Welcome Home: To a Land Ruined by War
Jon McGregor reports from Nuba, Sudan
The people of Nuba paid a high price during the 20 year civil conflict in Sudan: murder, rape and exile. Now that a fragile peace has been restored, they are rebuilding their shattered lives. But is their homecoming turning into a horror story?
Sunday afternoon at the Lemun Basic Healthcare Clinic, in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, and a group of men are gathering beneath the shade of a baobab tree; a guard, a health worker, the fathers of children staying in the wards. They fetch picks and shovels from the guardhouse, waiting a moment to see if anyone will join them in their work.
Their children sit quietly on rope-beds in the shadowed mud-brick wards, or play outside in the softening afternoon light. Their mothers keep an eye on them, crouching by small cooking fires, talking, carrying plastic jerry-cans of water back from the well on their heads, coaxing pale haired babies to their breasts, watching the men from a distance. Chickens scratch around the sandy compound, looking for spilt scraps of food.
The men turn and walk out along a narrow path between fields of sorghum and maize, down to the stream. A woman washing her family's clothes glances up in greeting as the men cross over the stepping stones. Salam, she murmurs. Assalamualaikum, they reply, ahlamdulillah. Following the line of the stream, wading through the long grasses still wet from yesterday's rain, the men walk quickly, silently, their tools slung over their shoulders. A boy herding his father's goats stops to watch the procession, staring, calling out to ask the men where they're going. Kwes?, he asks - how is it? - but gets no reply. Striding on, the men reach a low hillock at the far end of the valley, and climb up to a patch of ground scraped clear of grass.
One of the men, Ismail, reaches the spot first and starts to dig. The others watch as he lifts the shovel over his head and brings it down hard into the stony ground, swinging it with something almost like fury, quickly working up a sweat as the damp soil sprays across his face and his green hospital scrubs. After a few minutes he straightens, rubbing his back, passing the shovel to another man, catching his breath. The others take turns to break up the solid ground, working in bare feet and broken sandals as the afternoon light colours with the expectation of thunder and rain.
Our journey through the Nuba Mountains began in Tangal, a well populated village to the south where Medecins Sans Frontieres run one of four health outreach units. As we walked from the airstrip to the clinic in the late afternoon we passed lines of people coming back from their fields and from the market, children bringing their goats in for the evening, old men standing and talking at the crossroads. But despite seeing so many people, and despite passing a school, a church, and a busy mill, we never arrived at a recognisable village; the small one-room houses were scattered across the valley and up the sides of the hill in groups of no more than two or three, their stone walls shielded by ripening sorghum stems. They looked like houses which were trying to hide. I asked Carbino, our translator, why the village was so spread out like this; perhaps it was traditional, I asked, or a result of the distribution of farmland? He thought for a moment, and waved his hand at the sky.
"Yuh," he said, "actually, it's safer like this. This way they are not a target."
A clustered group of houses is easier to see from the air, he explained, and to bomb. A traditional village, grouped around the well and the mill and the meeting square, can be surrounded, and when one roof is set alight the rest will quickly burn. The villagers of Tangal had scattered in the early days of the war, as villagers all over Nuba had done, hiding their homes high up in the hills, looking for a safety which wasn't always there, and they weren't yet ready to regroup and rebuild.
Not far from the MSF compound we met a woman walking back from her field on crutches. Half of her left leg was missing, and after Carbino had greeted her, and introduced us, he asked her our obvious questions. She paused a long time before answering, puckering her mouth around the words in distaste as if she’d eaten one of the locally grown sour oranges. “She says she walked on a mine,” Carbino told us. “Over there, when she was tending her crops.” He pointed to a field on the other side of the stream, five or ten minutes walk away. “She lost her husband and her children in the war. She is all on her own here,” he said. She told him she was eighty years old, although she looked no more than forty-five. Does her leg still hurt? we asked, and she turned away, shaking her head, as if the question was foolishness itself.
Sudan is a vast and complicated nation. Created almost as a cartographer's convenience from a shifting collection of tribal lands and alliances - Dinka, Nuer, Nuba, Arab, Fur - by the colonial powers of Egypt and Britain, Sudan has experienced peace for an all too brief eleven years since gaining independence in 1956. The most recent war, which started in 1983 and finally seems to have ground to a bloody halt - Dharfur notwithstanding - can broadly be described as pitting the ruling Arabic and Islamic GoS (Government of Sudan) in the north against the predominantly Christian and Black SPLA (Sudanese People's Liberation Army) in the south. It's been a war fought over land, resources, the right to self-determination, and the personal vengeances which gather their own malevolent momentum in any civil war. And oil, the poisonous treasure buried beneath so many of the world's conflicts, has had a role to play as well; particularly in the Nuba Mountains, which lie directly between the oilfields and the main export route of Port Sudan.
The war came to Nuba with a particularly relentless brutality, bringing suffering which has been described by African Rights as a policy of slow genocide. In an attempt to clear the Nuba Mountains of its population, the government forces destroyed food sources and infrastructure, carried out extra-judicial killings, and intimidated or forced villagers into specially established camps away from their own areas. The suffering of the Nuban people was heightened by being hidden from the world - outsiders were barred, and not even the UN's Operation Lifeline was allowed access to fulfill its mission of feeding the starving. It took a long time for the rumours of what was happening in Nuba to reach the outside world, and even longer for the suffering to come to an end.