Sudan

IT IS a year before the millennium and Theresa Nybol Deng is a slave. In May, she was taken captive when the government-armed militia stormed her village in southern Sudan. Soldiers shot the men, looted the village and carted off as many women and children as they could. Theresa is 12 years old. She can be purchased for $50.If her fate is anything like that of tens of thousands of black Africans who have become chattel in Sudan's civil war, Theresa has been sold and bought. She is likely serving a master somewhere in northern Sudan, Libya or the Persian Gulf.

PARIS -- The international terrorist known as Carlos, an almost-mythical figure blamed for a string of bombings and killings across Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, was arrested in Sudan and flown secretly to France yesterday.France's interior minister, Charles Pasqua, said the 44-year-old extremist, a native of Venezuela whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, would go on trial here for crimes committed in France."He is one of the most well-known and most dangerous criminals in the world," Mr. Pasqua said with evident satisfaction.

IN OUR indifference, we speed past those souls at Charles and 25th streets. Consumed by evening rush-hour traffic, they look to us like scruffy relics from the '60s, gathered for an afternoon's nostalgic "Kumbaya" and hoping to pluck at the tattered remains of our collective social conscience. They hold up hand-lettered signs. One says: "Genocide Works Because the World Doesn't Care." Genocide? In 2004? Did we miss this during the endless hurricane coverage on the evening news? Another says, "Bush/Kerry: Does the Golden Rule Mean Nothing to Either of You?"

NAIROBI, Kenya -- The Sudanese government ordered the top United Nations envoy out of the country yesterday, the most recent sign of deteriorating relations between Khartoum and the world body over how to stop violence in Darfur. Jan Pronk, a former Dutch government minister who has been serving as U.N. special representative in Sudan since 2004, was given 72 hours to leave the country after Sudanese officials accused him of making inappropriate comments on his personal blog. The expulsion marked another diplomatic nose-thumbing by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his administration, which has resisted international pressure in recent months to accept U.N. peacekeepers in western Sudan.

FRANCIS BOK unfolded his wiry, 6-foot-7-inch frame from the chair on the stage of the auditorium that serves Polytechnic Institute and Western High School. He strode to the microphone and told a group of 1,000 students from nearly a dozen private and public secondary schools his tale of terror. Yes, Arab militiamen abducted him from his Dinka village in the Bahr al-Ghazal region of the African nation of Sudan in 1986, when he was 7 years old. They killed his parents and two sisters, and gave Bok to an Arab family.

Paris.--The United States has Sudan on its list of outlaw states, saying that Sudan sponsors Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. France finds that a logical reason for getting on better terms with Sudan.Who better to talk with about the problem of terrorism than those in a position, if not to call it off, at least to damp it down?A number of large conclusions has been drawn from Sudan's handing over of Carlos the terrorist to French justice. The principal significance, however, is what it reveals (or confirms)

The letter, written in response to the Sudan series, tells more about the writer than anything I could say, so here it is:"The Baltimore Sun has published a series of articles to create the impression that slavery is rife in Sudan. The series was followed by Johns Hopkins radio WJHU's interview with the two who visited Sudan. The Sun is now publicizing moves by NAACP leader Kweisi Mfume urging the U.S. to intervene in the Sudan. But look at the following facts which none can deny"The Sun is a Zionist Jewish daily which has a track record of opposition to and condemnation of all Islamic, African and Arab nations which show any semblance of independence in foreign policy.

SEVEN YEARS ago, I met a tall, lanky Dinka from the southern Sudanese province of Bahr al-Ghazal in a refugee camp called Lokichokio in northern Kenya. Standing a good 6 feet, 5 inches - his estimate, not mine - John Mangok told me why he had joined the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, the organization fighting the fundamentalist Islamic government of Sudan. "Because of the obvious discrimination of the Arabs against our people," Mangok said. "[The Arabs] want our land and the extermination of the Dinka people."

PALATAKA, Sudan -- They are the lost boys of Palataka.They do not know where their parents are, or if they are alive. The boys are trapped on a remote hilltop, cut off from the world by miles of rutted road and surrounded by men with automatic weapons.They have no beds, few clothes, and often nothing to eat. Their present is dismal; their past was worse.About 4,000 boys live here, most between the ages of 7 and 15. Leaders of the anti-government rebel group that keeps them here call this a school and say that the boys are here to get an education.