Residents of region near new north-south border have suffered heavy bombardments by government planes
- guardian.co.uk,
- Article history
Sudanese children have fled their homes in the Nuba mountains after government air strikes. Photograph: Phil Moore/Guardian
Fourteen-year-old Jacomo Tia Jibril was washing clothes at the village borehole when he heard the plane overhead. "I started running," he says. "My sister shouted at me to lie down, but I couldn't hear her." He tried to take shelter in a brick factory, but the bomb exploded before he could get inside. From his hospital bed in the Nuba mountains, Jibril is surprisingly calm as he recounts the day his village, Tes, was bombed by the Sudanese government. During the explosion he was struck by shrapnel on his left forearm and, when he finally reached the hospital 18 hours later, he was told his left hand had to be amputated. Just a few beds away, seven-year-old Viviana Issa lies lifeless, her upper back covered by a white bandage. Hit in the spine by a bomb fragment, she is paralysed from the chest down. "I don't know what to do with this girl," says Tom Catena, the only doctor in the hospital, whose exact location is being withheld for security reasons. "Since I came here three years and a half ago, this is the worst situation I've ever been in." Around him, beds are full with some of the130 people injured by the recent bombardments by government planes in the Nuba mountains, which lie towards the southern edge of Sudan's Arabised north. Clashes between government forces and opposition fighters in the region have displaced more than 70,000 people in less than a month. The injured come from towns such as Kurchi, Dalami, Umsardiba and Kauda, strongholds of the Nuba resistance to the northern Sudan government led by President Hassan Omar al-Bashir. From these secluded hills, Nubians spent 20 years fighting alongside the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) of southern Sudan against an Arab-led government whose policies were seen as discriminatory towards native Africans. The conflict caused at least 2 million deaths and the displacement of another 4 million people. But while south Sudan has seceded from Khartoum and is preparing to celebrate independence on Saturday 9 July, the Nuba mountains are experiencing yet another bloody chapter in this never-ending crisis. Tensions have risen in the past months and flared up on 5 June after a controversial election for state governor. Amid claims of vote rigging, Ahmed Haroun, the candidate of Bashir's ruling National Congress party, who is wanted, like his president, by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes, narrowly defeated Abdul Aziz Adam al-Hilu, of the Southern SPLM party, the rebel army's political wing. Khartoum then ordered the Nuba rebels to give up their weapons and integrate into the Sudanese army. Clashes soon erupted. Government forces eventually took control of the state capital, Kadugli, prompting opposition fighters to retreat. Thousands of civilians fled, fearing reprisals by northern soldiers. "It took me three days to get to Kauda. I had to walk through the mountains to avoid the checkpoints manned by the Sudanese forces," says a 46-year-old carpenter, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. He says Khartoum's forces have rounded up civilians, gathering them in three places inside the city. "They plan to use them as human shields in case of an SPLA attack," he says. If Kadugli has been the city worst hit by the conflict so far, Kauda, the headquarters of the Nuba SPLA, is still an impregnable stronghold. But the town is bearing the brunt of this renewed conflict. Schools are closed and the market is almost deserted. "People fled up the surrounding hills and come down early in the morning just to buy something," says 25-year-old Abil Abraham, who keeps a small stand of vegetables. His family is hiding in a nearby village, but he has no intention of leaving. "How could I do it? This is my place," he says. "If the war comes, I will manage to find a weapon and fight." But unlike the last war, where the units of the rebels were able to engage the northern army and its allied militia, they can now do little against an enemy that comes from above. The conflict on the ground has stalled, with government soldiers controlling just a few main population centres such as Kadugli, Delling and Talodi, apparently surrounded by SPLA forces. But civilian areas are being bombed by Sudanese planes every day, making the lives of these rural communities nearly impossible. Fields have been left unattended by tens of thousands of internally displaced persons who fled the warzone at the start of the rainy season. If they do not manage to get back to work soon, today's war might turn into next year's famine. Fawzya Osman, 18, from the village of Kapuo, is among the few people defying the bombs to work on her small plot of land. "I have no option. Bombs or not, we have to eat," she says with a smile. Just a few days ago, she witnessed the air strikes that hit Kauda and her village. A friend was hit by a bomb and killed instantly, a short distance from her. "It was so shocking, I couldn't think or speak properly for two days," she says. "Even now, the simple noise of a motorbike or an engine scares me." Just outside the village, on an apparently deserted rocky hill, several pairs of frightened eyes peer out of a half-metre wide crack between two big rocks. Suddenly, four children aged below five emerge, curious to see the foreign visitors, while dozens of others come out of similar hideouts. The eldest of the group, 13-year-old Al Shaikh Ismail Kalo, has been given the task of looking after the 31 children. Their parents venture out during the day to try working on their fields and come up the mountain twice a day to hand them food. "I don't like to stay here; this is a place for animals," says Kalo, already trained to distinguish the noises of Antonov and Mig planes. "We can't even play or study, because we left everything in the village. Everyone here just thinks about his life." Locals say the Nuba mountains are "just as God created them". Six years after the end of the civil war, development is nowhere to be seen in this region dotted by small rural dwellings and a few, isolated cities the size of small European villages. With no job opportunities, few schools and fewer health clinics, life is a daily struggle. Apart from a few paved roads in the capital Kadugli, roads are little more than mountain tracks: to reach a small hospital three miles away from Kauda, cars have to pass through a dry river bed, on a journey that can take up to 45 minutes. As a consequence, the life of this proud people made up of nearly 100 tribes is still being marked by the endless cycle of nature. During the rainy season, adults spend their day cultivating sorghum and maize, leaving grandparents at home to look after the children. When the rains stop, they harvest their crops and repair damaged huts. Once a year, their sons leave the villages all together to graze cattle in the nearby plains, living outdoors for two months, dancing and practising wrestling (the traditional sport of Nuba people) in a collective experience called "Fariq". For centuries, African and Arab communities coexisted in relative peace, as 60-year-old Hussein Ngalokuri, traditional leader of the Otoro tribe, explains: "Arabs used to beg us to pass through our lands and graze their cattle further south. We fed and helped them but, if we refused, there was nothing they could do. Now, they come here and act as our masters." He says the situation deteriorated after independence, when the Khartoum government started a programme of forced Islamisation and Arabisation of Nubians. Land traditionally held by African tribes was confiscated and given to Arabs; bearing an African name was discouraged; local languages were forbidden in schools, where offenders were caned in front of other students and forced to carry the image of a donkey on their back. The only way to get rid of it was to find someone else making the same "mistake" and pass it to them. "Imagine if someone comes to your land and starts telling you he is better than you, in every respect," says Chief Ngalokuri. "I am a Muslim, but what the Arabs are doing to us is not Islam." For many Nubians, the scars of the past and the mistrust towards Arabs are too deep to accept any political settlement with Khartoum. The peace talks in Addis Ababa, meant to create a ceasefire, have been met with various degrees of indifference. "Reaching an agreement with the Khartoum regime is impossible," says a 35-year-old former SPLA fighter, Solomon Osman Lonna. "Even if they talk about peace, they will send more troops. They have always done it and will keep on doing it."
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