Genocide threat to the Nuba JULIE FLINT
Sudan’s forgotten victims
Trapped just inside the Arabised north of divided Sudan, the African tribes of the Nuba, recognised for their religious and cultural tolerance, are being massacred by the Khartoum Government in what the African Churches say amounts to ‘ethnic cleansing’
tence, are under attack from government forces and militias who appear to be making no distinction between soldier and civilian in new fighting in this strategically impor- tant, oil-rich region along Sudan’s internal north-south border. After almost a month of daily aerial bombardment,
F including from
Chinese-made MIG-29s, talks medi- ated by the African Union reached agreement on a framework political and security agreement on Tuesday. The Nuba leader, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, has said a ceasefire, still under discussion at the time of going to press, must bring progress within a month on demands including cancellation of the results of disputed state elections. The framework agreement was signed in Abbis Ababa two days after 16 people were killed and more than 30 seriously injured, most of them women and children, when a government Antonov plane dropped a 500- pound bomb on the village of Kurchi. The raid hit the village water point and market as villagers were returning from Sunday serv- ice in the local Episcopalian church. The All Africa Conference of Churches has said that the fighting, which began on 5 June, amounts to “a deliberate process of ethnic cleansing” of the Nuba, black African tribes living in South Kordofan state just inside Sudan’s Arabised north. Many Nuba fought alongside the southern rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the 22- year civil war between north and south, seeking an end to political and economic neg- lect and respect for the indigenous languages, religious observances and customs of the Nuba tribes. As a result, the regime of President Omar al-Bashir sealed the mountains off in October 1991, denying humanitarian aid. Three months later, Khartoum ordered a jihad in the Nuba Mountains. Mosques and churches were burned, villages razed, food stores destroyed, livestock raided. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were driven out of the mountains and into “peace camps” where Islamisation, Arabisation and rape targeted the very essence of Nuba identity. Untold numbers died, not least from a three-year famine.
4 | THE TABLET | 2 July 2011
A Nuba family in Sudan takes refuge in a cave
There is undoubtedly an ethnic dimension to the new offensive. Reports by UNMIS, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in South Kordofan, speak of “ethnic targeting” of Nuba – including its own staff. A confiden- tial 10 June report seen by The Tablet says this dynamic “cannot be overstated”. But the conflict is political in origin, trig- gered by Khartoum’s insistence that Nuba fighters affiliated with the SPLA move into South Sudan before it becomes independent on 9 July, and by the Nuba conviction that Khartoum has repeatedly and systematically violated the peace process set in motion by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended the civil war six years ago. The CPA short-changed the Nuba. It gave
self-determination to southerners but denied it to South Kordofan, where Nuba outnumber their Arab pastoralist neighbours. It did not specify what would happen to the 30,000- strong Nuba rebel army. Since the CPA, however, al-Hilu has worked closely with gov- ernor Ahmad Haroun, a man indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes allegedly committed in Darfur, to make peace work. “We fought the war for delivery of services to the people, security and stability, and dem- ocratic rights,” al-Hilu told me recently. “We are doing everything we can to achieve this – but if we fail we will be ready for war.” A measure of stability returned to the moun- tains after the CPA, notwithstanding an increase in government forces, but services remained conspicuous by their absence. Then, on 27 April this year, Bashir made what al-
or the second time in 20 years, the Nuba peoples of central Sudan, a model of Christian-Muslim co-exis-
Hilu considered a “declaration of war”: he threatened to dislodge the SPLA from South Kordofan, disre- garding the CPA’s provision that they be integrated into the national army. Because of the near-total absence
of independent observers, and gov- ernment impediments to the work of UNMIS, already a much criticised force, it is impossible to gauge the balance of the new fighting and the full extent of the suffering it has caused. Al-Hilu claims the SPLA captured more than 60 Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) garrisons and outposts, from a total of more than
150, in the first 10 days of fighting. He told former South African President Thabo Mbeki that more than 3,000 people disappeared in that period – “either killed or their where- abouts not known, either because they are Nuba or they are SPLA”. He said as many as 500,000 others were displaced, more than 50 towns bombed, churches targeted and looted, clergy killed.
With all non-UN international relief work-
ers evacuated from the region, UNMIS warned on 8 June of an emerging humani- tarian crisis “of a magnitude that UNMIS … is not sufficiently prepared to counter and the UN Agencies, despite their mandate, are currently unprepared to deal with”. Mbeki heads the African Union High-level
Implementation Panel (AUHIP) that is medi- ating between SAF and the Nuba SPLA. He met al-Hilu in the Nuba Mountains town of Buram. One of the AUHIP delegation said half the town was burned. Not a single civilian remained. Ever since the CPA was signed, the inter- national community has neglected the so-called “contested areas” – South Kordofan and Blue Nile state to the east – and has underestimated the determination, commit- ment and political vision of the Nuba. The Nuba war was a war in its own right – not a footnote to the war in the south, not an echo of Darfur. The Nuba SPLA is a united, dis- ciplined force and has in al-Hilu a leader with formidable organisational capabilities. The Nuba themselves are a shining example
of tolerance in a country whose rulers have attempted to stifle diversity ever since seizing power in 1989. They include followers of Christianity, Islam and traditional religions, often in a single family. In December 1994,
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