Julie Flint reports from Sudan’s frontline where hunger is now used as a weapon of war against the ancient Nuba tribe
In a few weeks, barring miracles, the children in this region of southern Sudan will begin to die – if not from hunger, then from disease.
Most families are living in the open, without clothes, blankets or clean water. The mud hut that passes for a hospital contains nothing but flies. The young man in charge, a farmer-turned-health worker, says 200 children and 50 old people are already in urgent need of medical care. He is treating them with tree leaves and bark, but he needs anti-malarials and antibiotics. “I am doing my best,” he say, “but I know it’s nothing.”
Less than a year after international pressure forced Sudan’s Islamist government to allow United Nations relief into the Nuba mountains for the first time in more than a decade, Khartoum is attempting to put the Nuba beyond the reach of relief by cutting off all access to the mountains and starving civilians out of areas controlled by the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
In the past two months, moving in whenever United Nations teams move out, government forces have captured two of the three rough airstrips that make relief operations possible and have mounted a surprise assault on some of the Nuba’s most productive land around the village of Tabanya.
The UN’s silence has been almost as shocking to the Nuba as the attack on Tabanya that displaced 15 000 people and propelled them towards Kadoro – a mountain village of 150 families that has shared its meagre supplies for more than a month and now has nothing left to offer.
“The UN’s own first mission to the mountains was heavily shelled – but it has never said a word of criticism of the government,” said Walid Hamed, assistant to a rebel commander, Yusuf Kuwa.
“When it comes to the government, the UN is on its knees. All we are asking is equal treatment so people can decide freely whether they stay in SPLA areas or go to the government.”
The Nuba are in their 13th year of struggle for a democratic, secular state in which the country’s African south would be the equal of its Arab north. Since the fundamentalist generals of the National Islamic Front came to power in 1989, an attempt to defeat the Nuba rebellion has grown into a scorched-earth holy war of annihilation against a people whose tradition of political and religious tolerance threatens the Front’s whole project of a conformist Islamic extremism.
Today hundreds of thousands of Nuba starved out of the mountains are imprisoned in “peace villages” where men are armed and compelled to fight against fellow Nuba; where children are separated from their parents and conscripted into Islamic militias; where women are raped to dilute Nuba ethnicity.
Nuba who refuse to leave SPLA-controlled areas are being driven off the fertile plains and into the mountains where survival is a struggle. Even the UN acknowledges that Nuba women venturing down to the government-controlled plains to fetch water and mangoes are subjected to rape “often of the most horrendous kind”.
As evidence of human-rights abuses piles up, the government promises relief but fights with the oldest, and cruellest, weapon in its arsenal – hunger.
Rahila Kuku, a mother of five, was put to work gathering in the sorghum that was thick in the fields surrounding Tabanya at the time of the attack on the village on March 17. She says hundreds of prisoners, working at gunpoint, stripped the sorghum fields bare and loaded every grain on to trucks bound for government garrisons in other parts of the mountains.
Kuku escaped to Kadoro after being raped repeatedly over a month, but at the hospital has found only words of comfort – not the painkillers she needs. She says her body still hurts from the beatings she received. She suspects she is pregnant.
Phoebe Tutu fled to Kadoro with nine children and a jerrycan when the first government troops attacked Tabanya. Forced off Kadoro mountain by hunger, she joined a group of 30 women foraging for food on the edge of government-controlled areas a four- hour walk away. The women were ambushed and four died. Phoebe was shot and wounded. Reduced to one small plate of sorghum a day, all her children are suffering from diarrhoea.
The government’s capture of Toro airstrip near Tabanya has put the displaced almost beyond the reach of help. The nearest airstrip is now 120km away – a three-day trek up granite mountains and down valleys where water holes are drying up and government troops lay ambushes for defenceless civilians.
“At one stroke, the attack on Tabanya has cut people off from their harvest and also from easy access from outside,” said Paul Savage of the British charity Christian Aid.
“It now takes a huge logistical effort across insecure and dangerous areas to bring the smallest amount of help to the displaced. This is a planned and purposeful undermining of the Nuba’s resilience and capacity to cope and exist.”
Zakariah Suleiman, an elderly farmer, was among those captured in the Tabanya offensive. For three days he was forced to work for the government forces. “They burned all the far sorghum and collected all the near sorghum,” he said. “They sent us out every day in large groups protected by soldiers. This is their weapon against us: hunger. They have taken everything from Tabanya – sorghum, beans and maize. Nothing is left.”
Like Kuku, Suleiman succeeded in escaping from Tabanya and fled to Kadoro – fully aware that he was running from hunger to hunger.
“I’m happy to be here whether I find food or not,” he said. “I have left everything behind, but I don’t care if I’m naked or clothed. Here I can go wherever I want to without asking for permission . I may die of hunger here, but I’ll die free – not penned in like an animal.”