FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
“I reiterate my concerns over the continued reports of systematic abduction and kidnapping of children in both Southern Sudan and Darfur, and urge both the Government and armed groups to act without delay to stop that practice.” – UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon, report to the UN Security Council, August 2007
The world is familiar with the atrocities in Darfur in far western Sudan, but little attention has been paid to a pattern of child abduction in South Sudan.
What is “South” Sudan? The North and South of Sudan have waged civil war for most of the last 50 years but have been officially at peace since the United States brokered a Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. Under the agreement, the Government of South Sudan is mostly autonomous, although North and South are diplomatically one nation with shared resources.
Isn’t Sudan at peace? The 2005 peace agreement required that civilian militias from the civil war era lay down their weapons. Some ethnic groups disarmed, but others refused and later took advantage of their disarmed neighbors (UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Aug. 3, 2006). South Sudan’s public infrastructure is weak: Local police forces have little staff and virtually no vehicles or communications equipment. That leaves a security vacuum. The United Nations Mission in Sudan is mandated to protect civilians under threat and to promote human rights, but its 10,000 personnel must cover a country a million square miles in area with a population of 37 million.Who is abducting children? Groups of various ethnicities periodically steal cattle, often violently, from neighboring communities; during the civil war, coercive recruitment of child soldiers was commonplace; and abductions of many types continue in the conflict zone of Darfur. But another type of child abduction has continued unabated despite the peace agreement: Raiders abducting young children to raise as their own, because of their future value as brides or as domestic help. This type of abduction has been attributed only to armed groups of Murle ethnicity based in Jonglei state in the east of South Sudan. The Jonglei governor told U.S. officials in October 2007 that Murle groups had abducted more than 400 children from three states in the previous two years (Correspondence with USAID and OFDA). However, most Murle are law-abiding and positive members of the community. Murle leaders including Sultan Ismail Konyi have denounced the abductions and supported disarmament efforts. Innocent Murle people have been hurt or killed during retaliations over the actions of the armed groups.Who are Yar and Ajak? On October 3, 2007, raiders abducted Yar Achiek Mading, then 3, and sister Ajak, then 1, from Bor County, Jonglei, after fatally shooting their great-grandmother and grievously wounding their grandmother. Yar and Ajak are the nieces of U.S. citizen Gabriel Kou Solomon, a resident of St. Paul, Minnesota and a graduate student at the University of Minnesota.What do we want? We urge the Government of Southern Sudan to work with Murle leaders to negotiate a peaceful release of Ajak and Yar Mading and all other young children similarly abducted. We believe such a nonviolent solution should acknowledge the economic, health and security problems that underlie this pattern of child abduction; and we ask the United States to support solutions through its existing foreign aid program for Sudan.
