Joe Pitts: “who would ever have thought that we would be talking about the horror of modern-day slavery in this new millennium?…”

“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.”