New Wave of 'Lost Boys' Flee Sudan's Lingering War
By
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/jeffrey_gettle
man/index.html> JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: July 02, 2012
YIDA, South Sudan - Thousands of unaccompanied children are streaming out of
an isolated, rebellious region of
<
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/su
dan/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> Sudan, fleeing a relentless aerial assault
and the prospect of famine.
Sent by their parents on harrowing odysseys across battlefields and
malaria-infested swamps, the children are repeating one of the most sordid
chapters of Sudanese history: the perilous flight of the so-called Lost Boys
during the civil war in the 1990s, who wandered hundreds of miles dodging
militias, bombers and lions.
Now, a new generation of Lost Boys, and some Lost Girls, too, is emerging
from a war that, despite a peace agreement, has never completely ended.
Haidar Musa, 14, recently trudged into the muddy, mushrooming refugee camp
here in Yida, which is growing by 1,000 people a day, turning a lush green
jungle into a squalid sea of white United Nations tarps. With him were eight
other boys with shredded clothes and bellies full of grass, their only
sustenance for several days.
They stood barefoot in the dirt, eagerly watching an enormous vat of beans
come to a boil, ready for a real meal and a new home: a crushed cardboard
box to sleep on, in a rat-infested hut.
"We don't talk about our parents anymore," Haidar said, fumbling with the
broken buttons of a donated shirt. "Even if we go back, we won't find
anybody."
John Prendergast, co-founder of the <
http://www.enoughproject.org/> Enough
Project, which fights to end genocide and crimes against humanity, worked
closely with the Lost Boys 20 years ago. "Those survivors seemed to have a
one-time story, never to be repeated," he said. "But here we are again."
Sudan, perhaps more than any other country in this region, seems to have a
destructive capacity to sink back to the worst days of its past.
So many other African nations have plunged into civil war but eventually
pulled themselves out. Even
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/world/africa/somalis-embrace-hope-and-rec
onstruction-in-mogadishu.html> bullet-riddled Somalia is finally shaking off
chaos. But the Sudanese have essentially been at war with themselves for 56
years, with few respites. Today, this war grinds on in many of the same old
places, in many of the same old ways.
A hallmark of the Sudanese government's counterinsurgency strategy is an
unsparing assault on civilians, unleashed in the south in the 1980s, the
Nuba Mountains in the 1990s and Darfur in the early 2000s.
Now, it is the Nuba Mountains again, where bombing by the Sudanese air force
has forced entire villages to retreat to mountaintop caves, leaving fields
unplowed, markets empty and people on the brink of starvation.
The bloodshed in Nuba is directed by some of the same officials responsible
for previous massacres, like President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in power since
1989, and Ahmed Haroun, governor of the state that encompasses the Nuba
Mountains. Both
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/12/world/africa/12hague.html> are wanted by
the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity for
the bloodshed in Darfur, and Mr. Bashir has also been charged with genocide.
The current offensive seems to be putting Nuban children square in the cross
hairs, and often there is nowhere to run.
A caretaker in the Yida camp said 14 boys trying to get here were gunned
down at a Sudanese Army checkpoint. Bomb shrapnel has sliced apart countless
others. Disease is sweeping the countryside, and many infants who make it to
Yida on their mothers' backs are so skinny and sick that they are
immediately treated in a field hospital with feeding tubes up their noses.
Since even before independence in 1956, Sudan has been dogged by
center-periphery tensions often expressed in exploding shells. Just as the
central government has a tradition of brutality, minority groups in the
hinterland have a tradition of heavily armed insurrection.
Today, tens of thousands of Nuban soldiers, equipped with artillery, rockets
and tanks, are refusing to disarm until the government falls in Khartoum,
Sudan's capital, saying that they have been marginalized and oppressed,
partly because many Nubans are non-Arab and Christian, while the Khartoum
government is dominated by Arab Muslims.
The <
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/world/africa/10sudan.html> newly
independent nation of South Sudan, which split off from Sudan last year, is
suspected of funneling weapons to the Nuban rebels, who operate just north
of the border and fought alongside the southern Sudanese for years. Sudan
and South Sudan have nearly gone to war in recent months, after hitting an
impasse over how to share oil profits and demarcate the border.
The economies of both countries are reeling, with riots breaking out across
Sudan this past week, testing Mr. Bashir's grip on power and encouraging the
Nuban rebels to fight on. No one sees this war letting up anytime soon.
In Yida, about 20 miles south of the border with Sudan, daybreak is heralded
by the crack of axes splitting wood. Trees are being chopped down. Roads are
being cleared. The camp is becoming permanent.
United Nations officials are desperate to stop this, saying the camp is too
close to a military zone, the disputed border. Yida itself has been bombed.
Camp officials are refusing to build schools or hand out seeds, telling the
approximately 60,000 refugees to move south. But the refugees are not
budging, saying the soil is bad farther south.
"Our position is not ambiguous," said Teresa Ongaro of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees. "We have serious safety concerns about the
refugees staying in Yida."
The camp seems to be doubling as a rebel base. Recently, not far from where
Haidar and the other boys live, Nuban rebels carrying machine guns loaded up
a truck with barrels of fuel and then covered their cargo with a white
United Nations tarp.
The Nubans are a paradox. They are celebrated for their old-school ways,
like scarification and heroic wrestling, yet at the same time yearn for a
modern education. Many children said their parents sent them away because
most schools had closed in the Nuba Mountains when the bombing started. The
hope was that they could learn in Yida.
Other children said they were separated from their families during the
innumerable ground attacks and shelling sprees of the past year.
Often the packs of children, some as young as 7, were led by a teacher or
rebel fighter through the stony Nuba hills to Yida, a hellish journey that
usually takes about 10 days on foot.
Haidar's hut, number 60 in the children's camp, is shared with three other
boys. None have a mosquito net, though malaria is rampant and often deadly.
One of his hutmates, Jazooli, has no idea where his parents are.
Another, Mohamed, said his mother and father abandoned him.
Haidar was a slave, having been kidnapped by Arab horsemen when he was 6,
along with his brother, and pressed into bondage herding goats. Slavery was
an acute problem during the north-south civil war and seems to be on the
rise again. The kidnappers recently shot Haidar's brother, he said. Haidar
fled, finding other boys along the way and essentially giving up on his
parents.
"I don't remember what my parents look like," he whispered.
The volunteer camp leaders are exasperated. They are trying to keep the camp
clean, ordering the kids to sweep the ground with twigs and scour the pots
with sand.
"But unless the war ends, it's going to be very hard," said Ahmed Mamoun, a
caretaker. "I don't see how these children will find their parents."
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