Authors: Don Cheadle,John Prendergast
The Dinka’s historical ethnic rivals in southern Sudan are the Nuer, and the government armed Nuer militias to attack Dinka civilians and divide the insurgency. The attacks decimated the SPLA’s ethnic base by destroying Dinka livelihoods and the social fabric of their community. In the mid and late 1980s, before the National Islamic Front came to power, government-backed Arab militias had relentlessly attacked Dinka villages, leading to widespread famine in southwestern Sudan. The National Islamic Front government continued to use ethnic militias against its southern enemies, and learned some valuable lessons it would later apply to Darfur: do not support militias too transparently, in order to create a degree of separation between the regime and its militia proxies.
To attack its enemies and civilians inside Sudan, the Sudanese government also supported human predators from neighbouring countries, including the sadistic Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a notorious Ugandan rebel group responsible for grotesque human rights violations that include cutting off victims’ lips and ears and raping small girls. The LRA rebel leader Joseph Kony sees himself as a Moses-like figure, sent by God on a mission to impose the Ten Commandments on northern Uganda. His distorted view of the Old Testament—literally an eye for an eye—is a recipe for human rights violations on a macabre scale. Kony’s army is composed principally of abducted, tortured, and brainwashed children whom he forces to commit horrific atrocities.
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When we visited northern Uganda together in 2005, we met former child soldiers in Kony’s army with terrifying stories. The Lord’s Resistance Army has created a generation of children afraid to sleep in their own beds. Each night before the sun set, we saw thousands of Ugandan children march in grim procession along dusty roads that took them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children and their parents were terrified that the Lord’s Resistance Army would abduct them and force them to hunt down their friends, families, and loved ones. The children we met—called ‘night commuters’—spent their nights in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways.
The government of Sudan provides the Lord’s Resistance Army with weapons and sanctuary. In exchange, Kony and his henchmen attack the SPLA and civilians in southern Sudan. The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, supported the SPLA during the war with Khartoum, and Sudanese support for the Ugandan rebels is also meant as revenge.
Twentieth-Century Slavery
Government-supported militias in southern Sudan had a sinister ulterior motive in attacking Dinka villages: taking slaves to use for domestic labour and field work in northern Sudan. During the colonial era, one of the largest exports from Sudan was human beings. It’s difficult to imagine slavery existing at the end of the 20th century, but for the killers in Khartoum, slavery made sense, as it terrified southerners and created economic incentives for northern militias.
The Sudanese government had a name for the slave trade: intertribal abductions. The government denied both its involvement in and the existence of an organised campaign to perpetuate slavery. Instead, Khartoum feebly claimed that ‘tribal hatreds’ were behind the systematic kidnapping of Dinka civilians. The exact number is not known, but an extensive survey by Sudan experts John Ryle and Jok Madut Jok documented at least 12,000 abductions from 1986 to 2002.
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The total number remains unknown.
The militias would fan out on horseback to raid villages within a 50-mile radius of the railroad that ran through the south, killing and raping and then galloping away with human cargo. The trains that ran along the line became known as ‘slave trains.’ The captives were often taken to camps, where Sudanese from the north or buyers from overseas would come to purchase or trade goods for slaves. Younger boys and girls were usually used as farmhands or as domestic labourers. Older girls and women were usually taken as ‘wives’ or concubines, often subject to rape and sexual abuse. Living in subhuman conditions, the slaves were cut off from their families, stripped of their religion and culture, denied access to an education, and forced to become Muslims. Some tried to escape, but capture meant torture and possibly death.
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In 1998, vicious militia attacks aimed at abducting civilians were partly responsible for a devastating famine in southeastern Sudan. Thousands died from starvation, while relief workers struggled mightily to reach vulnerable people, but these efforts regularly encountered a more menacing resistance than Sudan’s harsh landscapes.
Starvation as a Weapon of War
The NIF government employs vicious tactics to achieve its strategic objectives, including inflaming intertribal conflict, slavery, and the denial of humanitarian food assistance. Despite the presence in southern Sudan of one of the world’s largest and most expensive humanitarian operations, Khartoum was able to deny food to millions of southern Sudanese by manipulating humanitarian access. The regime tried to starve the civilian supporters of the rebels into submission. This genocidal policy led to the deaths of 300,000 people in 1992–1993, in an area of southeastern Sudan that became known as the ‘starvation triangle,’ and another 250,000 in southwestern Sudan, in the area of the slave raids. This tactic was honed and perfected over the years and used in the genocide in Darfur with deadly efficiency.
To employ starvation as a weapon violates international law under the Geneva Conventions, but the government of Sudan has never been bothered by the rules that govern warfare. Starvation in war-torn regions of Sudan is less a by-product of indiscriminate fighting than a government objective—the wholesale liquidation of civilian populations—largely achieved through the diversion and denial of humanitarian food assistance. State-sponsored mass murder has moved to the bureaucratic level, with the government vetoing relief flights destined to provide food to starving civilians, forcing many people to flee. And as the south was emptied of its citizens, like the Lost Boys (see Chapter 6), the Khartoum government gained greater access to oil, which helped finance its continuing war.
The Curse of Oil
The discovery of oil in Africa can be a blessing or a curse, as is the case in southern Sudan. Against all odds and predictions, the Sudanese regime—backed by Chinese, Malaysian, and Canadian oil companies—was able to forcibly clear out the populations of huge swathes of south-central Sudan in order to secure the way for the oil companies to begin exploiting the oil.
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Hundreds of thousands of people were killed or displaced by these vicious scorched earth campaigns—in which everything is burned, including crops, villages, and houses—in the oilfields, and the manipulation of relief flights was an effective complement to government air strikes and ground assaults.
Oil exploitation has lined the pockets of mass murderers in Khartoum and financed the arms the government uses to terrorise its own citizens. More money from oil means access to more sophisticated weapons, and while the United States is forbidden by law from selling arms to Sudan, numerous other countries happily profit from Khartoum’s barbarism. The Chinese even helped build weapons factories inside Sudan, creating a military-industrial complex.
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Nonetheless, despite staggering growth in government revenue since oil first began to flow, most Sudanese remain desperately poor. The government’s social development spending is dwarfed by international aid flowing in, and millions more people would starve without the support of international relief agencies that persistently fight bureaucratic obstruction to deliver assistance.
Many companies that have cut deals with Khartoum are from Russia and China—countries that occupy powerful and permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council and have very poor human rights records. These countries’ cuddly relationship with hard-liners in Khartoum is based on greed, and protecting their interests comes at the expense of innocent lives. China in particular has used its position on the Security Council to protect the government of Sudan from sanctions and to prevent stronger action to end the atrocities in Darfur. This protection came despite the Sudanese government’s long history of harbouring terrorist organisations and radical Islamic groups.
Osama bin Laden’s Refuge
The National Islamic Front sought to establish the country as a key capital of the militant Islamic world, developing close ties with many violent organisations inside and outside of Sudan and attempting to organise them into a cohesive Jihadist network. The NIF hosted annual meetings attended by terrorist delegates from Egypt, Algeria, Palestine, Afghanistan, and more than 50 other countries, including Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.
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Terrorists moved freely in and out of the country, and the Sudanese government hosted bin Laden from 1991 to 1996. His main protector while in Sudan was a man named Salah Abdallah Gosh, the current head of the powerful military intelligence organisation and one of the architects of genocide in Darfur.
The Sudanese government allowed bin Laden monopoly stakes in some of Sudan’s most profitable businesses, gave fake passports to al-Qaeda operatives, allowed terrorists to set up training camps, and transported terrorists and their weapons aboard Sudan Airways aircraft. Bin Laden plotted some of his later terrorist attacks while living in Sudan, and the profits he made there undoubtedly funded attacks against Western targets.
Putting Pressure on Khartoum
In response to bin Laden’s use of Sudan as a base of operations, a small group of people working for President Clinton began to focus on the regime. They argued that Sudan’s support for international terrorist groups made it a rogue nation that needed to be pressured heavily. Susan Rice was a staff member of the National Security Council. Working for former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, she saw the threat that bin Laden’s residence in Sudan posed to US national security. Working closely with Madeleine Albright (who was US ambassador to the UN and then secretary of state), she and others (including John, who worked for her at both the National Security Council and the State Department) managed to ramp up US pressure on Sudan and were finally able to impose strong United Nations multilateral as well as unilateral sanctions on the leadership there. As a result of this year-long campaigning, the Sudanese government booted bin Laden out of the country and ceased much of their overt support for terrorist organisations. It is but one example of the Khartoum government responding to outside influence.
Near the end of the Clinton administration in 2000, the process unfolded to choose the new non-permanent members of the UN Security Council. Sudan was Africa’s consensus choice to represent the continent. Against the strong advice of all of the other Security Council members, President Clinton decided to oppose Sudan’s ascension to the seat and tasked Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, US permanent representative to the UN, with leading the diplomatic effort to find a replacement and defeat Sudan’s candidacy, even though this had rarely been done in the history of the UN.
Two weeks of hard diplomacy finally produced a stunning verdict: the tiny island country of Mauritius defeated Sudan in the General Assembly on the third ballot. It was an incredible upset that demonstrated in no uncertain terms what the United States can do when it puts its political muscle behind its intentions. But there was more to come.
The ‘North-South Peace Process’
In late 2002 and early 2003, after nearly 20 years of horrific conflict, the United States and others pressed the Sudanese government and the SPLA to enter peace talks. Responding to growing public pressure from conservative US Christian groups concerned about Christians in southern Sudan, George W. Bush appointed former Missouri senator John Danforth as his special envoy to Sudan. Danforth led US efforts to push both sides toward an agreement, but, like the Addis Ababa agreement, the ‘North-South peace process’ (as many people refer to it) did not address the grievances of northern Sudanese marginalised by the Khartoum government.
The Sudanese government’s policy of economic marginalisation and violent repression is not limited to the south, yet the peace talks between the SPLA and the government excluded numerous other constituencies in Sudan that opposed the National Islamic Front and its divisive policies, notably groups in Darfur. Opposition groups in northern Sudan, including those in Darfur, drew one simple conclusion from the North-South peace process: the only way to get what you want in Sudan is to fight for it. The Darfurians that took up arms to fight for their rights never imagined that the regime they were opposing would meet their mutiny with genocide.
DON:
The incredibly early drive the next morning is over a bumpy road of dust, the sheer volume of which clogs the filter and stops the car, stranding us in questionable territory. Our United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees guide that day chirps, ‘Don’t worry, the Janjaweed take Tuesday off.’ His wry sense of humour lets you know he’s been at it awhile now. It isn’t necessarily gallows humour, but obviously you have to grow a thick skin to stay out here for the length of time most aid workers do and not completely come apart. The workers are in fact in a strange position. They are both highly sought after and needed for as long as they can take it, yet cautioned against staying too long. That would create the kind of burnout that can turn a young ambitious contributor into a nihilistic fatalist. But how long is too long when the people you have come to know, come to befriend, are suffering? Spend a year getting to know someone, cry with them, share a meal, a story, a laugh with them, then when ‘too long’ comes, leave them to their fate—that’s what these people reckon with. No good deed goes unpunished. Our guide to Am Nabak is in fact rotating back home at the end of this year’s tour.
He tells us this while he fixes the car and gets us back under way. We ride through miles and miles of dust, terrain that only sustains scant vegetation and trees far too small and bare for shade. The Am Nabak refugee camp seems to slowly rise out of the dust. It is truly an oasis to the weary, distraught travellers, though you’d probably never use that word to describe what we’re about to see. It is un-cinematic, stark and real.