Up from slavery

The Atlantic Monthly fuels a debate over buying slaves their freedom. Plus, the Globe goes all-out in Kosovo, and George Will's free ride continues.

by Dan Kennedy

A long-simmering dispute over how best to fight the Sudanese slave trade is beginning to escalate. The new issue of the Atlantic Monthly includes a lengthy article by freelancer Richard Miniter, who argues that Western human-rights groups that buy back slaves at $50 to $100 a person are actually making things worse. Charles Jacobs, founder and president of the Boston-based American Anti-Slavery Group, cites 10,000 freed slaves as proof that Miniter is wrong.

Miniter takes on groups that send rescuers into war-torn Sudan, where black Christians and animists in the southern part of the country are regularly enslaved by forces loyal to Muslim Arabs, who control the north. Using money raised by the American Anti-Slavery Group and similar organizations, rescuers buy and free these slaves. But, according to Miniter, the money paid to slave traders by rescuers creates a powerful financial incentive for further slave-taking. He also reports that much of the money disappears in fake-slave hoaxes.

"It is common sense not to pay the men who kill your father and steal your brother, or they will return," Miniter quotes a local Sudanese official as saying. "I don't know why the redeemers do such a thing." Rather than paying slave traders, Miniter proposes that at-risk villages be provided with trucks and jeeps so they can head off horsebound raiders, and that steps be taken to destroy a rail line used to transport large numbers of slaves to the north.

Jacobs, though, cites the support of 47 village leaders and of Macram Gassis, one of Sudan's 11 Catholic bishops, as proof that slave redemption is working. "The focus of the piece should have been what this horrendous fascist regime is doing to people," Jacobs says. "I think for Miniter to focus on the behavior of white human-rights groups, and to make us the enemy, is outrageous and nuts."

Miniter, reached at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, insists that the issue isn't whether anti-slavery activists such as Jacobs are well-meaning, or whether they are, in fact, winning the freedom of some slaves. It's whether they are mucking about in a region that's more complicated than they are willing to acknowledge, creating a slave trade that's actually bigger and more vicious than it would be if there were no Western money flowing in. Referring to Gassis and the 47 village leaders, Miniter comments, "Whether or not various establishment folks in Sudan support slave redemption is less important than whether slave redemption actually accomplishes its goal, and it doesn't. It makes the situation worse."

Jacobs, a civil-rights and anti-war activist in the 1960s, left behind a lucrative consulting business to become a full-time anti-slavery crusader six years ago. His activism has helped expose the tragedy of African slavery. Because of his efforts, Boston, in particular, has become a center of anti-slavery activity. Former Phoenix reporter Tim Sandler (now with NBC's Dateline) was one of the first Western journalists to witness and confirm Sudanese slavery ("Africa's Invisible Slaves," News, June 30, 1995). More recently, Boston ad agency Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos designed a series of ads, pro bono, to raise money for Jacobs's slave-redemption work ("Slaves for Sale," News, March 19).

"Slavery and slave raids happened long before anybody was buying their children back," says Jacobs. "We will not deny that this runs the risk of creating a financial incentive. We are saying that we have taken 10,000 people out of the hands of monsters. If this were your kid or my kid, you would pay your life for this." If local officials in Sudan withdraw their support, he adds, the redemption efforts will stop. "This isn't sentimentalism," he says. "We are smart people."

Miniter is not the first to criticize slave-buying. UNICEF and Human Rights Watch have also expressed misgivings. But Jacobs's work has received support from Amnesty International, and from political figures ranging from Representative Barney Frank to the Reverend Pat Robertson.

Miniter's article -- which he says took many months of research, including two weeks in Sudan -- is serious and important. But though he makes a compelling case for a coordinated, systemic approach to ending slavery in Sudan, redemption programs such as Jacobs's are ending slavery right now, one person at a time.

That remains a damn sight more than anyone else is doing.

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In an era when most newspapers are engaged in obsessive cost-cutting and in purging foreign news from their pages, the Boston Globe deserves considerable credit for its all-out effort in Kosovo.

Though its coverage has not been as comprehensive as that of the New York Times or the Washington Post, the Globe has had at least three people on the ground at all times, with a daily package of two or three front-page stories and two to four pages inside. What's more, the journalism -- especially on the part of reporters Kevin Cullen, Susan Milligan, Charlie Sennott, and Charlie Radin, and photographer Bill Greene -- has been first-rate: human and illuminating without descending to the mawkish and sentimental.

The war was quite an initiation for Nils Bruzelius, who had just become the foreign editor after years of supervising health-and-science coverage. "I started March 1, and the bombing started on March 24. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the phrase `baptism of fire' over the past three months," says Bruzelius, who credits deputy foreign editor David Beard and assistant foreign editor Catherine Foster for keeping things on an even keel.

The war started shortly after the Globe received an edict from the New York Times Company, which owns the paper, to tighten its budgetary belt. Yet editor Matt Storin says the decision to go for wall-to-wall coverage was "not a tough call." He estimates that, so far, Kosovo has cost the paper $200,000. (The much smaller Boston Herald canceled plans to send a photographer and a reporter after publisher Pat Purcell ordered a five percent budget cut.)

Storin also argues that there's actually an advantage to being a regional paper trying to compete against national players. "I won't deny that we don't have the kind of access to senior administration officials in all cases that the Times and the Post have, and we were a little frustrated by that in the beginning of the war," he says. "But I began to realize that it was all spin, and we weren't being spun. And it was affecting our coverage in a positive way." Okay, that's a stretch. But Storin and Bruzelius certainly made the right call in using their own staffers for close-up, human stories while relying more on the Globe's Washington bureau and the wires for official news.

Among those praising the Globe's coverage is Peter Lucas, an Albanian-American and former journalist for the Globe, the Phoenix, and the Herald who's now director of legislative affairs for the MBTA. In 1986, Lucas, then with the Herald, became the first American reporter allowed in Albania in 30 years. He's since been back 15 times, including, most recently, a two-week trip in May, when he visited refugee camps for the American Refugee Committee and wrote about it for the MetroWest Daily News. "I thought the Globe's coverage had a human face to it," Lucas says. "They stuff they wrote about seemed to me more compelling than anything else I read."

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says many newspapers -- especially regional papers such as the Globe -- have cut back on foreign news in recent years. In part, he says, that's because of a decline in reader interest now that the Cold War is over; in part, it's related to an overall trend of putting a smaller percentage of revenues back into news coverage. Good papers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald have gone through devastating downsizing periods as the pressure for shareholder value has been ratcheted up.

At the Globe, at least, the Times Company and publisher Ben Taylor are still willing to spend money on big stories.

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Yes, the late Meg Greenfield was a clear thinker and a stylish writer. Yes, her back-page essays in Newsweek exuded both decency and common sense. But, more often than not, I came away disappointed. Her counterpart, George Will, with whom she alternated on an every-other-week basis, expresses clear, strong opinions from the conservative end of the spectrum. Greenfield, the putative liberal, often seemed to have no opinions at all.

In naming former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen to replace Greenfield, Newsweek has only perpetuated that ideological imbalance. Quindlen was a pioneering op-ed-page columnist, winning a Pulitzer Prize for her compact essays about feminism and herself. But she is even less equipped than Greenfield to do battle with Will. Greenfield, after all, was steeped in politics, lacking only ideological convictions as deeply cemented as Will's. Quindlen, by contrast, is almost apolitical -- emphasis on almost, since she did endorse Bill Bradley recently, before she realized she'd be returning to journalism.

Greenfield's forte was in explaining Washington to puzzled outsiders, and in speaking out for civility and propriety in what she invariably referred to as "this town." It's no surprise that two of the most heartfelt sendoffs she received were from a pair of gentlemanly conservatives -- Will, who hailed her "potent measuredness," a phrase that perfectly captures both her strength and her weakness, and the New York Times' William Safire, who, it turns out, consulted with Greenfield regularly on matters of language and grammar.

A Newsweek columnist since 1974, Greenfield, in her day job, was editorial-page editor of the Washington Post. In that position, too, her "potent measuredness" inspired more respect than passion. In a recent assessment neatly headlined REQUIEM FOR A MIDDLEWEIGHT, Washington City Paper editor David Carr observed, "There was no fiery call to account, no heralding of trumpets, no plan of action. And that was the way she liked it -- Greenfield took enormous pride in the temperance of her fiefdom."

Quindlen, who quit the Times in 1995 to work full-time as a novelist (her departure opened up a columnist's slot for featherweight quipster Maureen Dowd), will be paid a reported $300,000 to write about 1700 words once every two weeks. Not bad work if you can get it. In an interview with the New York Daily News last week, she said she expects to write "a lot about what used to be called `women's issues,' but now turn out to be the cutting-edge issues of our world for the next 100 years: about child care, about health care, probably a fair amount about how we live now and a lot on the news."

Balancing Will with a woman is a good idea. But Newsweek could have picked syndicated columnist Molly Ivins, Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, or journalist/author Barbara Ehrenreich, who used to do political commentary for Time. All are highly political and highly partisan. On the buzz scale, Ivins, at least, is nearly as well known as Quindlen. Or why not a fresh young voice? Here's a from-out-of-left-field choice Newsweek could have made: ABC reporter Farai Chideya, an African-American woman (and former Newsweek reporter) who's written well-received books about racism and multiculturalism.

No doubt Anna Quindlen will be terrific. But liberals will be getting the short end of the deal if she's writing about "how we live" while George Will is eviscerating Al Gore and Bill Bradley.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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