Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan. Deborah Scroggins
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was a railway town of about 60,000 people, most of them belonging to the Rizeigat, a Baggara tribe of Muslim cattle-herders who considered themselves Arabs. Rizeigat territory bordered the land of the Dinka. In the nineteenth century, the Rizeigat had been great slavers. In recent years, Sadiq al-Mahdi’s defence minister had been giving them and another Baggara tribe, the Misseriya in neighbouring Kordofan province, automatic weapons and hand grenades. The government claimed the Baggara needed to use arms in self-defence against the SPLA. Dr. Mahmud said they were using them to burn houses and fields and steal cattle throughout the Dinka lands of northern Bahr el-Ghazal and Upper Nile provinces.
In January 1987 an SPLA company ambushed a Rizeigat militia along the Bahr el-Arab at Safaha. In more peaceful times, Safaha had been a centre for trade between the Dinka and the Rizeigat. Now southerners claimed the Rizeigat militia gathered at Safaha had been raiding Aweil District across the border in Bahr el-Ghazal. The SPLA killed 150 Rizeigat and captured 4,000 cattle in its attack on Safaha. For months thousands of Dinka refugees had been streaming north past Safaha to Ed Da’ein. On 27 March the Rizeigat retaliated for the SPLA attack by firing on the Dinka refugees and burning down a Dinka church at Ed Da’ein. The Dinka gathered for safety at the Ed Da’ein railway station, where a train was supposed to leave for the town of Nyala the next day. After the Dinka clambered on board the train, the enraged Rizeigat set fire to the wagons. Hundreds burned or were suffocated to death in the carriages nearest the station. The Dinka in other carriages managed to start the train with the help of some railway workers. As the train moved, the Arab mob ran through the town killing and mutilating any Dinka they found. The police joined in the attacks. The perpetrators were never arrested, and the government clearly wanted to keep the matter quiet. For months it denied that any massacre had occurred. Then in June the Sudanese Minister of the Interior announced that only 183 people had been killed at Ed Da’ein. The University of Khartoum investigators put the number at more than 1,000.
Mahmud and Baldo said that the Rizeigat militia made a practice of selling Dinka women and children to Arab families in South Darfur for use as servants, farm workers and sex slaves. ‘The kidnapping of Dinka children, young girls and women, their subsequent enslavement, their use in the Rizeigat economy and other spheres of life and their exchange for money - all these are facts,’ their report said. ‘Moreover the existence of slavery in the area has generated some beliefs among the Rizeigat that the Dinka is subhuman. All psychological barriers to terminating his existence have been broken down - that was what made the massacre at Da’ein possible - without fear of reprisal from the government whose representatives were present.’
The report said the Rizeigat took the captured slaves to Safaha.
I WROTE A COUPLE of stories about the Ethiopian refugees at Showak - with Carol’s help, as I had never seen a telex machine before - and I sent them to Atlanta. A little while later, the machine lit up and a reply clattered back: THIS FINE, BUT WHERE FAMINE???
COMING, COMING, I typed slowly.
Why wasn’t it enough to write about how hundreds of thousands of Eritreans and Tigreans and Oromos were stuck out in the sands of Sudan, waiting for the whirlwind of war and famine that had ripped them out of their homes to cease? That meningitis had recently broken out in the Tawawa camp and that Tigrean children were dying without vaccines? That great set battles involving tanks and artillery were taking place in mountains between the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the Ethiopian army and that one day an Amhara deserter wounded by shrapnel and for some reason carried down into Sudan by the Eritreans died on a stretcher in front of me, his black velvet eyes suddenly going grey and glassy like the eyes of a rocking horse I’d had as a child?
I knew the answer. At that historical moment, one year away from the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine was still a kind of totem to the West. Refugee camps, terrible poverty, sickness, epidemics, AIDS - all this we accepted as unfortunate Third World realities. But mass starvation was different. Bob Geldof had shown that famine could still outrage Americans and Europeans. They bought newspapers to read about it. There was simply too much food in the world. It was embarrassing to think that thousands of Africans might be dying of hunger while we gorged ourselves, especially since fattening up the skeletons we saw on television appeared to be a purely technical matter, requiring nothing more than the money to buy grain and the know-how to move it. Africa’s other tragedies might be borne, but against famine a line must be drawn.
I suspected that American readers would be equally disturbed to learn about a revival of slavery. As Primo Levi wrote that same year of the Nazi camps, to whose survivors the starving Ethiopians had borne such a disturbing resemblance: ‘How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery and the duelling code? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of us do, so that in this world pregnant with threats, at least this threat can be nullified?’
IN DARFUR, I MIGHT FIND SLAVERY, I wrote.
The machine was silent. Then it lit up again.
GOOD. BUT HURRY, it said.
AT THE US EMBASSY, no one seemed to know anything about Safaha. But officials of the two aid agencies that Alastair had told me were working there, MSF-Belgium and Oxfam, went quiet when I asked about it. If you can get permission from the government to go to Safaha, we will be glad to show you what we are doing, Oxfam’s freckled, red-haired country director said finally. But for now I can’t talk about it. It’s an army garrison subject to military secrecy.
Carol had broadcast the report for the BBC on the Ed Da’ein massacre that prompted Dr Mahmud and Suleyman Ali Baldo to undertake their investigation. I asked her for advice on how to get to Safaha. She warned me not to ask the Ministry of Information outright for a permit. Don’t even say the word ‘Safaha’, she said. The minute they find out you’re interested in Safaha, you can forget about going anywhere. I did as she suggested and instead asked for permission to visit Nyala. Two hundred and fifty miles north of Safaha, Nyala was the nearest town with air service. The United States had mounted a huge relief effort in Nyala during the last famine. Fertile grasslands had once surrounded the town, but now they were turning to desert. The Sudanese government blamed drought. I told the Ministry of Information that I wanted to see what Oxfam and MSF were doing to help the nomadic Arab camel people who lived there.
The Oxfam report had said the Dinka influx into southern Darfur was connected to events in Wau, the capital of Bahr el-Ghazal, the huge province south of Darfur that had been fertile slave-raiding territory in the nineteenth century. Wau had been under seige by the SPLA for more than a year. The army and the rebels had blocked overland relief shipments to Wau. Pilots had refused to fly into the south ever since a plane chartered by the aid agencies had been shot down over the town of Malakal a year earlier. There were many rumours in Khartoum about what was going on in Wau. In January the acting governor of Bahr el-Ghazal, a southerner, had sent a message to the Prime Minister. ‘Right now, citizens are starving to death in villages,’ he wrote. ‘Wau town has run out of essential food items like grain.’ He urged that food shipments be sent ‘to avert a very devastating human tragedy’. No grain had been sent. Some whispered that the army commander at Wau, a man called Abu Garun, was a psychopath; others said he was simply following orders from Khartoum. He was said to have personally masterminded atrocities against civilians, including crucifixions. Fighting was reported between the Dinka police and wildlife services in the town and a government-armed militia drawn from the Fertit, a black African tribe. Carol had obtained Wau police reports showing that the Fertit were killing an average of ten Dinka a day. Next to many of the victims’ names, the notation ‘cult’ appeared, meaning that the body had been ritually dismembered and disembowelled. The Fertit were also said to be kidnapping Dinka women and children and selling them to the Baggara as slaves. On Christmas Eve, a Sudanese army unit had carried out a particularly gruesome massacre. Hundreds of Dinka were said to have been machine-gunned and thrown into the river that flowed through the town.
In October 1987 the army expelled World Vision, an American relief agency, and three other agencies from Wau. Dick and Carol Steuart, the couple who had worked for World Vision in Wau, came from Clarkston, Georgia. The Steuarts had been accused of telling the BBC about a massacre of 160—200 Dinka refugees at Wau. American diplomats told me the army had taken away their radio transmitter