Estimates Of Up To One Million Dead In Southern Sudan

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31656, 17 April 1968, Page 16

Estimates Of Up To One Million Dead In Southern Sudan

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright. JUBA (The Sudan), April 15. “We can never live with the Arabs,” proclaimed a Sudanese rebel in a conversation in a dimly-lit room in a town not far from Juba.

There were half a dozen men in the room, all but one of them Nilotes—as inhabitants of the Nile Basin are called —well over 6ft tall, longlegged, with deepblack skins. Their foreheads bore the scars of tribal markings.

The shorter man, a Madi, did most of the talking. He told a story of desperate men, of a guerrilla war that has been fought for half a dozen years with too little ammunition, no vehicles, no radios, no medicine. It was a story fraught with bitterness over the slave trade and all the other unhappy memories of these black Africans’ historic connections with the north. It was a story of a relentless determination among Southerners to be free, or to drag the Northerners into an abyss of destruction with them.

This is the Anyanya rebellion. The name comes from the Madi word for the poison that tribe derives from drying and grinding the whole head of the cobra. It is a deadly poison.

Whether painted on the tip of an arrow or left on the ground as a spot of powder for the unsuspecting enemy to step on, it is invariably fatal. ‘No-one Counting’

“We will fight for 20 years, for longer,” the Madi among the small group of rebels insisted. “Many people will die. With the Arabs we are dead anyway. It does not matter! how many of us die. Nonme! is counting the dead.”

The estimates of dead range into the hundreds of thousands, but no-one knows for sure. The South has been closed and hidden from all but a few in the outside world since the Sudan was on the threshold of independence and a mutiny by Arab officers left hundreds of armed men scattered in the bush.

Since that time only a handful of diplomats, journalists and others with a particular interest in determining what has happened in the Sudan has been permitted in the three troubled provinces of the South. Until now, no American reporter had ever been given permission to go to the South, even on a restricted visit

The permission, finally given, was less than perfect—three army officers waited at the airport in Khartoum to turn this reporter back without explanation, even with permission in hand. The railway station was blocked. A Greek merchant offered his truck, but the road beyond Malakal was washed out

Finally, after three weeks of effort, entry to the South was finally gained through the help of a group of Polish crop-sprayers, in a rickety old Polish biplane, flying a course between the Blue and White Niles toward newly-planted cotton fields close to the Ethiopian border. From there, written authorisations seemed to carry less importance. Chance encounter mattered more. A mounted policeman charged this visitor and bowled him over, simply because he was carrying a camera, even with permission.

The junior officers in the Army barracks in Wau were extremely cordial: they laid on an enormous feast, talked fairly freely about the course of the war, and asked in return only that they be shown the latest dance steps from Nairobi.

At the beer hall in Juba, soldiers who were about to drink up a month’s pay in an hour or so would not think of letting this visitor pay for a round. In the darkness outside the hall, an African touched this visitor’s hand, and whispered his worst apprehensions.

In this way must information be gathered in the most bitter, most devastating war in Africa. In the crudest, most haphazard way, must the great distances be covered—most of it in the Nile steamer, which bumps for days through vast, feverish swamps, through walls of papyrus and islands of floating vegetation on the

As the first American correspondent to be allowed into the South of Sudan since revolution broke out in 1963, Lawrence Fellows, of the “New York Times,” risked his life to report on the devastation resulting from the Anyanya rebellion— a movement of the black Africans of this region to win independence from the Arab and Islamic north. The estimates of those killed in the fighting between Government troops and rebel guerrillas, and deaths from disease and illness range from several hundred thousand to one million.

Little is known in the Westent world of this civil war because of the Khartoum Government’s refusal to allow access to foreign journalists, and the difficulty encountered in covering the 300,000 square miles of the embattled area.

From conversations with Government officers, rebels and missionaries, as well as visits to refugee centres, border areas and remote agricultural villages. Fellows has been able to piece together a description of Africa’s most cruel and chaotic war.

White Nile before it cuts into the open desert and northward on its course to Egypt, like a shining, greygreen ribbon. Still, impressions gained from what is left are not enough to judge how fierce was the fighting, how indiscriminate the killing, how irnany lives were lost. Blackened Sites In the villages where the fighting was general, only the blackened sites remain where the mud and thatch have long since crumbled back into the hot, moist soil. In a memorandum presented to the Pontifical Commission of Justice and Peace, the superior general of the Mill Hill Fathers claimed that a million people had died in the Sudan—victims of the fighting and of the attendant starvation and disease. But the Mill Hill Fathers cannot get into the Sudan. The missionaries, blamed by the Government for keeping alive the memory of the slave trade and for stirring up anti-Moslem feelings among the Southerners, have been expelled and the Mill Hill Fathers are only guessing at the extent of the devastation. Some Escaped Some have escaped. Tens of thousands of frightened Southerners have crossed over the borders into Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad, straining the resources of these countries, shaking their politics and the delicately balanced peace in a vast tract of Africa. Even there the refugees are prey to Anyanya rebels foraging for food, looking for recruits or seeking out the people who do not sympathise with them. Sometimes the refugees are attacked by Sudanese troops crossing these wild, ill-defined borders in search of their enemy. Sometimes the refugees are attacked by troops of the countries they have taken refuge in, for some of the Sudan’s neighbours, in trying to avoid trouble with the Sudan, have been ruthlessly clearing their bordei areas. By far the largest number of refugees from the fighting in the Sudan are still in the country. They live a hunted, half-starved existence in the bush, staying far enough from the roads so that the Army cannot get at them, far enough from the hidden trails of the Anyanya so that the rebels cannot raid them. They are safe from the fighting, but not from the dis-

eases that sweep over them in this sticky, unhealthy climate. Those who have come out tell of whole camps being wiped out by malaria, dysentery, black fever and many other diseases and illnesses. There are three or four million people here, out of perhaps 13 million people in the whole of the Sudan. Their forested hills, swamps and wild bush covered 300,000 square miles in a country of nearly a million square miles, the largest in all of Africa. The people here are a part of Black Africa. Their tribes are spread across all of the Sudan’s southern borders. Those who were educated went usually to mission schools, and learned English Whenever they dropped their pagan traditions they usually became Christians. They shared almost nothing of the Islamic traditions and Arabic culture of the Northerners. Closed By British The British deliberately closed the South to the Arabs from the North. Standing licences were withdrawn from the Arab merchants. Northern civil servants were gradually turned out. The Sudanese Government has argued ever since that this separation more than anything else brought on the suspicions, misunderstandings and eventually the fighting between Northerners and Southerners.

Almost universally the Northerners suspect the Southerners of wanting to secede and the missionaries of encouraging the Southerners in this respect. But the missionaries ha - e been gone for years and the secessionist feelings have not died down.

The Northerners were gone, but the memories of the slave raids, the senseless killings, the brothers and sisters dragged away in chains and under heavy yokes to the slave markets in Khartoum and elsewhere in the Arab world remained.

Since independence in 1956, the Sudanese Government has been trying to lock the separate parts of the country, but the feeling in the South is that the Arab is the enemy. Racially, there are not any very clear arguments: the Arabs who have moved southward over the centuries have taken their wives from the Southern environment, and genetically the lines are blurred. ‘Conservative People’ But the Southerners, like most Africans, are very conservative people, inclined to react violently to the prospect of their traditions being overwhelmed by an alien culture. Partly to protect them, the British administered the north and south of the Sudan separately. Inevitably, the Southerners developed a fear that they were being overwhelmed: Northerners in their administration, Arabic in their schools, streams of Northern merchants driving hard bargains.

The seeds of rebellion had already been planted with the Army mutiny. They were nourished by sweeping repressions: villages by the river put to the torch for the odd shot or two fired at the Nile steamer; villages suspected of sheltering fugitives from the mutiny razed, the crops burned or trampled, the people shot or chased into the bush.

Finally, in 1963, the Anyanya rebellion broke out, starting in the forest hideouts close to the borders, and sweeping quickly over the south. The whole countryside belonged to the rebels. The Army, after five years of savage fighting, is just beginning to win it back. Out of the rubble the Government appears at last to have picked up the first frail strands of authority, and to have begun the task of reconstructing the devastated South.

Long-legged, naked Nilotic tribesmen, their ears powdered white and their half- | shaven heads daubed with earthy huges of orange and red, are emerging again from the hot. spongy swamps of the Upper Nile on to rain-fed plains of high, waving grass They are coming out because they feel safe, not out of any feeling of loyalty to the Government. They care for very little but their independence and their lyre-horned cattle. New Logging Teams

The old logging camps in Equatoria and Bahr El Ghazal

remain charred and empty, but new mobile logging teams protected by the Army are beginning again to cut into the rich southern forests. Sudanic women, their black bodies covered with aprons of grass and decorated with hundreds of carefully-patterned scars, stare through the dense undergrowth when the loggers approach. Sometimes the women grab their children and run into the forest.

At the steamer landings people of all the river tribes push and shout and clamber all over one another and over the soldiers and police who are meant to be maintaining order—to sell chickens, eggs and sugar cane to the hungry passengers, or reed mats for them to sleep on over the long course of their trips. The police whack the natives with sticks and straps in an effort to keep some order. The beatings do not especially endear the police to the natives, but they keep coming: a few months ago they would have run from the sight of a steamer. “Do you know what it means to start from nothing, from worse than nothing?” asked Ahmed Hassan Fadi El Seed, the Government’s chief education officer for the Southern provinces. He had spent almost his whole career in the South, and seemed to regard the destruction almost as a personal loss. ‘Everything Gone’ "In the villages everything is gone, every village school burned and looted, more than 500 schools. In the towns so many are gone. In some places we have schools, but the population is gone.” In Upper Nile, the quietest of the three provinces, the rebels appeared to be blocked into a narrow margin of territory behind the swamps, close to the Ethiopian border.

In the town of Liria, 50 miles from Juba, a white visitor arriving with an Army escort is something of a sensation. Presumably the villagers had not seen one for a long time. The women shrieked and ran into their huts. The old men got out their long, pointed sticks and feathered hats, splattered their bodies with mud to make themselves look fierce, and danced in the heat and billowing dust with perspiration streaming from their bodies.

There were 6000 people in the village, with an Army garrison of 25 men to protect them. There were also policemen. and the plan was to enlarge the police force as the Army garrison was gradually reduced. The villagers had been issued supplied of durra, their staple grain, when they agreed to be settled. They had also been given seed to plant for their next harvest. In addition to old grievances, there are continuing incidents. Even during this visit two men were beaten to death by police in Kajok because they were suspected of being Anyanya, and in Aweil four men were shot in the courtroom when the judge drew the police sergeant aside and told him the men were rebels. An Army convoy was ambushed outside Akobo, but the Anyanya did not have much ammunition and eventually broke off contact. Tribal animosities and personal rivalries have taken their toll of the Anyanya, especially of the leadership. Joseph Oduho, the tubby schoolteacher and former member of Parliament in the Sudamu has been deposed as head of the Azania Liberation Front, the rebellion’s political arm.

He is in West Germany now, being treated for a liver ailment.

The party has been abolished and in its place a Southern Sudan Provisional Government set up, with Mr Grey Jaden as president. This mild-mannered former Sudanese civil servant proposes to stay with the rebels in their hideout in the Sudan, and not to repeat his predecessor’s mistake in operating too much from the outside, looking for weapons and money. Colonel Joseph Lagu has been relieved of over-all command of the Anyanya, mainly because he also spent too much time outside the Sudan, clearing operational orders for the widely separate, isolated fighting commands.

The new commander, Colonel Tafeng Lodingi, is an illiterate former corporal in the Sudanese Army, but he is more acceptable to the fighting men. The whole movement is being shaken up. Instead of having the men fight only in their own tribal districts, the fighting units are being mixed. It should discourage the trend toward banditry in the movement, and give it more the character of a national army. It will take another five or six months before everyone in this enormous, trackless country knows about the change. Options Closing But the options are gradually being closed to the rebels. The Army is pursuing them more and more deeply in the open countryside. The Government, by its diplomatic efforts, is getting Its neighbours to send the refugees back, or settle them away from the borders so that the rebels have no easy, hidden bases from which they can operate and to which they can retreat out of the reach of the Army. Only the Congo lingers as a serious border problem for the Sudan. Perhaps 45,000 Sudanese refugees remain packed into the hills around Aba, close by the Anyanya stronghold in the Sudan. The Congolese Government has had trouble establishing its authority in its own strifetom north-eastern regions. But until it does, or until some sort of settlement is negotiated with the Sudan, the Congo faces the prospect of still more trouble.

The Sudanese have kept 800 Congo army deserters in Tambura since they fled the Congo last fall at the time the white mercenaries and Katangese gendarmes held their mutiny. Another 6000 Congolese— Simbas from their unsuccessful rebellion in the northeastern part of the Congo—are spread through the border area.

However, even the Simbas appear to be settling down in their new homes. In Juba the simbas formed a dance band that plays in the beer hall. The waiters are Simbas. The prostitutes are Simbas. The Congolese element has definitely enlivened the heavy atmosphere that hangs over the southern Sudan.

In time, they might help restore normal life to the southern towns. If the towns are quiet, the Sudanese may come again in numbers to their villages from the bush, or from across the borders. Anyanya Included

The Government has offered them food and opportunities for settlement, and held out the prospect of education and eventually of work. There is even talk among responsible politicians in Khartoum of giving the Southerners a measure of regional political autonomy. The Anyanya are not excluded: those who want t 6 come back are forgiven their past offences. So far, few have come.

"I was in the Anyanya,” whispered Anitpas Malual. a large, strapping Dinka waiting by the airstrip at Wau for the plane to be refuelled. It was a long process, filling the tanks from a five-gallon can.

“I was a lieutenant in the Rumbek area. I decided to accept the Government’s amnesty and come back, because I looked around and said to myself: what are we doing to ourselves?”