War and Slavery in Sudan. Jok Madut Jok
Читать онлайн книгу.
of destabilizing the Dinka far outweighed the security problems.2 Some Baggara individuals were also known for enlisting in the army and then deserting with the arms. It was also a matter of common knowledge that many western Sudanese who retired from the armed forces were allowed to keep a number of guns for themselves, which they either sold to others in Darfur and Kordofan or gave to family members. Such arms are locally used for protection against cattle rustlers from other herding societies within the North. By means of these arms, the Arab herders forced their way into the Dinka grazing lands. They also hunted game with impunity, and when the Dinka tried to stop them, the result was often a declaration of war on the Dinka.
These hostilities became more intense when the SPLA deployed forces in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, partly to restore the old colonial borders and partly to protect the Dinka people as well as the environment. The SPLA encountered Baggara Arab raiding forces in 1984–87 on the borders between Bahr el-Ghazal and southern Darfur and southern Kordofan. The SPLA defeated the Baggara Arab pastoralists and drove them away from the southern borders. The SPLA forces then turned to the escalation of the struggle against the Sudan army, following their victory over the Arab pastoralists and hunters. The SPLA forces established their military bases on the borders, extending guerrilla activities to non-Arab ethnic territories of the Nuba Mountains and Ingessana hills in southern Kordofan and southern Blue Nile, respectively.
Like Christian and non-Arab ethnic groups in South Sudan, the Nuba and the Ingessana people had also suffered from the oppressive and unjust rule of the Arabs in Sudan. Although their regions belonged to north Sudan, which was comparatively more developed than South Sudan, they had been as neglected in development as the South. When SPLA forces penetrated the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile for recruitment and spread revolutionary feelings against the Arab and Muslim domination in Sudan, many young men and women from the Nuba and Ingessana joined the ranks of southern guerrilla fighters. Such unity among non-Arabs in Sudan, which had never happened before, sent a wave of fear through the Arab and Muslim rulers in Khartoum. In addition, the Khartoum governments traditionally relied on these non-Arab groups for army recruits under the command of Arab officers. During the second round of the civil war, the government found it difficult to recruit troops from the Nuba and the Ingessana ethnic groups. The Arab governments in Khartoum, therefore, turned to recruit most of their troops from Arab groups.
The Slave-Taking Armies and Their Mission
Two types of forces emerged out of this recruitment policy, and these were meant to be the “final solution”3 to the “Southern Problem.” The first type of force was the tribal militias called Murahileen.4 The Arab rulers in Khartoum resorted to the Baggara in particular to form a militia force to carry out what amounted to ethnic cleansing against the Dinka and the Nuba. The government saw the militias as an opportunity to assert Arab and Muslim domination in Sudan, and the Baggara pastoralists and peasants viewed their militia forces as the only way to gain their economic goals in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, southern Kordofan, and southern Blue Nile. The militias executed a policy of raiding and looting, capturing slaves, and expelling others from their territories, and settling “pacified” Nuba and Ingessana lands by force. The plan of the militia, as the victims explained it, was not only to collect booty and slaves but also to destabilize Dinka areas. The desperate Dinka would then have to move into the North, where they would be subject to economic exploitation and enslavement.
The second and most insidious forces comprised part of the Sudanese army and were the Popular Defense Forces (PDF). These also included paramilitary tribal groups affiliated with the Sudanese army. Their work took many forms. They were primarily a jihadic force that sprang out of the growing politicization of Islam and Islamic militancy most associated with the government of National Islamic Front (NIF), which came to power on June 30, 1989. One writer described the PDF as follows: “They consisted of existing Arab militias, the infamous Murahileen, student and professional ‘volunteers’ who rushed to the call of the jihad and adults dragooned into six weeks of compulsory military training whose curriculum consisted of calisthenics and religious indoctrination.”5 Because of this, these forces have also been called Mujahideen, meaning holy warriors. They were supplied with weapons, some money, and army badges. They were also armed with a complete ideology the Islamists had introduced to indoctrinate, shape, and thereby control the Sudanese in all aspects of life. The force was intended to fight the SPLA on the basis that the latter was the enemy of Islam and the Arabs, and that one way to defeat the SPLA was to hit at its support base among the Dinka. The recruits were constantly instructed that their mission was not only to defend the homeland from the “infidels paid by the U.S. and the Zionist State” but also to extend their faith to unbelievers in the South and beyond.
The NIF’s other mission was to guard the military trains between Babanusa and Wau, which run through Dinka territory. There were usually several trains going one behind the other carrying supplies and reinforcements to government garrison towns along the railway line up to Wau, the regional capital of Bahr el-Ghazal. To prevent the trains from being attacked or taken over by the SPLA, the government instructed the PDF to ride on them until the trains reached Dinka territory, after which they got off and moved on foot, forming a shield along the sides of the train. These trains moved at a walking speed. All three types of forces—the Murahileen, the Mujahideen/PDF, and the government of Sudan regular army—worked together, each assigned a particular role. The Baggara tribal militias “go on horseback forming an outer circle protecting the train, the army, and the other forces from possible SPLA attacks.”6 They move at an outer distance of approximately five miles but sometimes as far as sixteen miles away from the force on foot along the train. During their movement on horseback they pass through Dinka villages and cattle camps, which they attack, stealing cattle and taking slaves. They then return to the train with their booty, and as the train nears its destination, the horseback militia forces return back to the North as the trains enter Wau. To return to Babanusa, the PDF guards the train, and similar atrocities in Dinkaland recur.
My investigations indicate that the capture and movement of slaves to the North has been predominantly the work of the Murahileen. It has also been established that some of the regular soldiers and members of the other forces guarding the train have kidnapped women and children, whom they took to their barracks. Some of them have reportedly taken this human booty with them to their hometowns and villages when they went home on holidays or when they were transferred. Many children currently working as domestic servants in the towns and villages in northern Sudan were taken in this manner, under the pretext that they were being rescued from the ravages of the civil war in the South and were going to places of care rather than to enslavement. Some of them have been taken to Islamic schools in Khartoum to be trained as future Mujahideen to be used against their own people. Contrary to the stated goal of the army in establishing militias to boost its military situation, the government granted the soldiers free rein in the South to supplement their meager salaries with whatever loot they could come by.7
The Raids that Marked the Beginning of the Tragedy
The militias had been active since 1985 taking slaves from the Dinka. The first and most destructive attack on the Dinka communities of Aweil, Abyei, and Tuic occurred in February 1986. Jointly, the Rezeigat raided the Malwal Dinka of Aweil West County of the Bahr el-Ghazal region and the Misseria Humr raided the Abiem Dinka of Aweil East County. The Misseria Humr also attacked the Ngok Dinka of Abyei and Tuic during the same operations. During these violent attacks, many Dinka were killed, including the son of a Dinka paramount chief, Riiny Lual, in the village of Marial Baai. The Rezeigat and the Misseria Humr occupied a large area of Malwal Dinka for nearly two months. During this period, they conducted daily raiding and looting from their new bases within the Dinka territory, and some went back and forth between their homeland and the Dinka area to move their booty. They took two thousand women and children and thousands of cattle. The Dinka in the area were scattered, and large numbers were displaced to the North across the Kiir River into Baggaraland, where they hoped the government might protect them and provide them with shelter and food. The displaced also thought that their kin who had moved there in earlier years might help them. As will be shown later, they were soon disillusioned. Successive governments deliberately decided on a policy of exploitation of the displaced that amounted to slavery.8 Other Dinka communities in the vicinity of the border with the