Khartoum sparing nothing in war against the NubaBy FATHER KIZITO | Monday, April 30  2012 at  16:39

Travelling southward towards the border with South Sudan in one of the few vehicles plying the area, in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan, from time to time you see a group of two or three dozen children and a few women.

They walk under an implacable sun, with day temperatures constantly over 40 degrees Celcius, and sometimes in the middle of the day, they stop and gather in the shade of rare tree. 

They are all poorly dressed, covered in dust, the women carrying a basket with little food and few cooking utensils, plastic jerricans with some water. You feel pity and would want to stop.

The driver says there is no more room, he is not allowed, in any case, it would not solve the problem: there are dozens more behind and dozens more ahead. 

It is April and there are an average of 400 such children and women arriving every day at Yida, the camp for the Nuba refugees about 20km inside South Sudan.

Most of them suffer from severe malnutrition and dehydration. The registration is done in a shack and the camp holds more than 20,000 of them. And they have been bombed, as if Yida were a military threat to the Khartoum regime.

What are they running from? From war and starvation. There is a war looming between Sudan and South Sudan, fed by daily belligerent declaration from both sides, but the Nuba are in another more localised war.

Since June last year, the President of  Sudan Omar Al-Bashir, has been fighting an undeclared war against the Nuba and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-Northern Sector (SPLM-N), guilty of not accepting his centralising and Islamising policy that have made the Nuba the most marginalised people of the Sudan.

Estimates of the Nuba population resident in the Southern Kordofan State, also called Nuba Mountains and part of the Sudan, vary from 800,000 to 1 million people. In these 10 months of war, thriving centres and small villages have been bombed indiscriminately.

Buram, last year a flourishing centre to the south a Kadugli, the capital of Southern Kordofan, is now a ghost town, half of it razed by constant shelling, the new school has been deserted since bombs missed it by a whisker.

We meet one of it's former pupils, Daniel, 15, who is still in Gidel hospital. He recounts how he was scared when he heard the bombs hit, and he embraced a tree, in a desperate attempt to seek protection.

Bomb shred

A bomb shred hit the tree, and his arms have been cut just below the elbow. The school is closed, like most of the others in the area. Only a few courageous teachers still operate in improvised structures and without books, stationery and blackboards.

The seven secondary schools that existed in the area are all closed down, most of them have been the target of bombing. The two teachers training institute, one of them founded by Koinonia Community, are also closed down.

War generates starvation. The present conflict started just when last year's rainy season was about to begin. People fled to look for security up to the rocky mountain, some went to live in the caves, the fertile land of the plains were abandoned. Last December, there was no harvest to be gathered. There are reports that in some areas, people had started dying of starvation. Yida is the last hope for survival.

A strongly worded presidential statement from the UN Security Council dated February 14, 2012 emphasised that: “The members of the Security Council expressed their deep and growing alarm with the rising levels of malnutrition and food insecurity in some areas of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states in Sudan, which could reach emergency levels if not immediately addressed, and with the lack of access for international humanitarian personnel to conduct an assessment of the situation and deliver urgently needed assistance,” and therefore they “called upon the Government of Sudan to allow immediate access to United Nations personnel,” and asked “the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-Northern Sector (SPLM‑N) to cooperate fully with the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies” to allow  the delivery of assistance in line with international humanitarian principle and standards.

In spite of this statement and of a tripartite proposal (UN, African Union and League of Arab States) for the delivery of humanitarian assistance to all conflict-affected population, the Khartoum government has consistently denied access to the area controlled by SPLM-N,  about 90 per cent of the Southern Kordofan.

A high level European Union official in Juba, who asks for anonymity explains: “Our hands are tied. International law does not allow us to intervene even simply with food if the government in power does not agree.”

“Even if the government in question does everything possible to exterminate, with bombing and famine, its own people?”

“Yes, even in this case we cannot interfere.”

Nevertheless, a large scale internationally-led relief operation, accepted by both sides, was the only possibility to meet the need of the estimated 420,000 Nuba displaced by the war.

Now, a few weeks from the onset of the rainy season, which will make access extremely difficult, a rapid breakthrough on negotiated access was unlikely.

Military leader

How can then change come to Sudan? The rigid positions that President Bashir has kept since he took power in 1989 makes people think a change through peaceful political means was not possible.

That is why the people of the areas that were most opposed to Bashir policy – Darfur, Southern Kordofan and Southern Blue Nile - had formed an alliance, the Sudan Revolutionary Forces (SRM) and vowed to push Bashir out of power.

“Bashir has superiority only in the sky. On the ground, we are much stronger and we are ready to march on to Khartoum to make sure this regime will finish,” states Adbel Aziz al Hilu, the military leader of the Nuba and also the head of the military head of the SRF.

More war, more suffering were in store for the Nuba. But this time, they were determined to tell their own story.

Ryan Boyette is a 31-year-old American who came as a humanitarian worker to the Nuba nine years ago.

He has married a Nuba girl, and the Nuba cause. With simple means, he has helped to set up a team of locally trained journalists.

Armed with notebooks, cameras and video-cameras, they go out and report on human rights violation incidences and  the tragic consequence  of bombing and shelling. They also, understandably, speak only on condition of anonymity, since every time they went around, their lives were in danger.

Says one of them: “The Khartoum government has the habit of denying even the most evident facts. They deny the bombing, the human rights abuses, the devastation caused by their policies.

"Now, this will no longer be possible. We are going to build up unassailable evidence of what is happening. The world, at least those who are interested, will hear and see the trials of the Nuba. Maybe, by their own logic, the Khartoum government is right in trying to destroy us, but the more they try, the more they make us determined to resist and to document our plight.”

The same is expressed by a church leader in Yida, after Sunday Mass. Looking around at the hundreds of children he says: “Violence generates violence. Whatever we will try to teach to these children, they will grow up determined to drive the foreigners out of their land. The bombing of Yida has only strengthened their resolution.”

The morning of April 23, with my team, I am back in Bentiu. Suddenly, a MIG aircraft appears in the sky and drops bombs, aiming at the bridge, an essential connection between the town and the most important oil fields.

We realise we are back into another war. We are no longer in the war of Sudan against its own citizens, the Nuba. We are now in the war for the oil fields that opposes Sudan to South Sudan. A  story for another day.

-Father Kizito is a Comboni missionary (E-mail: padrekizito@gmail.com : Blog: http://kizito.blogsite.org)