Cold blooded mass murder in the Nuba Mountains
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By Samuel Totten
July 3, 2011 — Over the past four weeks, Government of Sudan (GoS)
troops and allied militia have carried out a vicious and murderous
attack on the people of the Nuba Mountains in the Sudanese state of
South Kordafan. This is the very same government that perpetrated
genocide in Darfur and continues to carry out devastating attacks on
the region. Tellingly, Sudan’s president, Omer Al-Bashir, is already
wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of
genocide and crimes against humanity for the atrocities perpetrated in
Darfur.
MIGs and Antonov bombers have created havoc in the Nuba Mountains;
farms, tukuls, and churches have been burned to the ground; close to
100,000 people have been forced from their villages out into the
wilderness and up into barren mountains; and untold numbers have been
killed.
In Kadugli, the capital of South Kordafan, the Sudanese Armed Forces
(SAF) have gone door to door in search of suspected members and
supporters of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLM) and
executed them on the spot. GoS troops have also planted land mines
throughout the area. In Dilling, GoS soldiers carried out their own
search for members and supporters of the SPLM and upon locating them
slit their throats.
While there are UN troops (United Nations Mission in Sudan or UNMIS)
in the Nuba Mountains they have largely served no purpose. If truth be
told, they are actually exacerbating the situation. First, they do
little more than largely observe the violence and certainly nothing to
attempt to halt it. Second, two sources inside the Nuba Mountains,
both of whom must remain unnamed, reported that Egyptian soldiers with
UNMIS were seen raping local women in Kadugli as the latter sought
sanctuary from the surrounding violence. Third, when a massive group
of civilians sought assistance at UNMIS headquarters in Kadugli they
were purportedly told to leave and go to Dilling, some 120 miles away
— a horrific journey on foot in the face of the ongoing attacks.
Finally, there are reports that UNMIS personnel told people to head
north when seeking safety, thus apparently leading them directly into
the hands of the GoS troops. It is no wonder that rumors are afloat
that those Egyptian soldiers with UNMIS are on the payroll of
Khartoum.
Various reasons are aswirl as to why GoS troops attacked the people of
the Nuba Mountains. First, some four weeks ago, Al-Bashir threatened
that if the people of the region did not readily accept the newly
elected Ahmed Haroun, who is wanted by the ICC on over 40 counts of
crimes against humanity and war crimes for the horrors perpetrated in
Darfur, as their governor, they would suffer the consequences. In
fact, in a speech in Kadugli, Al-Bashir stated that his soldiers would
chase the Nuba people up into the mountains as they did in the 1990s,
leaving them without food to starve to death once again. Second, when
members of the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A),
who, along with the vast majority of people in the Nuba Mountains,
voiced their vast disappointment that Abdel Aziz, a popular and former
commander of the SLPA, had been cheated out of the governorship as a
result of a rigged election and also refused to take off their
uniforms when ordered to do so, GoS troops attacked them. Third, many
believe that the real reason behind the attack is that Al-Bashir wants
to gain absolute control over South Kordafan and the border area with
South Sudan in order to strengthen his hand in negotiations over
Abeyi, a oil rich region straddling the border between the north and
the south. Finally, there are rumors that Al-Bashir wishes to gain
control of as much land as possible along the border, an area that is
poorly demarcated, as he also prepares for future negotiations with
the new state of South Sudan.
Al-Bashir’s propensity for killing those with whom he disagrees, who
question his authority and/or policies, who challenge his dictates,
whose land he desires, and/or who he looks upon with distain and wants
gone is well documented. He’s done it previously in the Nuba Mountains
(in the 1990s when he carried out genocidal acts and virtually starved
people to death), in Darfur between 2003 and today during which over
400,000 blacks Africans perished, and he is back at it once again in
the Nuba Mountains. And the world should never forget or overlook the
fact that just because the Comprehensive Peace Agreement has been
signed by the north and south, Al-Bashir, as president of Sudan,
oversaw a large part of the north-south war that resulted in some two
million deaths.
Clearly, Al-Bashir specializes in perpetrating crimes against
humanity, genocidal actions, and genocide, and he does so whenever he
wishes in the belief that he can do so with impunity — the ICC or any
other court or tribunal be damned.
For the sake of the people of the Nuba Mountains, for the sake of
civilization, for the sake of our own decency, we, and the rest of the
world, must show Omar Al-Bashir that he is wrong — and that impunity
does not reign.
Samuel Totten is a genocide scholar based at the University of
Arkansas, Fayetteville. He served as one of the 24 investigators with
the U.S. Atrocities Documentation Project in eastern Chad. His most
recent book is An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide
(Praeger Security International, 2010). He was last in the Nuba
Mountains in January 2011 conducting research for a new book,
Genocidal Actions Against the Nuba Mountains People: Interviews with
Survivors of Mass Starvation and Other Atrocities.
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