The Battle for South Kordofan
Will total war in Sudan ever cease?
BY JAMES VERINI
JANUARY 22, 2013
NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan — When Gen. Jagod Mukwar joined the Sudanese
People's Liberation Army (SPLA), soon after it formed, in the mid
1980s, he was a young man, and Sudan's civil war was already many
years older than he was. Factions from the north and south of the
country had been fighting since before Sudan won its independence, in
1956. Still, the SPLA's cause -- independence for the south --
remained internationally obscure. Sudan had not yet become a pariah
state, while a famine in Ethiopia and apartheid in South Africa used
up the world's limited bandwidth for African tragedy. Mukwar's
cause-within-a-cause -- the plight of the people of the Nuba
Mountains, his home, in Sudan's South Kordofan province -- was unheard
of.
Today, nearly 30 years after Mukwar took up arms, the bloodshed
continues. Though the Second Sudanese Civil War (as it's now called),
the longest official conflict in modern African history, came to an
end on paper in 2005, when Sudan's president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir,
and the SPLA signed a peace treaty, the fighting never ceased. And the
creation of the Republic of South Sudan in 2011 didn't much improve
matters, ironically. It merely turned a civil war into a border war.
South Kordofan -- a region on the central border between the two
countries, populated by an assortment of African tribes and Arab
settlers, farmers and pastoralists, Muslims, Christians, and animists
-- has borne the brunt of this grim transition. When I met Mukwar, I
asked him where the front line is these days in South Kordofan. "The
front line is everywhere," he said.
Mukwar at least has the benefit of world attention now. With the
conflict in Darfur out of the headlines (though by no means over),
South Kordofan and the border state of Blue Nile have become the new
focus of international condemnation of Bashir. They are a matter of
growing concern to lawmakers in Europe, Washington, and the United
Nations Security Council, which in May passed a resolution calling on
Sudan and South Sudan to end hostilities. The conflict has achieved
celebrity status: George Clooney regularly travels to the Nuba
Mountains and has testified about what he's seen there before
Congress. Meanwhile, Bashir -- indicted in 2010 by the International
Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
genocide -- is losing power in Khartoum, thanks to a plummeting
economy and growing dissatisfaction after 23 years in power. As he
does, he seems increasingly eager to tear apart South Kordofan.
Now roughly 50 (he wouldn't say exactly), Mukwar commands what is
known as the SPLA-North, an army of 80,000 men and women that does
battle with Bashir's Sudanese Armed Forces along the border. The
SPLA-N split off from the South Sudanese Army (which is still called
the SPLA, confusingly enough) in September. The South Sudanese
government denies any connection to the SPLA-N, but Bashir routinely
accuses his foes in Juba, the new nation's capital, of backing it, and
it's easy to see why: While there are tensions between the SPLA-N and
Juba, the SPLA-N still has extensive support among South Sudanese
officials, some of whom made their names fighting with Mukwar in the
Nuba Mountains. (Bashir is not alone in this charge. In October, Anne
Richard, U.S. assistant secretary of state for population, refugees,
and migration, claimed the SPLA-N recruits child soldiers from the
Yida refugee camp in South Sudan. I saw no evidence of this, either in
Yida or Sudan.)
Mukwar's headquarters moves frequently. At the moment he's installed
in a small compound of mud-brick and thatch huts in Jegeba, a mostly
abandoned village at the foot of a crescent of hills. I arrived there
in late December, after a six-hour ride on dirt roads in the back of a
pick-up truck through the Nuba Mountains, a semi-arid region that
resembles the American Southwest. Two roosters were pecking around a
pair of Eurostar satellite dishes, and in a nearby creek a family that
lives in a cave in the hills was washing clothing. I was greeted by a
group of soldiers sitting quietly outside the compound, Kalashnikovs
resting on their legs. On the shoulders of their uniforms was the flag
of South Sudan, which began life as the flag of the SPLA. Below that,
on some of the uniforms, were loose yellow threads where GOSS, for
Government of South Sudan, used to be embroidered. After the split
they were ordered to unstitch it.
I was shown into a hut that appeared tiny from the outside, but which
turned out to hold a kind of conference room, with two tables and a
lot of the plastic lawn chairs one typically finds in African rebel
compounds. At the head of one table was an office swivel chair, which
in this context looked like a Louis XVI chaise longue. When Mukwar, a
man of moderate height and respectable paunch, ducked into the hut a
moment later, he was wearing suit pants, a dress shirt open at the
collar, and flip-flops. He offered the desk chair to me. I declined.
After placing a bulky satellite phone on a table, he eased into the
fake leather.
"Thank you for coming here to see us," he said. "Thank you for
describing what is happening here. Because of people like you, the
world knows what is happening to the people in the Nuba Mountains."
They didn't want to secede and join South Sudan. "We are northern,"
Mukwar said. "How can we become southerners?" All they wanted, he
said, was for Bashir to stop the attacks and treat them fairly.
War has given to Mukwar -- he exudes purpose and pride -- and taken
away. In a battle some years ago in the village of Tolushi, while
manning a machine gun nest, most of the ring finger of his left hand
disappeared. There is disagreement as to how it happened. The official
line is that the finger was shot off by enemy fire. But some of his
troops believe Mukwar's more self-deprecating story: He was never much
of a gunner, he claims, and during the battle he was shooting so
off-target he thought his gun must be loaded with blanks. So, in his
frustration he put his left hand in front of the muzzle and pulled the
trigger with his right. The bullets were real enough. "I shot it off
myself!" Mukwar said with a peel of laughter, holding up the nub.
In 2011, the SPLA and rebels from Darfur attacked the Sudanese Armed
Forces along the new border, and Sudan responded with a campaign of
bombings and killings that continues to this day. Last year, Bashir
began moving thousands of troops into South Kordofan. Today, they've
taken control of most of Nuba's larger towns, including Kadugli, the
capital.
Khartoum has superior firepower, Mukwar told me, but its men are
untrained and weak. His comparatively ill-equipped but more committed
SPLA-N troops have been fighting back, slowly. They'd been shelling
Sudanese positions in Kadugli, and, the week before I arrived, had won
a two-day battle in nearby Deldoko, capturing a dozen Sudanese tanks
and armored vehicles. "We are not dead. We have not surrendered. We
are still strong," Mukwar said. Knowing I was American, and apparently
wanting to impress or rattle me, or both, he said, "If they brought
your Marines in here, we could fight them."
A man in a gray, short-sleeved suit came into the hut. "This is the
hero of Deldoko!" Mukwar announced, introducing me to a quiet colonel.
"Show him what happened," Mukwar commanded. Reluctantly, the colonel
pulled back his lapel to reveal a bandage on his chest, where a piece
of shrapnel had pierced it. Mukwar held up his finger-nub near the
colonel's chest and let out another peel of laughter, as though to
say: "Why am I in charge? This guy should be commanding."
I pointed out to Mukwar that most of the villages I'd passed through
on my way to him were, like Jegeba, empty. "All our people are going
to the camps or the caves, because we're not able to feed them. We eat
from the enemy side. We attack them to get our foods. If we're
fighting, we can always eat, but also we can't feed our children," he
said. "The Sudan government uses propaganda to tell the international
community not to send us aid. They say that if you send the people
food, it will go to SPLA. They say if you're helping the people,
you're helping the rebels. It's not true.... Even South Sudan, they
don't have any budget, they don't have any resources. Sometimes even
our soldiers, they eat the leaves off the trees."
Driving around Nuba, you have to be careful to avoid roads that are
too dry -- Sudanese pilots circle in Soviet-era Antonov bombers,
looking for targets that kick up dust-clouds. They also like to bomb
homes, churches, farms, markets, mosques, medical clinics, and
schools, according to villagers I spoke with. Thanks to the planes'
inaccuracy (bombs are typically rolled by the crew out of cargo
doors), though, they miss more often than not. Still, every village in
Nuba has at least a few foxholes, which people run into when they hear
the Antonov's unmistakable thrum overhead. According to the SPLA-N, in
November the Sudanese military dropped 330 bombs on South Kordofan.
According to a Human Rights Watch report released in December, the
Sudanese military "has adopted a strategy to treat all populations in
rebel held areas as enemies and legitimate targets, without
distinguishing between civilian and combatant." In addition to
bombings, this has included killings, arbitrary arrests, and rape.
For centuries, the Nuba Mountains -- a diverse region compared with
largely Arab Khartoum and Dinka and Nuer-dominated South Sudan -- was
known as a place where people fleeing the Arab slave trade, and later
oppressive Islamism in Khartoum, could take refuge. During the Second
Sudanese Civil War, the SPLA began recruiting soldiers there. When
Bashir came to power, in 1989, he ordered a program of forced
migration in South Kordofan. Tribal councils and village chiefs that
had existed for generations were replaced with Arab-style emirates.
Black Nubans were expelled from their lands, which were redistributed
to Arabs. Nuba's professional and intellectual classes were subjected
to a campaign of kidnappings and murders. Children were dragooned into
the military. Bashir called this social planning, but in retrospect it
was clearly an attempt at ethnic cleansing, a kind of dress rehearsal
for what Bashir would attempt in Darfur. In 2011, the governorship of
South Kordofan went to Bashir's former minister of state for
humanitarian affairs, Ahmed Haroun, in an election many Nubans
believed was rigged. Haroun has also been indicted by the ICC for war
crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
The results are apparent everywhere. Along the road that runs from
Nuba over the border into South Sudan, families and dump-trucks full
of men travel south to the refugee camp in Yida. About 60,000 people,
most of them Nubans, live there now. Hundreds more arrive every day,
many on the verge of starvation. Nuba is without paved roads, or
almost any pavement at all for that matter. Plumbing and electricity
are rare. Messages are passed by satellite phone or handwritten note.
To travel around the parts controlled by the SPLA-N, you need a series
of notes from various commanders -- though I found that the security
at village checkpoints usually consists of a piece of string stretched
between wooden posts and a sleepy guy in fatigues.
It's impossible to calculate the current population: of the roughly
1.1 million people who once lived in South Kordofan, an estimated
900,000 have been displaced or fled. Those who've stayed often live in
ravines, caves, forests, or dry riverbeds; their villages are open
targets for Khartoum's bombers. Others have set up make-shift villages
near SPLA-N camps hoping for protection. Near a camp in Umm Sirdibba,
a group of tribal chiefs assembled cross-legged on a plastic tarp and
told me their story. They wore clothing cast off from Sudanese
soldiers. A chief from Deldoko named Ibrahim, in green army pants and
a T-shirt that showed a fish on a hook and the words "Bass to the
Bone," said that before the Sudanese bombing campaign began, hundreds
of families lived in and around Deldoko. Now it's nearly empty.
His family and some others managed to hold out for a time. They dug
foxholes in their sorghum fields, so they could harvest their crops
and not starve. Some young men moved to Khartoum to try to find work
(oddly, the capital is full of Nubans); others joined the SPLA-N. When
the Sudanese troops moved in, Ibrahim said, they burned Deldoko's
grain-stores and homes. "They burned everything," he said. When I
asked if they had considered going across the border to Yida, one of
his companions sucked his teeth contemptuously. "This is our land and
we will die here," the man said. "We will never leave it."
After we spoke, I made my way along a back road toward Deldoko with
two trucks of SPLA-N soldiers, passing by the charred remains of
settlements. We entered a clearing where a pattern of black circles
and rectangles and piles of charred mud-bricks stretched to the
treeline. Nothing was left standing. The corpse of a Sudanese soldier
lay by the trunk of a baobob tree. Animals had eaten the flesh off his
legs and picked out his eyes. "This was Deldoko," a soldier said.
A few miles further on, we reached two adjoining hills where the last
engagement in the battle for Deldoko had been fought. The air smelled
of cordite and rotting flesh. Bullet casings littered abandoned
half-dug trenches. The body of a Sudanese colonel lay alongside one,
his torso yellowed and bloated with rigor mortis, his head covered in
maggots. Nearby, on a rock ledge, were four more bodies, lined up side
by side. Blood stains were visible on the rock face in front of their
heads. When I pointed this out to a soldier, he seemed to understand
what I was getting at -- that the men had been executed. "No," he
said, dismissing my suggestion, "they were shot from down below."
>From the valley beside the hills, we could see to Kadugli, the
capital, still held by Sudan. As we looked on, a Sudanese attack
helicopter suddenly appeared on the horizon in front of us, above the
town. We ran for the rocks to take cover, and as we did, the
helicopter let loose a missile. An explosion rang out, and a plume of
smoke rose above the hills. We stayed hidden until the helicopter flew
off.
* * *
During the battle for Deldoko, Mukwar's men took three Sudanese
prisoners. They were being held in Jegeba, where I was brought to meet
them. They sat one next to the other on a cot outside. One was in his
40s, one in his 20s, and one claimed to be 19, though by the looks of
him he was barely into his teens. All three were skinny and wore
filthy clothes, though they did not appear to have been mistreated.
They had been recruited into the People's Defense Forces, a
government-sponsored militia, in Khartoum, they told me, where they
received arms but virtually no training. They were moved to Kadugli,
where they were informed that they would secure the town. Then they
were sent to attack Deldoko.
Like everyone else fighting for Khartoum in South Kordofan, they had
been fed a steady diet of Islamist propaganda. They were told that
Nubans were infidels who wanted to take their land. The 19-year-old,
Mustafa, told me that it was only after he was captured by the SPLA-N
that he learned this was all wrong. He told me that SPLA-N soldiers
asked him: "Do you think we are disbelievers? We are Muslims, like
you. We are your brothers, the Nubans." He continued: "Then I hung my
head.... When I realized we were both Muslims, I said, ‘Shoot me.' I
asked them to shoot me." They didn't, happily for him, though he
insisted to me that he still believes he should probably die.
Like Mustafa, Mohamed, the eldest prisoner, was visibly petrified. He
kept reiterating how well he had been treated. He'd been shot in the
leg during the battle ("I only shot two bullets," he said), and when
he was captured, the SPLA-N took him to a hospital. Once he was
bandaged up, they fed him sorghum porridge. "Tell the world that
what's going on here is wrong," Mustafa implored me. "The Nubans just
want their rights." Whether he was told to say this or was trying to
ingratiate his captors or believed it, I couldn't tell.
I asked a SPLA-N commander what would happen to the prisoners. "We
won't kill them," he said, in such a way as to make it clear the
thought had occurred to him. "This is political war, not a religious
war. They'll stay with us until we return them to their families."
Back in Mukwar's hut the general said, "I want to show you something."
One of his men brought in a video camera. After the battle for
Deldoko, he explained, his soldiers found a videocassette in an
abandoned truck. The footage on it had been shot by a Sudanese soldier
as he and his comrades advanced on Deldoko.
Mukwar pressed play. As the video begins, Sudanese soldiers are
haphazardly firing their carbines and rocket-propelled grenades into a
haze. They're in no recognizable formation. The cameraman moves
around, while the men jump into the frame, like fans at a college
basketball game. They hold up their index fingers and triumphantly
repeat "Allahu Akbar!" over and over again. The cameraman says it back
to them: "Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!"
Each time, Mukwar let out another peel of laughter and mimicked them.
I asked whom they're shooting at. "No one!" he said. "We're not even
there at this point. They're shooting at the bush!"
In the video, a soldier walks into the frame and says in Arabic, "I
want to greet the camera before I die."
"Ok, if that's what you want!" Mukwar said back to the screen.
"They are morons," the colonel who took the shrapnel wound, watching
with us, said.
Mukwar pressed fast-forward and let the tape roll a bit. "Now listen
to the sounds of the bullets," he instructed. Suddenly the nature of
the firing changes. Rounds can be heard whistling past the camera.
It's the counterattack. The video becomes shaky. The cameraman drops
the camera to his side and begins running. Then the footage goes
black. When it comes back on again, there is no more preening, just
men running around in disarray. "Allahuakbar, allahuakbar," the
cameraman chants to himself, as he whirls about, except now it sounds
as though he's crying. The camera comes upon a dead soldier, shot,
presumably, by one of Mukwar's troops. Men have gathered around him.
One says a prayer and then shuts the dead man's eyelids.
"You see that? He died!" Mukwar said, beside himself with laughter.
"They closed his eyes because he's finished!"
"They're very stupid," the colonel, who is not laughing, said.
A few weeks after I left Mukwar and the colonel, Sudan launched a
counterattack near Deldoko and retook some of the land the SPLA-N had
seized in December. Sudan claims that it killed 50 rebel troops. The
SPLA-N claims only a few died. Both are probably lying.
Meanwhile, African Union leaders, including Bashir and South Sudan's
President Salva Kiir, have been meeting in Addis Ababa at the U.N.
Security Council's behest. Bashir had planned to travel to Juba to
negotiate with Kiir personally, until talks broke down last week. He
was expected to push a plan to partition South Kordofan into two
states. At the same time, Bashir's influence in Khartoum continues to
wane. In November, the city went into lockdown after a reported coup
attempt by senior military officials. Before that, Bashir imprisoned
his intelligence chief, after he allegedly expressed his desire to
take over the presidency. Last year saw a series of demonstrations,
followed by bloody crackdowns by the state.
"The problem isn't in Nuba," Mukwar told me. "The problem is in Sudan.
Now even the students in the university are protesting. And Bashir is
beating them, killing them, torturing them," he said, pausing to set
up the joke. "And the students aren't even Nuban!"
"There's always war in Sudan," Mukwar said, serious again. "There's
something wrong in this regime."
I asked how much longer his forces could go on. "This is war. I can't
determine that," Mukwar replied. "If there's a change of regime in
Khartoum and a peace agreement, maybe then we can stop. Maybe then."
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