Un’altra aera si prepara alla rivolta mentre il Sudan sta per dividersi
Sull’orlo della guerra tra i monti Nuba, in Sudan
– La prossima secessione del Sud Sudan (sancita con il referendum di gennaio) fa temere la ripresa di diversi conflitti etnici: lo Stato del Sud Kordofan dove si trovano i Monti Nuba, dovrebbe rimanere al Nord.
– La regione fa da confine tra il Nord che appartiene al Nordafrica ed è per lo più arabo e musulmano, e il Sud che fa parte dell’Africa Subsahariana, ed è per la maggior parte nero e cristiano.
o Questa divisione attraversa il continente e scatena regolarmente conflitti dal Chad alla Nigeria alla Costa d’Avorio; in Sudan lo scontro è ancora più esplosivo, 2 milioni di vittime in due guerre dal 1956 e il 2005.
– Nei decenni della guerra civile tra Nord e Sud, il governo ha armato le tribù arabe della regione Nuba contro la minoranza di africani Nuba, molti dei quali hanno combattuto con il Sud.
– Gli arabi si sono prestati a combattere contro i Nuba per prenderne le terre.
– Nel Sud Kordofan sui monti di Nuba, nel centro Sudan, dopo la controversa elezione a governatore del Sud Kordofan del candidato del governo, la tensione tra forze dell’opposizione regionale e quelle del governo centrale di Khartoum è andata crescendo, fino a divenire un conflitto armato.
o Khartoum ha ammassato carri armati, lanciamissili, artiglieria e migliaia di soldati e milizie alleate, in attesa di lanciare una grande offensiva quando cesseranno le piogge se i leader della regione non disarmano.
– I ribelli vogliono l’autonomia: uno Stato laico e democratico, come il Kurdistan, una richiesta simile a quelle di diverse altre regioni del Nord Sudan che hanno scatenato forti scontri armati.
– Il Sud Kordofan non può essere perso: possiede i giacimenti petroliferi più produttivi che rimangono al Nord Sudan, ha inoltre terre fertili, ha minerali e gomma arabica e, confinando con il Sud, può essere usato come base per le milizie armate dal Nord.
– La regione ha una storia di oppressione e di resistenza:
o le popolazioni Nuba, non arabe e in parte cristiane, vennero rese schiave dai vicini secoli fa’, bombardate dai britannici e assoggettate dal Nord.
o Durante la guerra civile nord-sud, decine di migliaia di guerrieri Nuba si sono uniti ai ribelli del Sud; sono questi che ora rifiutano di disarmare e in giugno sono iniziati gli scontri. Migliaia di soldati del Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), l’ala armata dell’SPLM, provendono dai monti Nuba; se riprendono gli scontro molti di essi si sposteranno al nord per combattere Khartoum e le sue milizie.
o Secondo molti testimoni, nella città di Kadugli, la maggiore della regione, le forze armate del Nord e milizie arabe hanno setacciato casa per casa uccidendo civili.
o Centinaia di civili sono stati uccisi dai bombardamenti; l’esercito blocca le strade e impedisce il rifornimento alimentare.
– Nel Sud Sudan, il nuovo governo di Juba, controllato da appartenenti alla tribù Dinka, sta combattendo contro un numero crescente di ribellioni di altre tribù, che si sentono marginalizzate; oltre 1000 le vittime da gennaio a maggio.
– Nel Nord, la secessione del Sud che possiede la maggior parte del petrolio ha fatto aprire nuovi conflitti nel partito al governo sulla tattica da seguire; finora sembra abbiano vinto i duri, mentre progetti agricoli latifondisti e la desertificazione ha sospinto i nomadi arabi poveri verso il sud alla ricerca di pascoli. [N.d.R: Come temuto, i vecchi attriti e i nuovi sviluppi si sono sommati causando nuovi conflitti nel Sud Kordofan, in occasione delle elezioni del 2 maggio. Il candidato del governo di Khartoum è stato uno dei maggiori sostenitori della Jihad contro gli africani dei monti Nuba negli anni 1990.]
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Segue art. in inglese sulle Nuba Mountains, storia, economia, scontri militari, etc.
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
LEWERE, Sudan — Children with shrapnel wounds lie on metal hospital cots. Thousands of others have been huddling in caves and stony riverbeds, fleeing the fighter jets and bombers prowling the skies. Villages are empty, fields unplowed. At the faintest buzz of a plane, people scatter into the bush, in a panic.
“Just lie flat, or you could get killed,” warned Nagwa Musa Konda, the director of a local aid organization, as a plane growled closer.
– Despite an agreement signed only days ago to bring peace to this part of central Sudan, it seems to be sliding inexorably toward war.
– Young men here in the Nuba Mountains are being mobilized into militias, marching into the hills to train. All the cars in this area, including humanitarian vehicles, are smeared with thick mud to camouflage them from what residents describe as unrelenting bombings. And opposition forces vow to press their fight until they win some form of autonomy, undeterred by the government’s push to stamp them out.
– “It’s going to be a long war,” said Ahmed Zakaria, a doctor from the Nuba Mountains who recently quit his job to become an opposition fighter. “We want a secular, democratic state where we can be free to rule ourselves. Like Kurdistan,” Dr. Zakaria said, smiling. “And we will fight for it.”
– The conflict is overshadowing one of the biggest events in Sudan’s history: the independence of the southern part of the country and the creation of two Sudans.
o In just over a week, southern Sudan will officially break off from the north, the capstone of decades of civil war and years of international negotiations to stave off further bloodshed.
– But the fighting in the Nuba Mountains, which sit in the north’s territory, underscores how fractured Sudan will remain even after the south secedes. The same demands being espoused by opposition fighters here have been the kindling for major conflict — and major suffering — in several other corners of northern Sudan, where the government is determined to keep a firm grip across a country of diverse groups clamoring for their rights.
– In the few towns in this vast landscape of terraced mountainsides and thatched-roof villages, the northern government has been amassing tanks, rocket launchers, artillery and thousands of soldiers and allied militiamen, either to pressure Nuba leaders into disarming or to prepare for a major offensive once the rains stop in a few months.
While the hillsides are slick and muddy, the government can do little but bomb, as it admits doing. But government officials say their fight is solely with opposition fighters, not with civilians, contending that widespread reports of civilian casualties are fabrications intended to rally Western nations against Sudan.
“The government is trying to control and take care of the people for peace and security and actually defeat and remove all the traces of rebels from the area,” said Rabie A. Atti, a government spokesman. “We are not against the people,” Mr. Atti added.
– But as the conflicts in the western region of Darfur and southern Sudan long before that have proved, counterinsurgencies often cast a wide net.
– At a small, mountainside hospital here in Lewere, an entire ward is filled with victims who said they were at a well, fetching water, when they were bombed. Most are children. Their whimpers filter through the mesh windows, along with the pungent smells of antiseptic solution and decaying flesh.
Inside, Winnasa Steven, a 16-year-old girl, writhed on a cot. From her hip, doctors cut out a three-inch chunk of ragged shrapnel, which her mother keeps, wrapped in white paper.
Next to her, a toddler cried, his face a map of bandages. Not far away, a little girl sucked down spoonfuls of porridge. Her mother tried not to look at the gaping hole in her leg.
– Tensions had been building steadily in the Nuba Mountains since a disputed election in May. The governing party’s candidate, Ahmed Haroun, who has been indicted on charges of war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court, won the governorship of Southern Kordofan, the state that encompasses the Nuba Mountains, by a margin of 6,500 votes out of a total of 400,000, defeating a popular Nuba leader who used to be a guerrilla fighter.
– The Carter Center endorsed the election, but people say the government fiddled with the tallies because Southern Kordofan was too important to lose. It has the most productive oil fields in the north and borders the south, making it a useful rear base for the militias widely believed to be armed by the north.
– Kordofan also has fertile land, minerals and gum arabic, an ingredient in countless Western products.
– This area has a history of oppression — and resistance.
o The Nuba people were enslaved by their neighbors hundreds of years ago, bombed by the British and subjugated by the north. The people here are not Arab like the northerners, and many are Christian. Tens of thousands of Nuba fighters joined southern rebels during the north-south civil war. It is these southern-allied fighters who are refusing to disarm, and clashes erupted in June.
– In Kadugli, the biggest town in the Nuba Mountains region, many witnesses say the Sudanese Army and allied Arab militias have gone house to house, methodically executing civilians. Kamil Omer El Amin, a Nuba agricultural officer, matter-of-factly described what happened to his friend Philip.
“He drove up to the U.N. compound,” Mr. Amin said. “The intelligence agents told him to get out of the car. He sat down. They shot him in the chest.”
– United Nations officials confirmed the killing, but said the overwhelming number of northern troops rendered them powerless to stop it, even though the shooting happened right outside the United Nations base.
Many Nuba professionals have fled to the opposition-controlled mountaintops.
“We spent two weeks up there, drinking something you can barely call water,” said Caddy Ali, who worked for a project financed by the World Bank.
– Ms. Ali said the agreement signed on Tuesday between southern-allied opposition leaders and the government, which outlined steps for political compromise and a cease-fire, was meaningless.
“We’re never going to forgive them now,” she said. “Do you know how many people I’ve seen die right in front of me?”
– Aid workers said hundreds of civilians had been killed in the bombings. The Sudanese Army is also blockading roads and bombing airstrips, essentially cutting off food supplies. “These people are going to starve,” one Western aid worker said.
On Thursday, some Nuba aid workers stopped their car to pick up some deleib, a wild mushy fruit that looks like a coconut.
“This is what the fighters lived off in the 1990s,” Dr. Zakaria said. It seems some people are preparing to live off it again.
By Alan Boswell / Dilling
Deep in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, by the light of a full moon, I am passed a glass of sugary tea — and the discussion of another civil war in the heart of Africa begins. My two hosts in the town of Dilling are commanders in a government-sponsored Arab paramilitary force that a decade ago carried out Darfur-style atrocities against their African neighbors in the surrounding mountains. For nine years, they have held a ceasefire. But now the coming secession of South Sudan has prompted fears of renewed ethnic conflict.
– The reason? When the line is drawn across Sudan to create two new countries, the Nuba Mountains and the state of South Kordofan in which they lie will remain in the north. That has once again sharpened divisions between Sudan’s Arab rulers, who armed Arab tribes during decades of north-south civil conflict, and the minority Nuba Africans, many of whom fought with the south. My Arab hosts are adamant: no war, ever again. "Nobody wants more fighting," says Ibrahim Yagoub Jabreel. "If the government asked us again, we would refuse." But later, my go-between, Juli Argouf Buda, 71, a Nuba African elder, pulls me aside. "They are not telling the truth," he says. "Most Arabs enjoy being the government’s militias. They want our land. To kill a Nuba, for them, is not a crime." (See photos of Sudan going to the polls.)
– The Nuba Mountains are a jagged fulcrum for a region that has long been delicately balanced between war and peace. To the north is North Africa, mostly Arab, mostly Muslim; to the south, sub-Saharan Africa, mostly African, mostly Christian. That division runs across the continent, along the southern edge of the Sahara, and regularly sparks conflict from Chad to Nigeria to Cote d’Ivoire. But in Sudan, this meeting of worlds has proved the most explosive: around 2 million people died in two wars between north and south that lasted between 1956 and 2005.
– In July, Sudan will split in two after southern Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for independence in January — a key condition of an internationally brokered peace deal sealed in 2005. But instead of ushering in peace, secession could be opening several new fronts of war.
– In the south, the new government in Juba, whose leadership is dominated by the Dinka tribe, is battling an ever-growing number of rebellions rooted in other tribes, who say they suffer marginalization — since January, more than 1,000 people have died in the fighting. (See why the north began to protest after the secession vote.)
– And in the north, the split has also ratcheted up tensions: most of Sudan’s oil lies in the seceding south, and the country’s partition has opened new rifts in the ruling party as to whether its divisive iron-fist tactics are the best way forward. So far, the hardliners seem to be winning. Meanwhile, large-scale agricultural schemes and desertification have pushed the nation’s poor Arab nomads further south for pasture.
– Many expect these new trends and the old local grievances to converge with toxic results around the South Kordofan state elections, scheduled to start on May 2. Those fears are heightened by the fact that the Khartoum government’s candidate for governor is Ahmed Haroun, who was a key mobilizer in the government-declared jihad against Africans in the Nuba Mountains in the 1990s. Haroun’s election rival, Abdulaziz al-Hilu of the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), tells TIME: "The future is very grim." Indeed, recent signs are not encouraging. On April 13, Arab militiamen torched al-Hilu’s home village, killing up to 29 people.
– Outsiders rarely hear about the gathering storm in the Nuba Mountains, and for one good reason: the Sudanese government wants it that way. Refused official permission to travel to the area, I snuck in from Sudan’s south. I found a place of bare boulder mountains, dusty open savannah and poverty: while Khartoum now boasts gleaming steel-and-glass skyscrapers, the Nuba Mountains mud-brick villages have changed little since Africans fleeing Egyptian conquerors first found refuge in these slopes centuries ago. The one modern intrusion: AK-47s, everywhere. (Watch the empowerment of the southern Sudanese as they voted for secession.)
– Theoretically, Nuba’s African tribes have reason for hope. After the May elections, whoever leads the new South Kordofan state government will be mandated to present its demands to the national government in Khartoum — which, for the Africans, would include peace, greater autonomy, and exemption from national Shari’a law.
– But even if the African-backed SPLM wins the poll, Khartoum is unlikely to want to cede more power to other regions after accepting the departure of the south — particularly since South Kordofan is home to the north’s remaining reserves of crude oil. Pessimists foresee a nightmare scenario: renewed full-scale war between north and south.
– Thousands of soldiers in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the armed wing of the SPLM, are from the Nuba Mountains. Should violence escalate in South Kordofan, many of them would expect to travel north to join the fight against Khartoum and its militias. Malaak Ayuen, the SPLA’s head of information, says the south will not send Nuba soldiers into South Kordofan. But at the same time, he warns: "We won’t disarm them."
For Al-Hilu, the SPLM’s candidate for governor, anyone who thinks the Nuba soldiers will accept an extended exile in the new country to the south doesn’t understand how the rugged, moonlit hills resonate in the hearts of those born here. "Anybody who tries to stop them is not a wise person," he says. "They must come back. This is their homeland."
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The Nuba Mountains of Sudan: Resource access, violent conflict, and identity
Since 1987, a violent conflict between the Nuba people of southern Kordofan and government forces supported by indigenous Arab Baggara has been raging in the Nuba Mountains. The armed conflict has brought great misery to the inhabitants of the mountains, especially the Nuba and has had a severe impact on relations between the Nuba and Baggara, who have shared the mountains in uneasy peace and guarded cooperation for the last 200 years. The government persuaded the Baggara to join its crusade against the Nuba by giving them arms and promising them Nuba lands after a quick victory. The Baggara, intoxicated by military power and greed, rejected all calls for peace with the Nuba. The war continued unabated for years. The Baggara lost some of their traditional lands, many people, and animals. Their trade with the Nuba collapsed. Losses forced the Baggara in several areas to negotiate peace with the Nuba. This chapter attempts to explain the complex web of cooperation and conflict that binds the Nuba and the Baggara. It also documents three peace agreements reached between the two warring groups.
The conventional assumption that violent conflicts in Africa emanate from ethnic, religious, or cultural differences is limited and misleading. In the Sudan, scarcity — resulting from denying or limiting access to natural resources and from growing environmental degradation — stands out as probably the most important factor behind conflict among the peoples of the country. However, ethnic, religious, and cultural dichotomies are strong in people’s minds, and the longer a conflict persists, the more these factors come into play. In a prolonged conflict, when the initial causes have faded away, abstract, ideological ethnicity can become a material and social force, and change from consequence to apparent cause of such conflicts.
Ecological degradation can act as a cause or catalyst of violent conflict (Beachler 1993; Homer-Dixon 1994). However, the focus on degradation of the natural resource base tends to limit conflict resolution to tackling its specific causes — land-use, human and animal population growth, and climatic variations. Proposed resolution mechanisms are thus more technical than economic, political, or cultural: better water management, soil conservation, reforestation, family planning, etc. The crucial issues of the economy, the state, politics, and identity are inadvertently pushed aside. Persistent inequity in resource allocation, which is inherently political and economic, and the role of the beneficiaries and perpetrators of the status quo are thus taken out of the limelight. However, in all the group conflicts we scrutinized in the Sudan, access to natural and social resources expressed in terms of justice, fairness, equitable sharing, and equal development, was the primary concern of the people in arms.
In the Sudan, as in most other parts of the continent, human and animal life depends on the delicate balance of soil, climate, water, and flora. Since the mid-1970s this equilibrium has been upset, particularly in the vast arid and semi-arid areas of the northern half of the country. Not only the persistent drought, but also the unsustainable methods of land use, such as large-scale mechanized rain-fed farming and overgrazing in marginal lands, are destroying the Sudano-Sahelian ecozone, where 70% of the population lives. Millions of people have been forced to abandon their homelands and have become displaced; so many in fact that the Sudan has the highest proportion of internally displaced people in the world — one in every six.
The slow processes of natural wear and tear on the environment have been accelerated enormously by the unprecedented exploitation of natural resources. This is being carried out by members of the northern Sudanese traditional merchant class (the Jellaba), prompted by their integration into the world market in the restricted role of extractors of primary resources. In addition, loan conditions imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have considerably boosted the restructuring of Sudan’s resource use away from local needs and the local market toward the demands of the international market (Suliman 1993).
This situation has been compounded by a steady decline in international terms of trade, brought about by the collapse of primary commodity prices, which had an effect on the local market, where terms of trade have also worsened. To maintain their living standards, peasants and pastoralists have had to produce more from a shrinking resource base. If they fail to do this, they have no option but to join the millions of dispossessed and assetless poor.
In the past, those in distress simply moved to a richer ecozone nearby. However, this option is increasingly hampered by an expanding population, large-scale mechanized farming, political and ethnic tensions, and the general worsening of the environmental situation. As central-government control of law and order in the countryside is weakened, physical security is becoming increasingly important in the decisions of people to abandon their homelands and move to urban centres where food is in greater abundance and physical security is relatively better maintained.
The movement of people and herds from one affected ecozone to another that is already occupied by a different ethnic group is a recipe for tension and hostility. Conditional agreements used to be reached when the need for sharing land was occasional, but now that this need is for prolonged periods (or even for permanent sharing), the strain is much greater. These difficulties are particularly prevalent in the south and in the drought-stricken areas of Darfur and Kordofan. They are one of the causes of the armed conflict raging in the Nuba Mountains of southern Kordofan (Suliman and Osman 1994).
The Nuba Mountains lie in southern Kordofan, covering an area of 50 000 km2 almost exactly in the geographic centre of the Sudan (Figure 1). The Nuba hills rise sharply to some 500 to 1 000 m above the plains. The area is classed as a subhumid region. The rainy season extends from mid-May to mid-October, and annual rainfall ranges from 400 to 800 mm, allowing grazing and seasonal rain-fed agriculture.
The term “Nuba” is often used to refer to the inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains; they number 1.5 million. The various Nuba people make up some 90% of the population of the area. The other 10% are Baggara (cattle herders) — mainly Hawazma and Misiriya Arabs. The Baggara moved into the mountains from the west and north in about 1800. There is also a smaller minority of Arab traders, the so-called Jellaba.
The term “Nuba” refers to “a bewildering complexity” of ethnic groups (Nadel 1947). Stevenson (1984) identified more than 50 languages and dialect clusters, falling into 10 groups.1 Many authors have argued that the term “Nuba” was originally an alien label used to group together all peoples living in the hills area who were seen as “black Africans,” as opposed to the Baggara Arabs (Nadel 1947; Baumann 1987). When the Nuba use the term to describe themselves, it has is not always consistently applied. Nadel (1947) commented that
The people of a certain tribe will describe all similar groups of which they know or with which they come in contact as being their “race” but would be uncertain into which category to place other groups outside their kin … . In the opinion of a Korongo man all the surrounding tribes were Nuba, but not the people of Dilling, whom he believed to be Arab.
Despite the problem involved in using the term, one can reasonably assume that the ethnic type presented by the Nuba today was widespread in the Sudan but was forced to retreat by Arabs coming into the mountains, where they found adequate water and easy defence. As MacMichel (1912) wrote,
In the earliest days and for thousands of subsequent years the ancestors of the Nuba probably held the greater part of this country (i.e., what is now known as Kordofan) except the northern-most deserts. Beaten back by other races that ruled the Nile banks in successive generations, by tribes from the interior, and finally by the nomad Arabs, the Nuba have now retired to the mountains of southern Kordofan.
In spite of the previous difficulty in using the term Nuba for all non-Arab inhabitants of the mountains, successive calamities have imposed a common destiny on these peoples and have been conducive to the development of a loose unity and a growing feeling of a common “Nubaness” among them. Their common historical experiences — the slave raids, the Turkish and British invasions, and Jellaba domination — as well as the existence of something akin to a common Nuba culture, permit commentators now to speak of one Nuba people.
This classification is also justified by the identification of the Nuba by others and the consequent implications of this identification on individual Nuba in relation to non-Nuba and among themselves. Thus, in a sense, a common ethnicity has been forced on these diverse peoples by the actions and definitions of other more powerful groups. The Nuba identity is, therefore, subjectively defined in contrast to the Baggara Arabs of Kordofan and Darfur regions (what the Nuba are not) and objectively determined by shared space, comparable cultural values, and similar economic activities (what the Nuba are).
Because they have no written language, the distant history of the Nuba peoples has largely been forgotten. As Nadel (1947) noted,
The traditions and memories of the peoples themselves yield sparse information. It often seems as if historical traditions had been cut short by the overpowering experience of the Mahdist regime (1881–1898).
Of all Nuba peoples, those of Tegali have the best historical records because of the strong links they had with the Funj Kingdom of Sennar. The more recent history of the Nuba goes back to the early 16th century, at the point when large groups of Juhaina pastoral tribes began to move southwestward into the plains of northern Kordofan, ultimately confining the Nuba to the region now known as the Nuba Mountains. This great movement coincided with the establishment of the Kingdom of Sennar by Umara Dungas around 1504.
In spite of the lack of certainty about the Nuba’s distant past, most authors seem content to assume that the Nuba have lived in the area they now occupy for a very long time. Some of Nadel’s (1947) informants seem to attest to this. When asked about previous places of settlement, the people replied, “We have always lived here.” It is also possible to assume that during most of their recent history, the Nuba have been farmers living mainly on the plains.
In about 1800, the Baggara tribes, which had previously roamed the plains of Kordofan and Darfur, began to move into the valleys of the Nuba Mountains in search of water and pasture for their growing herds. The Baggara are said to have divided the plains among themselves and driven the Nuba uphill. A large part of the Nuba area fell to the Hawazma (a Baggara tribe). The advent of the Baggara in the mountains coincided with the beginning of slave raiding. The fact that Nuba people were sturdy soldiers worked in a curious way to their disadvantage, because it encouraged continuous attacks from slave raiders who were looking for potential soldiers.
Driven into the hills, the Nuba turned to terrace farming of the relatively barren hill soil. Gradually barter-trade relations began to unite the two communities in a strong reciprocal, albeit asymmetric, relationship. Sargar (1922) mentions relations of cooperation, which stretch across the Nuba–Baggara divide: “Each sub-tribe of Baggara protected, as far as possible, the hills of its own zone, in return for supplies of grain and slaves.”
These local Baggara–Nuba relations frequently created inter-Baggara rivalries, when a Baggara subtribe defended “their” Nuba from the machinations of another Baggara group. In some areas, Baggara–Nuba relations were even closer than the protection agreements indicated: some Baggara assuming titles and positions in Nuba tribes. Intermarriages were also recorded (Suleiman 1993). However, the extent and limits of these cross-cutting ties varied greatly from one area to another.
These sporadic good relations should not obscure the fact that the most prominent feature of Baggara–Nuba relations was the slave raids by the Baggara on the harassed Nuba communities. These raids were especially widespread during the Turkish rule (the Turkiyya), which began with the conquest of the Sudan by Egypt in 1821. The Turkish governors of Kordofan led many expeditions into the Nuba Mountains in search of gold and slaves but never made serious attempts to govern the area directly. As Stevenson (1984) noted, “With this strange mixture of trade and enslavement, the Nuba people continued through, and endured the Turkiyya.”
The rise of the Mahdist movement in the 1880s brought fresh trouble to the peoples of the mountains. Some supported the Mahdi (a person believed to be the one who would lead Muslims to salvation); others resisted him. This difference in attitude toward the Mahdi was to be characteristic of Nuba relations with central governments in the future, dividing them into rebellious and government-friendly Nuba. After the death of the Mahdi, his successor, Khalifa Abullahi, sent a force under Hamdan abu Anja and al-Nur Muhammed Anqara to subdue the Nuba. More than 10 000 Nuba perished and even more were enslaved.
Brutal harassment of the Nuba people continued after the defeat of the Mahdist state by the allied forces of Egypt and Britain at the battle of Omdourman in 1898. In spite of their devastating experience during the Mahdiyya, the Nuba did not welcome the new colonial administration. As Stevenson (1984) remarked, “Hills which had managed to beat off the Mahdists at different times thought themselves impregnable to attack, notably Dair, Nyimang, Katla, Fanda and parts of Koalib.” It took almost 30 years to subdue the various Nuba peoples and bring them in line with the rest of the country. With state authority at last established in all the Nuba Mountains, intercommunal raiding was minimized and community leaders were empowered by state appointment. “Friendly” Nuba were recruited to pacify Nuba rebels.
During this period of peace, many Nuba began to come down from the protection of the hills to farm and even live in the plains. This natural adaptation to peaceful times was supported by the desire of the central government to bring the Nuba down to the accessible plains for the purpose of effective administration and control by the state, which grew weary of the stubborn resistance of the Nuba to the new regime in Khartoum.
The new regime brought about far-reaching changes in the Nuba Mountains over a relatively short period, which transformed, in many respects irreversibly, the way the Nuba lived. One such change was the introduction of modern agricultural practices, with cotton as a cash crop. The success of large-scale mechanized production of cotton brought the mountains to the attention of international companies and, subsequently, to the attention of the Sudanese Jellaba. Another major change was the introduction of modern school education, although the Nuba had to wait until 1940 before the government introduced large-scale modern schooling into their area. The emergence of an educated Nuba elite was to have far greater implications for the subsequent history of the Nuba people than any single event or process. Education would later emerge as one of the strongest unifying factors, a pillar on which to build the edifice of a unified Nuba people.
Independence, established in 1956, accelerated the opening up of the mountains to all the winds of change and catalyzed movement of the Nuba people toward the urban centres of the Sudan and foreign countries. The Nuba Mountains were also now open to economic and social intrusion by national and international agents of trade and politics and to cultural exchange. Going out to meet the world meant coming home to understand one’s own identity. Many Nuba discovered their Nubaness in the towns of the Sudan, where their cultural diversity was reduced to a single Nuba identity.
The Nuba practice a range of productive activities, including animal husbandry, hunting, and foraging; however, agriculture is the mainstay of their economy. It is fairly widespread throughout Nuba communities and is certainly one of the elements that distinguish the Nuba from some of their neighbours.
The basic farming unit is generally the nuclear family. Its members farm land that is, according to tradition, individually or family owned. Farmland is divided into three basic types based on its location: house, hillside, and far farms. These usually determine the choice of the crops grown and the family members responsible for their care. House farms are generally within a village, are used to grow a variety of early maturing crops (maize, bulrush, and millet), and are the responsibility of the women. Hillside farms (terraced plots on the hillside) are planted with later maturing grains. Far farms are situated on the clay plains that have been used by the Nuba since “pacification” of the area under Anglo-Egyptian rule and are worked traditionally by men. Land holdings are thus fragmented. This means that a large amount of time is spent traveling between home and the various plots, and the use of modern agricultural machinery is impractical for any one farm. The advantage is that the spread of plots tends to spread the risk of all crops failing in any one year.
The Nuba practice a form of shifting agriculture. Land is planted with a selection of crops and farmed until a new plot is needed. As a result, the regular demand for new land is an integral part of the farming system. This demand and the need to allow used land to regenerate is upheld in the traditional Nuba land laws. In any given area, the Nuba recognize three types of land: individually owned land, vacant land that is recognized as being communally owned by a village or hill community, and vacant land that does not belong to anyone. Any, usually male, member of a village community has the right of access to communal lands. All he or she has to do is to clear and cultivate the land to make it his or her own.
The patterns in Nuba agricultural production reveal several risk-spreading factors. For example, a range of crops grown on a range of plots relieves the land from the pressures of monoculture. Harvesting times are staggered to allow for lean times. Families try to produce a range of crops to cover most of their subsistence needs. Leaving large tracts of land unused gives herders room for grazing without interfering with crop production. However, now that the practice of large-scale mechanized farming is spreading, this integrated system is being eroded. The ability of Nuba farmers to respond to erratic rainfall and climate change has been severely limited by the expansion of mechanized farming. As is the case in many areas in the Sudan where mechanized farming has displaced traditional farming, the mere subsistence of millions of people is severely affected.
Current Nuba society is an excellent example of what Chevalier and Buckles (this volume) call a heterocultural society. The Nuba have never been a monocultural group. They are generally aware of the common destiny and other values that unite them, but they are also conscious of differences among them. After 200 years of sharing the mountains with the Nuba, the Baggara exhibit similar heterocultural features. This intragroup diversity has arisen out of Baggara–Nuba interdependence and the relative isolation of the two groups in their fairly secluded hill clusters. Nuba and Baggara cultures have permeated each other. However politically improper it may sound today, every Baggara embodies dynamic elements of Nuba culture and vice versa. Nuba–Baggara relations, be they cooperative or conflictual, have been instrumental in shaping their heterocultural societies; because these relations are in constant flux, Nubaness and “Baggaraness” are dynamic identities, impossible to solidify in monocultural or multicultural casts. War in such a society is particularly tragic, because it cuts deep wounds where the two groups have intermingled, amalgamated, and enriched each other.
In the past, problems arising from land and water disputes were resolved at an annual conference of Nuba Mekks and Arab Sheikhs. These meetings usually took place on neutral ground, both sides abided by the agreements reached, and the Nuba Mountains enjoyed decades of peace and relative prosperity. Recently, however, forces have conspired to bring the two groups into direct violent conflict. The major causes of the armed conflict are
* Allocation of the best lands to absentee Jellaba landlords; and
* The drought, which has brought large numbers of Baggara and their animals to the mountains.
The single most important issue behind the outbreak of the conflict in the Nuba Mountains is the encroachment of mechanized agriculture in an area of Nuba smallholder farming. This devastated the economic and social life of the Nuba and ultimately destroyed friendly relations with the Baggara.
In 1968, the Mechanized Farming Corporation, which was established with credit from the World Bank, supervised the introduction of large-scale mechanized farming at Habila, between Dilling and Delami. Of 200 mechanized farms supported by the State Agricultural Bank in the Habila area, 4 were local cooperatives, 1 was leased to a group of Habila merchants, 4 were leased to individual local merchants, and the rest (191) were leased to absentee Jellaba landlords, mainly merchants, government officials, and retired generals from the north (Suleiman 1993). A community leader from Korongo Abdalla told African Rights (1995) that
Land is a big problem. At Abu Shanab, the local people prepared the land, but the government brought its tractors and began to prepare cultivation. We asked them to go to another side. They refused.
Two witnesses from Delami described the spread of mechanized farming: “The merchants came with tractors and ploughed right on top of people’s cultivation. They could do this, because anyone who objected will be arrested” (African Rights 1995). A leading Nuba civil servant (who must remain anonymous) provided me with the following testimony:
The mechanized farming problem has two ways of taking our land: the government planned mechanized farming schemes which are given from Khartoum, from the Ministry of Agriculture and regardless of the reality of the area, land is just allotted to certain people, who are mainly retired army generals or civil servants, or wealthy merchants from northern Sudan, or to local Jellaba who have been living in the area for a long time and here accumulated wealth. They have links with Khartoum and the central Sudanese government, because they originally come from the north. These people acquire land and then go and tell their relatives that they too can acquire land through the ministry. They join forces together and acquire more land.
Because the Nuba are not wealthy only a small number of them are involved in this distribution of land. The government just demarcates land regardless of the realities of the area. They do not care if there are villages in this land or not. In the area of Habila, mechanized farms have circled many villages. There is no more land for the Nuba, no land for farming and no land for the animals to graze … . The Nuba are squeezed and have to choose between two options: either leave the area to work for the government as soldiers, or become workers in a mechanized farming scheme. This phenomenon is becoming massive.
Besides the planned mechanized farms, there is the unplanned land acquisition. Here you have somebody who is powerful and wealthy, who just comes in and cleans up a piece of land, which is actually owned by the community. But because he is powerful he just cleans it and brings in his tractors and his workers and begins to farm. And then, if any resistance happens, he will go to the authorities to protest and ask them to protect him. Because he can bribe the authorities, he can pay and do whatever he likes. Otherwise, he has a politician friend, or an army officer, who is powerful and can send an order down here, so his friend can get the land. There are also other ways of getting land, for example burning down a village and forcing its inhabitants to move on.
You can find no intention of keeping some of the land for the Nuba. The land is either taken by the Arab nomads for grazing, or taken by the wealthy landlords who come from the North. What remains for the Nuba is to fight back against these things. The Nuba have to find a way to protect themselves. They have already started to build their own political organizations or activate old ones.
Since 1967 rainfall in western Sudan has been less than half the annual average. As a result, Arab nomads, not local to the area, are seeking long-term or permanent shelter in the wet hills. Coupled with large increases in human and livestock populations, the persistent drought is a major cause of tensions.
The Jellaba mechanized farmers and the Baggara pastoralists have forged a temporary alliance to dislodge the indigenous people and take over their land. It remains to be seen whether this “marriage of convenience” can endure the conflicting interests of its partners, all seeking to eat the same cake. There are already signs that the powerful Jellaba will use the Baggara to secure their objectives, then deny them access to the best lands.
The scissors effect created by the drought and the incursion of mechanized farming alerted the Nuba people to the possibility of being squeezed out of their best farming lands. Thus, when civil war broke out in the south in 1983, the Nuba were generally sympathetic with the proclaimed aims of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and individual Nuba even moved into liberated areas and joined the movement.
The SPLA made its first incursion into the Nuba Mountains in July 1985. In response, the government began to arm the Baggara as a militia. African Rights (1995) reported that
[It is] one of the deepest tragedies that the Baggara Arabs, who have implemented so much of the government’s policies against the Nuba, are themselves an impoverished and marginalised group in the Sudan.
Almost at the same time (June–July 1985), the Khartoum government decided to arm the Baggara, namely the Misiriya Zurug and Humur. This mission was entrusted to the then minister of defence, Fadllala Burma Nasir, who was a Misiriya Zurug. He created the Misiriya militia, known as the Murahaliin, which spread terror throughout the mountains.
Although the Murahaliin militia had been created as a progovernment force against the SPLA, the Baggara groups had their own agenda. They immediately began raiding Nuba communities, increasing Nuba distrust of the Baggara, the central government, and the Arab north as a whole. The mistrust was reflected in substantial support for the Sudan National Party, a Nuba party headed by the Reverend Philip Ghaboush. As the government became aware of this change in the Nuba political situation it began to replace Nuba administrative and security officials with non-Nuba people, mostly Arabs.
In 1985, a Nuba militia group attacked the Baggara in the El Gerdud region. Rumour had it that the Nuba leader, Yusuf Kuwa, led the attack. The rumour was false, but Baggara girls lamented the breakdown of traditional friendship between the Nuba and the Baggara, singing “Yusuf Kuwa has forsaken our brotherhood and entered el Gerdud by force.” A marked escalation of the war occurred in 1989, when an SPLA unit (the New Kush Battalion, headed by Commander Yusuf Kuwa Mekke) entered the region to establish a base in the eastern part of the Nuba Mountains and take the guerrilla war into Kordofan. The SPLA quickly occupied the area around Talodi and began recruiting Nuba youths.
The response of the ruling Umma government to the turbulence in the mountains was highly irresponsible. Without authorization from the Constituent Assembly, it reorganized the Misiriya militia as a paramilitary force, the Popular Defence Force (PDF) and coordinated its actions with the army. By 1988, systematic killing of Nuba civilians by the army, the military intelligence, and the PDF had begun. This pattern of violence — elimination by attrition — became well established in the following years, which saw the SPLA advance close to Kadugli, the administrative centre of the Nuba Mountains.
The new regime of the National Islamic Front (NIF) offered no respite to the Nuba. In October 1989, it passed the Popular Defence Act, which had not been formally promulgated by the previous government. In effect the new Islamic regime had legitimized the Murahaliin militia. Africa Watch (1992) documented an upsurge in violence against Nuba civilians by the army and the military intelligence, the main targets of which seemed to be young educated Nuba men. Some Nuba believe that the army had drawn up lists of all educated people, whom it planned to kill.
In 1992, massive human rights violations against the Nuba were recorded. The Kordofan state government declared Jihad or holy war to implement a “final solution” to the “Nuba problem.” A fatwa (an authoritative ruling on a religious matter) was issued in 1993 by a group of Muslim leaders supporting the Jihad. In its report, “Eradicating the Nuba,” Africa Watch described a litany of killings, destruction of villages, and forced removals of Nuba people (Africa Watch 1992). In addition to the burning of villages and the disappearance of civilians, a large-scale plan of forcible relocation began to be implemented. Tens of thousands of Nuba are now scattered in small camps all over northern Kordofan. Many other thousands were taken hundreds of miles from home and abandoned. The scale of the killings and relocations reached the level of genocide.
In October 1993, First Lieutenant Khalid Abdel Karim Salih, who was in charge of security in Kordofan and was a personal bodyguard to the Governor of Kordofan (who is also his brother) from May 1992 to February 1993, made a statement in a press conference in Bern, Switzerland. He announced that, during a 7-month period, the army and the PDF had killed 60 000–70 000 Nuba. He stressed that these ethnic-cleansing operations made no distinction between Muslims and Christians. Churches and mosques, missionary centres and Quranic schools were all shelled indiscriminately.
Since its inception in 1956 Sudan has been a Jellaba state; thus, government troops have always been fighting Jellaba wars by proxy. Earlier attempts at conflict resolution in the south and west focused almost entirely on sharing political power, often maintaining the economic status quo — a state of affairs most welcome to its beneficiaries, the Jellaba elite.
Given the complex relations between the Nuba, the Jellaba, and the Baggara, two independent approaches to conflict management and resolution can be proposed. First, the only way to resolve the relationship between the Nuba and the Jellaba is to stop the incursion of large-scale mechanized farming into the Nuba Mountains and return all stolen lands to their original owners, the Nuba. Second, in terms of the relationship between the Nuba and Baggara, there is a need for some sort of a temporary and equitable sharing of the available resources, mainly land and water. This should not be difficult, as the two groups have had working agreements in the past that have secured an uneasy peace in the mountains for almost 200 years. Cooperation is in the long-term interests of both groups.
Peace agreements between the Nuba and the Arabs
Since 1993 several peace agreements have been reached between the Nuba and the Baggara: the Buram agreement (1993), the Regifi agreement (1995), and the Kain agreement (1996). A precarious peace is still holding. During negotiations, several reasons were cited for the necessity of establishing peace — notable among these are the following:
* The Baggara lamented that they have lost many men and animals and some were forced to abandon their homes;
* The Baggara admitted that the government deceived them (it told them that the war against the rebels would only take a month or two, whereas it is now more than 10 years old);
* The Baggara said that they need trade with the Nuba (they want to trade their consumer goods for cereals grown by Nuba peasants);
* The Baggara told the Nuba that their politicians (for example, El-Mahdi, the leader of the Umma party) have already left the Sudan and are working with the SPLM against the NIF regime;
* The Nuba emphasized the fact that they are fighting against the government, never against the Baggara; and
* The Nuba said that they also need to trade with the Baggara (they especially need to exchange cereals and animals for clothes, salt, and other industrial goods that the Baggara bring from Khartoum).
* They had been living together in peace for 200 years;
* They intermingled through marriage and sharing of cultural and religious values;
* Most of the Nuba and the Baggara fighters have been poor;
* Outsiders, mainly rich Jellaba, seem to be the only beneficiaries of the war;
* Both sides have lost many people and animals for no good reason; and
* The outsiders come and go, but the people indigenous to the mountains will stay and have to find ways to live together in peace.
Nuba leaders are well aware of the need to win over the Baggara in the war against the government. In March 1989, Commander Yusuf Kuwa entered the mountains with six well-armed battalions. In an interview, he indicated that he was aware that the Baggara were assembled at Lake Abiad, and that his troops intentionally avoided them. However, the Baggara followed their trail and attacked the Nuba at Hafir Nigeria, unaware of how strong the Nuba fighting force was. The Baggara suffered huge losses and many were taken prisoner. A few days later, all prisoners were freed and given letters from Yusuf Kuwa to their sheihks asking them to either join the struggle or refrain from siding with the government. He recalled the case of a Baggara trader called Abdulla who carried his message to Baggara sheihks that the SPLA is not at war with them.
Several Baggara groups responded positively (including Sheikh Sanad). They kept open the dialogue with the Nuba leadership through letters and emissaries. The farsighted decisions of the Nuba leadership not to retaliate, to refrain from attacks of revenge, and to seek talks with the Baggara have at last yielded good results. Even so, it took 6 years, from 1987 to 1993, for the first peace agreement between the Baggara and the Nuba to materialize.
The first peace negotiations between the Baggara and the Nuba took place in February 1993 in Buram in the southern Nuba Mountains. The initiative came from the Misiriya in response to written appeals from Yusuf Kuwa. This agreement spelled out conditions and commitments for peace that have been echoed in all future agreements:
* Both sides will immediately stop all military actions against each other;
* Both sides have the right to move freely in the other’s territory;
* In case of dispute or violation of the peace, a joint committee will intervene to settle the matter;
* All animals stolen will be returned, and the thieves will be punished;
* Killings will be investigated, and those responsible will be punished;
* Trade will be safeguarded;
* Information, especially of military relevance, will be exchanged; and
* Travelers to either side will have safe passage and, when necessary, will be assisted to reach their destination.
This peace agreement opened up a trade route into Buram and adjacent areas. The Misiriya traders brought in essential goods, such as salt, matches, clothes, and medicine, and the Buram trade flourished until the end of 1993 when government troops overran Nuba positions in the area and stopped it. Although sporadic trade still goes on and an uneasy peace still holds in the area, the government has succeeded in weakening the accord that began so well. Disheartened, a group of Nuba rebels joined the government and were used by its security forces to attack the Baggara and rekindle the feuds between them and the SPLA. However, it is also important to note that a number of Baggara fought with the Nuba troops against the government in Buram and continue to honour their agreement with the Nuba rebels.
The Buram agreement gained a new lease on life in the 11-point Regifi accord signed on 15 November 1995, which reiterated pervious commitments to peaceful cooperation and mutual assistance. The Baggara delegation was keen to distance itself from the Khartoum government. Again, they told of their great losses in men, animals, and trade. Both sides agreed that peace is crucial for their existence in the precarious situation in the mountains.
The government did a