[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 10199]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                 SLAVERY STILL EXISTS IN NEW MILLENNIUM

  (Mr. PITTS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, who would ever have thought that we would be 
talking about the horror of modern-day slavery in this new millennium?
  Francis Bok is a 21-year-old native of southern Sudan. At age 7 he 
was captured and enslaved during an Arab militia raid on his village. 
Francis saw children and adults brutalized and killed all around him. 
He was strapped to a donkey and taken north, and for 10 years he lived 
as a family slave. He was forced to sleep with cattle and endure daily 
beatings and eat terrible food.
  In December of 1996, Francis escaped to a nearby town where local 
policemen enslaved him again. Again he escaped. Eventually he reached 
Khartoum, the capital, where he was arrested by security forces and 
jailed for 7 months. After being released, Mr. Bok was able to make his 
way to Cairo, Egypt, and finally, in 1999, the U.N. resettled him in 
the United States of America.
  Mr. Speaker, I met Francis yesterday. It is an incredible story. It 
is incomprehensible that slavery still persists in the world today. It 
is harder to understand why the Clinton administration has not made 
stopping slavery and genocide in Sudan a priority.

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