The material that follows has been provided by African Rights
The material that follows has been provided by African Rights
African Rights has undertaken the first first-hand investigation of human rights abuses in the Nuba Mountains since the war began. Facing Genocide is the outcome of this investigation: the Sudan Government's blockade has been broken and for the first time, the true story can be told.
To the government in Khartoum, the Nuba are an anomaly: a people proud of their "Africa-ness" in the heart of Northern Sudan. Successive governments have discriminated against the Nuba: in education, in development, in social services, and in political office. Northern elites have also seized much of their fertile land for huge mechanised farms. Nuba migrant workers in northern towns experienced blatant racial discrimination. By the mid-1980s, many Nuba youth turned to armed resistance and joined the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The then Prime Minister, Sadiq el Mahdi, unleased a vicious response. The military government of President Omer al Bashir and Hassan al Turabi, that seized power in 1989, have escalated this into a war of annihilation.
Against enormous odds, the Nuba have survived so far. But theirs is a bitter struggle for the highest stakes. The government's programme is dedicated to the eradication of all that is essential to Nuba society - whose very existence challenges the foundation of the government's claim that it can create an Islamic state in Northern Sudan because all the citizens are Moslems who support that goal. The war in the Nuba Mountains is a war for the identity of Sudan.
Africa Rights' report details the components of this genocide. The centre of the strategy is huge 'combing' operations in the rural areas, in which the army destroys whole swathes of rural Nubaland. The army avoids confronting the SPLA, and instead they burn undefended villages, destroy or loot food crops, steal animals, and destroy all peoples' possessions. The people who remain in rural areas are dressed in rags, without medicines, and reduced to destitution. The aim is to create permanent famine, so that the SPLA soldiers surrender or run away, and the villagers submit themselves to the government 'peace camps', hoping at least to be fed.
For several years, the Sudan Government has been systematically eliminating all independent Nuba leadership: chiefs, merchants, teachers, health workers - in fact anyone with an education - is liable to be arrested and tortured, executed or 'disappeared'. The aim is to decapitate communities and leave them without the means to defend their interests. Having completed the elimination of all actual or potential leaders in the towns, the government has turned to the villages. It has set up death squads that assassinate village leaders and educated people.
Ordinary people are killed too. In each army attack, soldiers arbitrarily gun down anyone they find. Old people who cannot run away, young children, adult men - all are liable to be shot on sight, or burned inside their houses. The army also shells defenceless villages to terrorise and kill.
One of the main aims of 'combing' is to capture civilians. Thousands of men, women and children are captured when their villages are surrounded, or are snatched while tending their crops, herding their animals, or collecting water. Many people run to hide in caves to escape government attacks, but they are driven even from these refuges by hunger and thirst, or by attacks using tear gas. Captives are taken to garrisons, forced to carry their own looted furniture, or drive their own stolen animals in front of them.
These captives - or 'returnees', as the government calls them - usually never see their families or villages again. Men are either killed or forcibly conscripted into a militia known as the 'People's Defence Force'. Many are tortured. Women are raped and forced to work, often in special labour camps. All but the youngest children are separated for 'schooling' - i.e. conversion to Islam and training for a role in the new, extremist Islamic Sudan.
The Sudan Government claims that the 'returnees' have voluntarily come to the 'peace camps' to escape the SPLA and to receive relief. And indeed a few do surrender themselves - from hunger or nakedness, or simple weariness at a life of fear and apparent hopelessness. Indeed, the depths of poverty in the rural Nuba mountains are extreme - African Rights was unable to interview some people because they were ashamed to appear in public without clothes. Control of relief is one of the Sudan Government's main weapons in its policy of draining the rural areas of people. No relief agencies operate on the SPLA side. The government distributes food, medicine and clothes to attract villagers to the 'peace camps' - but once people are captives, they are kept in poverty and subjected to routine abuse.
New 'peace camps' are set up each month. During African Rights' visits in 1995, the government mounted five big 'combing' operations, and set up several new camps, where captured civilians are interned.
"Very early in the morning the enemy came and surrounded the whole village. Our family has two compounds - they took sixteen people from just our family. The soldiers said: 'You will come with us to Mendi. If you refuse, you will be killed.' On the way they said: 'Something you have never seen before - you will see it in Mendi'."
Fawzia went on to detail what life in a 'peace camp' means. Some women and girls were forcibly 'married' by soldiers who chose them. The others had only a few hours of peace:
"After dark, the soldiers came and took the girls to their rooms, and raped them. I was taken and raped... When you have been taken, the soldier who has taken you will do what he wants, then he will go out of the room, you will stay, and another one will come. It continues like this. There is different behaviour. Some lady, if she is raped by four or five soldiers, she will cry from pain. Then, if the soldiers are good, they will leave her. But others will beat her to keep her quiet, and they will carry on.
"Every day the raping continued... It is impossible to count the men who raped me. It was continuous. Perhaps in a week I would have only one day of rest. Sometimes one man will take me for the whole night. Sometimes I will be raped by four or five men per day or night; they will just be changing one for another."
Fawzia details how every activity in the peace camp seemed to be designed so that the soldiers can exercise their arbitrary power over their women captives' bodies. The soldiers can force the women to work, can control their access to the water pump, and distribute relief items at whim, all to compel the women to submit. No women were spared, even girls as young as nine years old were raped. The men in Fawzia's group were all forced to join the 'People's Defence Force', where, after brutal training, they are compelled to join in the destruction of their own communities. Christians are forbidden from praying. Children are separated from their parents, and many are sent away to special camps outside the Nuba Mountains for indoctrination and training.
If the Sudan government's policy of 'combing' continues to its logical conclusion, every rural Nuba women or girl will have been raped. This crime destroys individuals and communities and creates a generation of children who do not belong to their mothers' communities - or indeed to any community at all. In short, it is an instrument of genocide.
What is more shocking is that the Sudan Government is also desecrating mosques. It is burning them and destroying copies of the Koran, as commanded by a Fatwa issued in 1992 by pro-government Imams, which decreed:
"An insurgent who was previously a Moslem is now an apostate; and a non-Moslem is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom both of them."
If Moslems in areas outside government control are heretics, then it follows that their mosques cannot be "real" mosques. The widespread desecration of Islamic places of worship is the Sudan Government's darkest secret.
Facing Genocide includes extensive evidence of attacks on mosques. One testimony is reproduced here, from Ali Tutu Atrun, Imam of the mosque in Kodi Ba in the Otoro hills. The soldiers of Mendi-Fawzia's abductors - were those responsible. They claimed to be acting in the name of Islam.
"One morning in January [1995] the army attacked Kodi Ba... After they burned an area adjacent to the mosque I saw them moving towards the mosque. They entered the mosque with their boots on. They took some time and they came out carrying books, chairs, a table and a carpet from the mosque. I saw six of them taking positions around the mosque's rakuba [veranda] and the library. The six soldiers pulled out matches from their bags and in minutes the mosque's rakuba and the library were on fire. Then I heard a gunshot and saw the fire at the top of the mosque. The mosque started burning from top to bottom. I couldn't believe my eyes.
"I saw the army leaving Kodi Ba at about 10.30am. It was a big force of over three hundred men all in military uniform. At 12.00 noon I came down to check the destruction... I was the first to enter the mosque. Inside the mosque I found writings on the wall. The writing reads: 'If you are Moslems, join Dar el Islam [the 'place of Islam'] in Mendi.'"
Imam Atrun, who studied Islam in prestigious colleges in Khartoum and Mecca, was outraged by the army's destruction of his mosque, the burning of his copies of the Koran and Hadith, and the looting of the zakat charitable donations he had collected to distribute to the poor. He was even angrier at what he saw as a patently false interpretation of Islam contained in the soldiers' graffiti. Imam Atrun said: "Allah is anywhere - we need not go to Mendi to be good Moslems."
Most Sudanese Moslems have long opposed the human rights violations committed by the government, in the name of Islam. The desecration of mosques in the Nuba Mountains confirms the depths of the government's hypocrisy, and its cynical abuse of religion in pursuit of power.
The one group who are not passive in the face of this genocide are the Nuba people themselves. They have been forced into self-reliance. In the non-government held areas, the people have set up - or pressed the SPLA to set up - schools (with no textbooks), clinics (with scarcely any medicines), a nursing school, a theological college, a judiciary and a civil administration. Most significant of all is the establishment of institutions for political representation. In 1992, in the midst of the war, a remarkable conference was convened in the centre of the SPLA controlled area, in which two hundred delegates from all parts of the Nuba Mountains, most of them civilians, openly debated whether the SPLA should be given a popular mandate to continue the war. It was not a propaganda exercise (it has never been reported outside the Nuba Mountains before this report) - it was a genuine debate, with prominent civilians and SPLA commanders arguing on both sides. The conference has since developed into a Nuba parliament, known as the Advisory Council.
African Rights' report also details:
African Rights concludes that there is no doubt that genocide is being committed in the Nuba Mountains. If the Sudan Government is able to continue its war against the civilian population for one or two more seasons, tens of thousands of Nuba people will be killed, the majority of the women and girls raped, and most of the children separated from their parents. It is unlikely that Nuba civilisation as it has been known will ever exist again. There is a moral imperative on all who are concerned with basic human rights to prevent this crime from being perpetrated.