---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Ashworth <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 11:01 AM Subject: [sudan-john-ashworth] Fw: More articles on South Kordofan To: Group <[email protected]>
Yasser Arman warned of “a war that runs from the Blue Nile to Darfur” (article 2, below). This scenario is not improbable if the NCP refuses to take seriously the marginalised and oppressed indigenous groups within (North) Sudan who are seeking democracy and justice and who wish to maintain their own identity in the face of statements from the government that there will be no room for ethnic and cultural diversity in the new northern nation. Many analysts have been warning of this for years. Note the last paragraph in the Guardian article below (article 1), explaining the difference between Nuba and Nubia, something which many in the international community and media consistently get wrong. John BEGIN 1. Nuba mountains bear scars of Sudan's forgotten war Residents of region near new north-south border have suffered heavy bombardments by government planes * Matteo Fagotto in the Nuba mountains * guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 July 2011 19.31 BST Fourteen-year-old Jacomo Tia Jibril was washing clothes at the village borehole when he heard the plane overhead. "I started running," he says. "My sister shouted at me to lie down, but I couldn't hear her." He tried to take shelter in a brick factory, but the bomb exploded before he could get inside. From his hospital bed in the Nuba mountains, Jibril is surprisingly calm as he recounts the day his village, Tes, was bombed by the Sudanese government. During the explosion he was struck by shrapnel on his left forearm and, when he finally reached the hospital 18 hours later, he was told his left hand had to be amputated. Just a few beds away, seven-year-old Viviana Issa lies lifeless, her upper back covered by a white bandage. Hit in the spine by a bomb fragment, she is paralysed from the chest down. "I don't know what to do with this girl," says Tom Catena, the only doctor in the hospital, whose exact location is being withheld for security reasons. "Since I came here three years and a half ago, this is the worst situation I've ever been in." Around him, beds are full with some of the130 people injured by the recent bombardments by government planes in the Nuba mountains, which lie towards the southern edge of Sudan's Arabised north. Clashes between government forces and opposition fighters in the region have displaced more than 70,000 people in less than a month. The injured come from towns such as Kurchi, Dalami, Umsardiba and Kauda, strongholds of the Nuba resistance to the northern Sudan government led by President Hassan Omar al-Bashir. From these secluded hills, Nuba spent 20 years fighting alongside the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) of southern Sudan against an Arab-led government whose policies were seen as discriminatory towards native Africans. The conflict caused at least 2 million deaths and the displacement of another 4 million people. But while south Sudan has seceded from Khartoum and is preparing to celebrate independence on Saturday 9 July, the Nuba mountains are experiencing yet another bloody chapter in this never-ending crisis. Tensions have risen in the past months and flared up on 5 June after a controversial election for state governor. Amid claims of vote rigging, Ahmed Haroun, the candidate of Bashir's ruling National Congress party, who is wanted, like his president, by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes, narrowly defeated Abdul Aziz Adam al-Hilu, of the Southern SPLM party, the rebel army's political wing. Khartoum then ordered the Nuba rebels to give up their weapons and integrate into the Sudanese army. Clashes soon erupted. Government forces eventually took control of the state capital, Kadugli, prompting opposition fighters to retreat. Thousands of civilians fled, fearing reprisals by northern soldiers. "It took me three days to get to Kauda. I had to walk through the mountains to avoid the checkpoints manned by the Sudanese forces," says a 46-year-old carpenter, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation. He says Khartoum's forces have rounded up civilians, gathering them in three places inside the city. "They plan to use them as human shields in case of an SPLA attack," he says. If Kadugli has been the city worst hit by the conflict so far, Kauda, the headquarters of the Nuba SPLA, is still an impregnable stronghold. But the town is bearing the brunt of this renewed conflict. Schools are closed and the market is almost deserted. "People fled up the surrounding hills and come down early in the morning just to buy something," says 25-year-old Abil Abraham, who keeps a small stand of vegetables. His family is hiding in a nearby village, but he has no intention of leaving. "How could I do it? This is my place," he says. "If the war comes, I will manage to find a weapon and fight." But unlike the last war, where the units of the rebels were able to engage the northern army and its allied militia, they can now do little against an enemy that comes from above. The conflict on the ground has stalled, with government soldiers controlling just a few main population centres such as Kadugli, Delling and Talodi, apparently surrounded by SPLA forces. But civilian areas are being bombed by Sudanese planes every day, making the lives of these rural communities nearly impossible. Fields have been left unattended by tens of thousands of internally displaced persons who fled the warzone at the start of the rainy season. If they do not manage to get back to work soon, today's war might turn into next year's famine. Fawzya Osman, 18, from the village of Kapuo, is among the few people defying the bombs to work on her small plot of land. "I have no option. Bombs or not, we have to eat," she says with a smile. Just a few days ago, she witnessed the air strikes that hit Kauda and her village. A friend was hit by a bomb and killed instantly, a short distance from her. "It was so shocking, I couldn't think or speak properly for two days," she says. "Even now, the simple noise of a motorbike or an engine scares me." Just outside the village, on an apparently deserted rocky hill, several pairs of frightened eyes peer out of a half-metre wide crack between two big rocks. Suddenly, four children aged below five emerge, curious to see the foreign visitors, while dozens of others come out of similar hideouts. The eldest of the group, 13-year-old Al Shaikh Ismail Kalo, has been given the task of looking after the 31 children. Their parents venture out during the day to try working on their fields and come up the mountain twice a day to hand them food. "I don't like to stay here; this is a place for animals," says Kalo, already trained to distinguish the noises of Antonov and Mig planes. "We can't even play or study, because we left everything in the village. Everyone here just thinks about his life." Locals say the Nuba mountains are "just as God created them". Six years after the end of the civil war, development is nowhere to be seen in this region dotted by small rural dwellings and a few, isolated cities the size of small European villages. With no job opportunities, few schools and fewer health clinics, life is a daily struggle. Apart from a few paved roads in the capital Kadugli, roads are little more than mountain tracks: to reach a small hospital three miles away from Kauda, cars have to pass through a dry river bed, on a journey that can take up to 45 minutes. As a consequence, the life of this proud people made up of nearly 100 tribes is still being marked by the endless cycle of nature. During the rainy season, adults spend their day cultivating sorghum and maize, leaving grandparents at home to look after the children. When the rains stop, they harvest their crops and repair damaged huts. Once a year, their sons leave the villages all together to graze cattle in the nearby plains, living outdoors for two months, dancing and practising wrestling (the traditional sport of Nuba people) in a collective experience called "Fariq". For centuries, African and Arab communities coexisted in relative peace, as 60-year-old Hussein Ngalokuri, traditional leader of the Otoro tribe, explains: "Arabs used to beg us to pass through our lands and graze their cattle further south. We fed and helped them but, if we refused, there was nothing they could do. Now, they come here and act as our masters." He says the situation deteriorated after independence, when the Khartoum government started a programme of forced Islamisation and Arabisation of Nuba. Land traditionally held by African tribes was confiscated and given to Arabs; bearing an African name was discouraged; local languages were forbidden in schools, where offenders were caned in front of other students and forced to carry the image of a donkey on their back. The only way to get rid of it was to find someone else making the same "mistake" and pass it to them. "Imagine if someone comes to your land and starts telling you he is better than you, in every respect," says Chief Ngalokuri. "I am a Muslim, but what the Arabs are doing to us is not Islam." For many Nuba, the scars of the past and the mistrust towards Arabs are too deep to accept any political settlement with Khartoum. The peace talks in Addis Ababa, meant to create a ceasefire, have been met with various degrees of indifference. "Reaching an agreement with the Khartoum regime is impossible," says a 35-year-old former SPLA fighter, Solomon Osman Lonna. "Even if they talk about peace, they will send more troops. They have always done it and will keep on doing it." • This article was amended on 4 July 2011. Some references to the people of the Nuba mountains described them as "Nubians". While it may be the case that this term is sometimes used in speech in the Nuba mountains, it has been changed throughout the article above for the avoidance of confusion with the people of Nubia – a different people inhabiting a different region. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/03/nuba-mountains-scars-sudan-war END1 2. NCP denies discord over Addis Ababa deal as SPLM warns against scrapping it July 3, 2011 (KHARTOUM) – The ruling National Congress Party in North Sudan dismissed on Sunday suggestions of any in-party discord over the framework agreement it signed with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the north on new security and political arrangements in the war-battered state of South Kordofan. NCP’s chairman and Sudan President Omer Al-Bashir on Friday appeared to be overruling an agreement signed between his party and the SPLM in Addis Ababa last week to start talks on a ceasefire in South Kordofan, saying he had ordered the army to continue its operations there until the state is "purged" and the "rebel" SPLM’s leader in the state, Abdel Aziz AL-Hilu, is caught and brought to justice. “We order the armed forces to carry on its operations and not to stop until South Kordofan is purged as Abyei was purged before, and Abdel Azizi is arrested and brought to trial," Al-Bashir told a gathering of citizens following Friday prayer at a mosque in Khartoum. North Sudan’s army known as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has been fighting elements aligned with the opposition SPLM in South Kordofan state since early June. The fighting escalated into artillery and aerial bombardment by SAF, resulting in the displacement of more than 70,000 people, according to UN figures. The Addis Ababa agreement stipulates the NCP’s recognition of the right of the South Sudan’s ruling SPLM to continue as a legal political party in the north despite previous assertions by NCP hardliners that the SPLM would not be allowed to exist in the North after secession. The agreement also acknowledges that SPLM’s fighters in South Kordofan are Northerners and should therefore be integrated into SAF. It further stipulates that the two parties should start talks on an agreement to cease-hostilities in the state. The NCP’s political secretary Al-Haj Adam Yusif announced on Sunday that the party had formed a committee to consider remarks expressed by the party’s leadership over the framework agreement. He said, according to Sudan official news agency SUNA, that the remarks would be communicated to the party’s negotiating team before it starts the new rounds of talks. Adam denied any "contradiction" between what was agreed in Addis Ababa and the president’s instruction for the army to continue its operations against "the rebellion" in South Kordofan. Adam pointed out that the agreement does not contain any provisions of a truce on the ground. The NCP official went on to defend Al-Bashir’s description of Al-Hilu as a "rebel," saying it is “true considering that he [Al-Hilu] resorted to war in South Kordofan.” Adam further suggested that the military situation in South Kordofan is somewhat detached from the political negotiations. "We are now talking in political terms, the agreement is political and has no relation with the military affairs," he said. "We in the NCP talk only on the political side, the military side concerns the armed forces." Adam stressed that the SAF was the only body authorised to use arms to confront rebel forces, and that the president in his capacity as a commander-in-chief had the right to issue directives for the army to do whatever necessary to safeguard the lives of citizens in South Kordofan. In the meantime, the SPLM claimed its forces had achieved major victories on the ground and inflicted great losses on SAF and its allied militias in South Kordofan. Gamar Dalman, the media adviser to the SPLM’s chairman in South Kordofan, on Saturday said that SPLM forces on Thursday achieved its “biggest victory” over SAF since the war broke out in early June. According to Dalman, SPLM forces inflicted great losses on SAF in Kahliat area to the west of Kadugli, the state’s capital. Dalman went on to claim that the SPLM had seized six vehicles and large amounts of ammunitions whereas SAF fled the area leaving behind 83 killed soldiers. The SPLM’s spokesman regretted Al-Bashir’s order for continuation of military operations in South Kordofan, saying that Al-Bashir’s “unhelpful” statements shows that he is "frustrated" and proves a state of division within the NCP. Meanwhile, the SPLM’s northern sector’s secretary-general Yasir Arman has warned against reneging on Addis Ababa agreement, saying that those trying to persuade the government to scrap the agreement and hit with a fist of iron were “playing with fire.” "There are voices in Khartoum against this framework agreement, those voices are playing with fire," Arman told a press conference in Khartoum on Saturday. The veteran SPLM figure further warned that the only alternative to this framework agreement is “a war that runs from the Blue Nile to Darfur.” Anti-SPLM media in North Sudan have been scathingly criticizing the Addis Ababa agreement, saying it gave the SPLM too many concessions. Arman expressed confidence that the agreement would be implemented and reach its logical conclusion of a cease-fire in South Kordofan. He further disclosed that the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zinawi and the AU moderation team led by Thabo Mbeki were considering sending a private jet to transport Al-Hilu from the field in South Kordofan to Addis Ababa. Arman said that the SPLM’s delegation was ready to sign an agreement on cessation of hostilities immediately. (ST) END2 ______________________ John Ashworth Sudan Advisor [email protected] +254 725 926 297 (Kenya mobile) +249 919 695 362 (Sudan mobile) +27 82 853 3556 (South Africa mobile) +44 750 304 1790 (UK/international) +88 216 4334 0735 (Thuraya satphone) PO Box 52002 - 00200, Nairobi, Kenya This is a personal e-mail address and the contents do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation -- The content of this message does not necessarily reflect John Ashworth's views. 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