http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/ en mgraham@ushmm.org Copyright 2008 2008-07-01T19:32:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/simons_map/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/simons_map/#When:18:32:00Z I met him in Agok, whose roads are bustling with displaced people from the destroyed town of Abyei.  For some reason the man stood out from the rest, and my translator Wol insisted we speak with him. Simon Dut is a Dinka man from Difra, a town just a day’s walk north of Abyei.  He is not much older than I am, maybe late twenties.  He looks sick, thin.  There is a gap where his front teeth once were, and his eyes are bloodshot, tired, with the look of someone who has given up on people. Underneath a light rain, Simon gingerly removes his shirt, and turns around.  I cringe at what I see.  His back is a map of pain, etched with dozens of fresh scabs slowly forming into scars.  I think to myself that this is what a slave’s back must have looked like two hundred years ago. “When did this happen?” I ask. “Four days back,” he says softly. We sit in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser by the side of the road while Simon tells me his story.  He had been living peacefully on a farm for seven years, splitting half his profits with the owner of the land, a well known Misseriya chief.  Simon had married a woman called Angar two years earlier, and their twin children John and Mirria were now just over a year old. Shortly after the attack on Abyei, the chief came with his two sons looking for Simon.  When they found him, they separated him from his children, wife and her sister, then blindfolded his eyes and tied his hands with rope.  They took him along with three of his cousins and a man from town to an unknown place near Difra.  He doesn’t know where they took his family. When they arrived the chief explained why they took him and the others. “Your people have taken our area, taken our town.  We are killing them, and will kill you now.  We will not leave Abyei for you.  Either you leave Abyei or we will kill you all.” They left Simon’s arms tied and beat him for an entire day with a whip made from hippopotamus hide.  It’s normally used for driving camels, a tightly woven braid of heavy leather about four feet long. They killed two of the other men in front of him.  Before it was his turn, he slipped out of the rope and escaped into the bush.  He ran south, away from roads and people, until he reached Agok, where I met him a few days later. Simon does not know what happened to his remaining cousins, or his family, if they are alive or not.  He is hungry after days without eating, his body is tired, but it seems more than anything he burns with revenge.  He says he doesn’t care whether his family is alive or dead, he will go back and fight those who did this. Simon finishes talking.  I quietly take a few photos, but I don’t know what to say.  I have no words of comfort.  I say thank you, but it’s a hollow phrase that echoes down the road as soon as it leaves my lips.  He nods, not looking at me, and walks away in the rain. Sudan 2008-07-01T18:32:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/waiting_to_go_home_to_abyei/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/waiting_to_go_home_to_abyei/#When:11:38:00Z 2008-06-23T11:38:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/abyei_destroyed/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/abyei_destroyed/#When:18:39:00Z Twelve year old John Marai was in class when he heard the deafening sound of artillery and automatic rifles.  He fled the school on foot along with his fellow students, into the bush away from the fighting, running past bodies of soldiers and civilians lying alongside the road. When he reached Agok three days later with a few brothers and sisters who had been with him at school, John immediately began looking for his mother and father.  Four days later he found them- but learned that his sister Aluel and brother Mariak, both around 7 year old, were missing.  They had been sent to the market on an errand when the fighting began, and have still not been found. It is a scene replayed endless times throughout the nearly twenty year war in southern Sudan, and in today’s ongoing conflict in Darfur. But this time the violence took place three years after the signing of a Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the North and South in 2005; such attacks were supposed to be a thing of the past.  The burning of Abyei marks a return to violence that could reignite another destructive civil war. Abyei, a land of green marshes that sits deep in the heart of central Sudan, wedged between the North and South and touching Darfur’s eastern border, is home to both the Ngok Dinka tribe who were targeted by the government during the civil war, and the Misseriya, an Arab tribe that was recruited by the North to attack Dinka villages in exchange for cattle, loot and slaves.  Today, with oil fields estimated by the International Crisis Group to be worth more than half a billion dollars, Abyei is the most desired and contested area in Sudan. In the months leading up to May, the 31st brigade of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the forces of the South Sudanese government had been building up military forces around Abyei, and experts including Roger Winter suggest that the SAF had been pushing people out of nearby villages for several months.  On May 13th a minor incident between the opposing sides quickly escalated into full scale fighting and shelling over the next few days.  When it was over, Abyei had been completely destroyed; every hut in smoking ruins, the market smashed and looted. For Munrol Ayak, a Dinka tailor who had a shop in this market, the attack was all too familiar.  Many residents of Abyei had been displaced once already during the civil war.  In an interview, Munrol described the attack twenty years ago that forced him to leave for Khartoum, capital of Sudan: They would ride the horses and shoot at you.  If you ran, they would take a match and burn the house.  They were looting things; cattle, gold, all the properties in the house.  They would take the children captive, rape the girls, kill the grown ups.  They might leave the really old people.  That was how it was in the 80’s during the war. Munrol told me what he saw in Abyei this time: During last month’s attack I saw fighting and guns, they were not discriminating-the SAF was shooting at anyone, soldiers, civilians.  Later I saw someone inside my own shop who had been burned to death inside.  A Dinka man, maybe 20 years old. Some 50,000 people from Abyei and the surrounding area have been forced from their homes and are trying to survive the heavy rains that instantly turn this part of Sudan into a muddy swamp.  Luckily, aid and development organizations have long had a presence in the area.  Although their compounds in Abyei were destroyed and looted in the attack, they and UN agencies have been able to provide tarps, food, and drinkable water to nearly all the displaced. The UN Security Council has been in Sudan this month pressing for peace, and Khartoum and the southern Government have agreed to international mediation on Abyei and for the 31st brigade to be pulled out of the town.  Though the Abyei issue had already been covered under the 2005 agreement signed by both parties, Khartoum has so far refused to follow through.  Both sides seem to be stepping back from the brink.  Within a week or two the IDPs may be able to return to Abyei, and begin the long process of rebuilding, of reclaiming their lives from the ruins. John Marai says he does not want to go back.  He is afraid that there will be another attack.  Munrol the tailor wants to rebuild, but says he will refuse any compensation offered by the North.  For him, the humiliation of accepting money from those who destroyed his home would be too much.  Neither of them has much faith in promises of peace. Listen to our podcast interview with Sudan expert Roger Winter, who was in Abyei shortly after it was destroyed. Learn about Abyei and Winter’s work to stop war in a profile by Eliza Grizwold in the New York Times Magazine. Sudan 2008-06-13T18:39:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/a_lifetime_of_war_in_south_sudan/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/a_lifetime_of_war_in_south_sudan/#When:07:28:00Z If you listen carefully, amidst public outcry over Darfur you might hear the warnings of impending catastrophe in South Sudan. I am here in Sudan to witness what is happening on the ground; to try to understand the impact of two decades of conflict, talk with returnees from the refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia who are just beginning to rebuild their lives and find out what efforts are being made to head off a new round of war. South Sudan has been at war with the North for all but a decade since Sudan’s independence from the British in 1956.  It is one of the least developed places on earth, with the world’s highest rate of maternal mortality.  1 out of every 50 women dies during childbirth here. It is the rainy season in Juba, capital of South Sudan, situated on the calmer southern reaches of the White Nile.  In the past few years, the rutted dirt roads of this once backwater outpost have been crammed with new returnees and shiny white Land Cruisers plastered with the logos of UN agencies and non-governmental organizations trying to help the Sudanese taste the dividends of peace. The war between the government in Khartoum, controlled by the National Congress Party (NCP), and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA/M) in the South killed more than 2 million people and displaced 5 million over 17 years.  The tactics employed by Khartoum would later be used in Darfur: arming local militias, in this case Baggara and ‘Arabized’ tribes; unleashing militiamen and regular army troops upon the villages of neighboring Dinka, Nuer and other ‘African’ tribes with the promise of cattle and loot; and massive human rights abuses, displacement and slavery. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in 2005 officially ended the war and laid out a path for sharing power and oil wealth between Khartoum and the new Government of South Sudan (GOSS).  But the tenuous peace it created is in danger of collapse.  Khartoum, with a history of signing and then violating agreements, has failed to implement key parts of the CPA.  In May, fighting between the government and southern forces destroyed the town of Abyei, capital of a highly disputed, oil-rich province, and displaced more than fifty thousand people.  Military tensions are mounting and at the moment neither side seems willing to give up any ground. The scale of displacement today in Darfur makes this attack on one town seem small.  But if war in the South starts again, experts fear it could dwarf the scale of Darfur’s tragedy and bring other marginalized regions of Sudan into the fold of conflict. That would be the worst possible scenario for the people of Sudan, especially here in the South where civilians have just started to rebuild lives broken once already by a lifetime of war. There is tension in the air of Juba, uncertainty as to what will happen over the coming weeks.  A warm rain is beginning to pound on the metal roof of my hotel.  When desert and savannah turn to mud, vehicles become about as useful as boulders for getting around the largest country in Africa.  But I’ll need to find a way if I am going to learn what future lies in store for South Sudan. Sudan 2008-06-05T07:28:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/beautiful_memories_of_darfur/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/beautiful_memories_of_darfur/#When:19:36:00Z “Welcome to Farchana,” reads the sign at the entrance. I visited this remote and desolate desert camp in July 2007 to get a first-hand look at the challenges faced by Darfur refugees in Eastern Chad who have spent more than four years living in limbo. Here, children face a life that spins between boredom and danger.  They make handheld radios and action figures by adding water to the red clay dirt, hunt imaginary lizards with wooden bows and avoid local Chadians who may beat them - or worse for girls- if they venture too far from the camp to collect firewood. They also struggle to come to terms with what they witnessed in Darfur. One day I gave crayons and paper to a class of twenty students in one of three small schools located throughout the camp.  I asked the class to draw whatever they wanted- life here, in Darfur, anything.  Nearly all drew the attack on their village that brought them here.  While an international border provides some distance from the place of trauma, they have no escape from memories of a childhood violated.  Their drawings, equally harsh and beautiful, describe in painful detail their lives in Darfur and the instant everything changed. Playing a favorite game with friends outside the market each week.  Working with their father in the early morning tilling the soil and planting peanuts.  Helping their mother make the evening meal over a cooking fire. The whir of helicopter rotors and the whistling of a bomb that signals the beginning of an attack.  A mother frantically telling the children to run and hide in the bush outside town.  The sight of an uncle shot in the back, of friends and relatives lying still in the dusty road under the hooves of Janjaweed camels. Despite these traumatic events that forced them from their villages, the students kept asking me when they could go back home.  I never had an answer for them that I quite believed.  “Maybe when the peacekeepers arrive in Darfur,” I might say, or “when a peace deal is signed.” The latter is by far the more difficult prospect.  And if other camps for Sudanese refugees are any indication (Kakuma camp for South Sudanese refugees in Kenya has been open for 17 years), some of these young students may one day take the place of their own teachers here in Farchana. Visit the website of UNICEF to learn more about what children face in Sudan and Chad. Compare these drawings with others collected by Human Rights Watch researchers in 2005 and see children’s drawings of war in Chechnya. Chad 2008-05-16T19:36:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/images_of_abu_suruj/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/images_of_abu_suruj/#When:18:17:00Z The attacks on the village of Abu Suruj and its neighbors Sirba and Silea on February 8th were a return to the brutal tactics of the Sudanese government that characterized the height of violence in 2004 and 2005. In Abu Suruj, a village of more than 18,000 people, it began early in the morning, on market day.  Around 8:00AM government attack helicopters were seen buzzing overhead, along with a Russian-made Antonov aircraft.  A half hour later, as if on cue, government soldiers and Janjaweed arrived in trucks and on camels and began shooting everyone in sight, burning homes and carrying loot back to their vehicles.  In these three villages at least 115 people were killed and 30,000 displaced by the attacks. Satellite photos commissioned by the American Association for the Advancement of Science vividly show the destruction and extent of the burning of homes in all three villages.  See for yourself the aftermath of the attacks on Abu Suruj, Silea and Sirba. The Sudanese government claims that they were only trying to deal with rebels and bandits in the area (in this case, the Justice and Equality Movement).  They deny, as always, that civilians were targeted. But United Nations investigators who interviewed survivors of the attacks tell a different story: During the attack [on Abu Suruj] at least 30 persons were reportedly killed, including one woman, one mentally disabled man, ten elderly people, among them a 75-year-old blind woman who was burned alive inside her house, and three children, three, eight and sixteen years old. The eight-year-old was a disabled girl who could not walk and therefore succumbed to the flames inside her house.  United Nations report, March 20th The report, from the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, states in no uncertain terms that the level of destruction “suggests that the damage was a deliberate and integral part of a military strategy.” It also accuses Sudanese soldiers of large scale sexual violence against girls and women during the attacks.  A Sudanese spokesman blasted the report, calling it baseless, and asserted that Sudanese soldiers “have never attacked its people.” A joint United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force is finally being rolled out in Darfur.  But with the Khartoum government doing everything in its power to hamper the effort and a crippling lack of international support and equipment (the New York Times reports that some soldiers have even had to buy their own paint to turn their green helmets UN blue), many feel it is too little, too late; they worry it may not be enough to turn back the tide of violence. Many of the newly displaced – and hundreds of thousands of people displaced in Darfur over the past 4 years of violence – are beyond the reach of the UN and humanitarian agencies; not only because of government interference, but because the rebel groups themselves hijack vehicles and harass civilians and aid workers alike.  There are no angels in Darfur- both the Sudanese army and rebels like the Justice and Equality Movement are keeping the embers of war smoldering. Sudan 2008-05-14T18:17:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/stolen/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/stolen/#When:19:45:00Z The most coveted tools of warfare in North Kivu are not grenades, or even shoulder-fired missiles.  Children are the weapon of choice- too young to question orders, with hands the perfect size for Russian made AK-47 (Kalashnakov) assault rifles, they are taken from their schools and homes and forced into service, kept from leaving through fear of punishment or drug addiction.  They are used as frontline fighters, porters, and even sex slaves. Walking through the Kibumba displaced camp today, a dozen miles south of the front line, we happened across an old man carrying a blanket, tools and some food.  He had fled the fighting yesterday with his 14 year old grandson.  But this morning, the Congolese army surrounded them and forced the boy to join the battle against Nkunda’s rebels.  The grandfather had no choice but to continue on to Goma. The use of child soldiers in North Kivu has been prevalent since the start of the first war in 1996, but the recent round of fighting in December is leading to a new ‘catastrophic situation’ for children, according to the organization Save the Children.  The 7,000 child soldiers they have demobilized in the area over the past 3 years are especially at risk, according to country director Hussein Marsal: Children previously rescued from armed groups are at greater risk because commanders seek out battle-hardened youths, as many of them fail to reintegrate into family and community life due to lack of resources for care and schooling. Last week in Bukavu we saw first hand how challenging it is to help these children find a new life after war.  We spent an afternoon with former child soldiers at a demobilization center where two dozen boys, aged between 15 and 19, try to remember how to be teenagers again.  Many came from here in North Kivu. Children arrive at the center without their guns, feeling cast out by their commander. Counselors must first gain their trust, and then help them understand that the terrible things they saw and were forced to do were not their fault. The adults, not they, are responsible.  They learn to not pull out a knife when they have an argument with another boy, and interact with women and girls with respect. But when their 3-6 month program is finished, I wondered, what will happen to them?  With luck they will be reunited with their families and be able to finish a childhood deferred.  But with renewed violence, at least a few will find themselves on the battlefield in North Kivu, trying to kill an enemy they might have played cards with in Bukavu. Learn about the campaign to end the use of child soldiers. Want to learn more about what it is like to be a child soldier?  We recommend Ishmael Beah’s book, A long Way Gone. Congo 2007-12-06T19:45:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/we_sleep_on_stones/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/we_sleep_on_stones/#When:00:08:00Z Click here to see Mugunga from above in Google Earth.  Note the absence of any plastic sheeting.  November 2007, image courtesy Masako Yonekawa/UNHCR. The sound of exploding shells mixes with afternoon thunder; only those who live or work here can tell the difference.  Yesterday government soldiers took back the town of Mushake [and will lose it again the following week] a few miles up the road, and are pounding Nkunda’s northern positions with attack helicopters and mortars.  Today Jerry and I have come to Mugunga camp to see for ourselves how the people displaced by the conflict are surviving.  On top of a field of sharp volcanic rock is a small city of thousands of tiny huts made of banana leaves; they were made small so they would fit under the standard sized orange plastic tarp given to each family when they arrived sometime over the past year. But last month (November) after a battle nearby, the displaced fled and the Congolese army (in which a soldier, when paid at all, receives $10 a month) looted the camp, stripping the residents of their food and every last piece of plastic sheeting.  To top it off, they haven’t received a food distribution in two months.  Jeanette, a 24 year old woman from Masisi district, is soaked every time it rains, along with her family and handful of possessions.  She is hungry and beyond furious. Yesterday the camp residents held a UN worker hostage for the day, blaming them for the lack of supplies.  The humanitarian aid organizations are underfunded, not fully prepared for the latest round of fighting and wary of handing over new sheeting- they are worried, for good reason, that the tarps will just be looted again in a month or two. But if later the afternoon thunder clouds bring rain, as they do nearly every night during the wet season, Jeanette and her family will lie awake with a puddle in place of their cardboard bed.  Across the camp thousands will suffer the night quietly, and wake together to a morning of uncertainty. Congo 2007-12-06T00:08:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/shattered_youth/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/shattered_youth/#When:03:24:00Z We will call her Marianne.  She is a beautiful six year old girl, wearing a dark blue dress and pink rubber shoes.  She sits beside her father while we talk with him about what happened to her last month, before their family fled here to Bulengo camp a few miles east of the fighting on the front line.  Marianne sits with her hands in her lap, and doesn’t say a word. Congo 2007-12-03T03:24:00-05:00 http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/goma_on_the_edge/ http://blogs.ushmm.org/WorldIsWitness/goma_on_the_edge/#When:20:32:00Z Jerry and I stepped off the boat from Bukavu this afternoon into a war zone, the faint pop of artillery fire reflected by the hills of Rwanda a few miles east. Not even the strange beauty of the lake or mountains can hide Goma’s harsh landscape.  In 2002 the volcano Nyiragongo erupted and sent molten lava flowing through the airport, city center and out into lake Kivu.  The city was rebuilt on top of the hardened volcanic rock, and at times I could almost imagine we were driving on the moon. This week the Congolese government launched major military operations 15 miles up the road, against a rebel group that refuses to give up arms.  Laurent Nkunda, leader of the rebels (National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP), claims to protect Tutsis in eastern Congo, who he says are at risk of genocide.  While anti-Tutsi (and more broadly anti-Rwandan) feeling is strong here, Nkunda’s heavy-handed response risks fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy: Every [Nkunda] military offensive, with its abuses against innocent civilians, fans the flames of anti-Tutsi sentiment… In response to the cumulative deaths of fewer than 20 Tutsi over the past two years, Nkunda has launched offensives that have killed over 100 persons and displaced hundreds of thousands… While Nkunda has defended the Tutsi minority in North Kivu, he has become a potential danger to the community’s security as a whole.  From Bringing Peace to North Kivu, a report by the International Crisis Group published October 31, 2007. The CNDP’s own laundry list of human rights violations makes clear that Nkunda is as much abuser of the weak as defender of the people.  Like every other armed group in North Kivu (including the Congolese army, and the FDLR which includes former perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide), the CNDP has preyed upon the local population through sexual violence, extrajudicial killings, torture and by recruiting children by force right from their schools and homes to fight on the front lines. Regardless of whether the army can defeat Nkunda (aside from atrocity and theft the Congolese army is known best for running away from the battlefield), the humanitarian consequences of the government’s operation will be severe for the people living in North Kivu.  There are already more than 370,000 people displaced from their villages in this area by the conflict over the past year (and 800,000 in all of North Kivu), and this week tens of thousands more who live near the front lines are expected to join them in Goma and its crowded camps, where malnutrition and disease are taking their toll on the most vulnerable residents. Click here for an October 2007 Human Rights Watch report on crimes against civilians in North Kivu. Congo 2007-12-02T20:32:00-05:00