JUBILEE ACTION

For immediate release 3rd October, 2002

BOMBING OF SOUTH SUDAN CONTINUES DESPITE PEACE TALKS

The independent cross-bench peer, Lord Alton of Liverpool has produced a first-hand report following a humanitarian trip to Southern Sudan with the human rights charity Jubilee Action. The report reveals that even during the much publicised Machakos peace negotiations between the Islamic government of the north and the SPLA of the South, schools, villages and civilian installations were continuing to be bombed by the Sudanese government.

Last week, Lord Alton of Liverpool and Mark Rowland of Jubilee Action visited Southern Sudan to see first hand the evidence of a war that has rumbled on for 19 years, leaving 2 million dead and 4 million internally displaced. Jubilee’s delegation visited the diocese of Torit – an area that has been inaccessible for much of the western press – and witnessed the reality of bombed out clinics, shattered buildings and unexploded munitions.

Lord Alton’s report highlighted the experience of Auxillary Bishop of Torit, Bishop Akio Johnson, who himself has had nine attempts on his life. He testified that some areas of the mainly Christian and animist South are facing daily bombardments in villages such as Hiyala and Tirangore which are exacting a terrible toll in lives. In three raids on Ikotos, on the 26th and 29th June and 12th July, 72 bombs were dropped on the town, razing much of it the ground.

The report also highlighted the marked affect the war has had on the children of Southern Sudan. In a visit to a school in Narus, Lord Alton met traumatised children who had even learnt to differentiate the sound of the UN’s relief planes from the much-feared Sudanese bombers.

Lord Alton of Liverpool said, ‘The West would like to forget it, but we are intimately involved in the conflict in Sudan. This is a client war whose roots lie in the same conflict that led to the carnage of New York’s twin towers. Far from being contained, the conflict is having a dangerous ripple effect throughout the region. The international community must continue to engage constructively in finding a path to peace. As the world ponders going to war with Iraq, we should remember the lessons from Sudan that wars are easier to start than to finish.’

On Monday 7th of October, Lord Alton and Baroness Cox will be leading a special debate in the House of Lords where the evidence from this latest investigation will be presented.

Lord Alton’s report, below, will be printed in the Tablet on the week commencing 7th October.

Jubilee Action supports and initiates projects world-wide that protect vulnerable children combat poverty and provide aid for Christians suffering persecution for their faith.

For more information, please contact Wilfred Wong on 0207 219 5129 Jubilee Action Head Office at St Johns, Cranleigh Rd, Guildford GU5 0QX Tel 01483 894 787 Fax 01483 894 797 Art.alton.2909emrww

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THE TABLET Oct 7, 2002

A murderous kind of peace David Alton

ON 20 July the Islamic Government of the Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLA) signed the Machakos Protocol establishing terms for a peace agreement. That would bring a long-awaited settlement to this civil war that has raged for almost 20 years, at the cost of two million lives and four million people displaced.

The protocol tackled the conflict’s two major issues. Self-determination for southern Sudan, the SPLA’s principal objective, would be subject to a referendum with the option of secession. If a six-year breathing space failed to result in reconciliation between the north and south, southern Sudan could secede.

Secondly, the mainly Christian and animist south would be exempt from Islamic sharia law, which they have long resisted, during the six-year interim. Machakos is silent on what would then happen to the two million southerners who live in Khartoum and its hinterland and in Christian areas such as the Nuba Mountains (which remains north of the prospective border).

The agreement suffers from the usual problem of ambiguity: both sides seem to interpret it differently, with the north’s supporters still stating that autonomy within a federal structure is as far as they will go.

The SPLA, for its part, sees the agreement as paving the way for an independent state. In any event, the ink on this settlement was barely dry before the talks collapsed amid acrimonious recriminations.

The Government then threatened to accelerate its military campaign against the south, and the bombing has indeed been resumed.

The SPLA’s decision to use the negotiating period to press on with its military campaign (and the important capture of the town of Torit) no doubt contributed to the collapse. The government forces are now concentrated in Juba and Liria: although weak on the ground, they are masters of the air.

Last week, I travelled into southern Sudan as part of a humanitarian mission with the human rights charity, Jubilee Action, to see some of the consequences of a war that the West has frequently ignored. Far from being contained, the conflict is having a ripple effect throughout the region, as far away as Chad. And it is a war whose line of engagement has become Africa ‘s Maginot line.

This bloodletting has its roots in racism and fundamentalism. In Africa’s biggest country, the Arabs of the north call the blacks of the south “slaves” – and have frequently treated them accordingly. The bloodletting is exacerbated by radical Islamists seeking to impose their religion on non-believers, and by greed for resources – primarily oil.

In addition to the two million lives which have been brutally ended, there are countless displaced people and refugees. Nearly 80,000 of them are in one camp which I saw at Kakuma in northern Kenya’s remote Turkana region, where they are causing instability and resentment among the indigenous Turkanas living in abject poverty in the neighbouring areas.

Many refuges inside Sudan are dying from hunger and thirst. Cholera and other virulent diseases are rife. The effects of daily aerial bombardment and indiscriminate laying of anti-personnel landmines are manifest in torn limbs and broken bodies. One Red Cross surgeon working at Lokichoggio, the last Kenyan outpost before the border, told me that he had performed 300 operations in the past month and that two other surgeons had done the same. “It’s not a civilian hospital, it’s a field hospital in a war”, he said.

I travelled into Sudan with the Catholic auxiliary Bishop of Torit, Akio Johnson, and one of his priests, Fr Maurice Loguti of Chukudum. There have been nine attempts on Bishop Johnson’s life. On his head and other parts of his body he has scars where bullets have hit him or glanced off him. He has a diocese that is equally scarred but has also somehow managed to survive. It is an extraordinary story of personal bravery and endurance.

The bishop says that the daily bombardment of villages such as Hiyala and Tirangore is taking a terrible toll in lives. Homes, schools, churches and dispensaries have been targets too.

When the SPLA liberated Torit on 1 September, the scale of the destruction became apparent. The cathedral church of Sts Peter and Paul, where Mass was last celebrated in 1992, is still standing but has been stripped of its furniture, which has been used to make bunkers. Torit’s smaller church, Our Lady of the Assumption, built in the Forties, fared far worse. It has been razed to the ground; only one wall remains. The foundations have been turned into a military bunker and the bricks taken to build a mosque. The town itself has been forcibly Islamised: the Koran imposed; the road signs changed to Arabic; and water and medicine only given to people who have changed their names to Islamic ones.

One group of 180 children had been taken to Khartoum and radically indoctrinated, encouraging a hatred of their parents, and turning them into child soldiers.

Even as the negotiators were hammering out the details of the Machakos accord, Bishop Johnson’s home and compound were being blitzed by the Sudanese military. In three raids on Ikotos, on 26 and 29 June and 12 July, 72 bombs were dropped on his residence. It was obliterated. If its occupants had not scrambled into shelters, there would have been a massacre.

The compound also housed the primary school of St Teresa of the Child Jesus and the secondary school of St Augustine (where more than 200 children were being educated). Both were destroyed. Miraculously, the prudent provision of bomb shelters saved their lives, but the bishop told me that “many were vomiting and crying; they were deeply traumatised”.

South Sudan’s children have learnt to recognise the difference between the engines of the planes trying to deliver the UN’s massive relief programme and those of the feared Russian-made bombers as they dispatch their daily cargo of death. “People are living like foxes in holes, just to survive”, Fr Loguti said.

The bishop would like to see strenuous efforts made to create a process of reconciliation (and after the capture of Yei he personally intervened to stop the killing of Sudanese troops, whom he fed, clothed, and had repatriated). But he says an end to the bombing is a prerequisite – “people’ s hatred has gone very deep”. Fr Loguti sums up the mood of defiance by adding: “It is better to be a rebel in the south than to be a slave.”

The picture of devastation is much the same throughout the south. At Mur Ahat Tha, for instance, four children and their mother were killed along with six others while its church of St Mary, rebuilt four times, was levelled again in August.

Janet Aya, the programme manager for Torit diocese, pays tribute to organisations such as the Catholic aid agency Cafod for the practical help they give. But the agencies come and go, pulling out whenever there is an attack. Only the Church stays, frequently facing the frustration of building a school or dispensary only “to find it destroyed the following day”.

At the town of Narus, Sr Mary Consolata, an energetic and formidable nun, is headmistress of a primary school for 600 girls (drawn from 27 tribes).

“Educating a man educates one person, educating a woman educates a whole society”, she says. She showed me unexploded munitions on the school site. She points out where bombs have hit buildings and the bomb shelters where children flee from the approaching planes. The life-saving shelters were built with funds from Cafod.

The dispensary that served Narus has been completely destroyed. The buildings are a mangled ruin. One local inhabitant, Moses March, took me to where a family of seven (five children, including an unborn child) all died in a direct hit on their hut. In addition to the massacre of Martin Lowie’s family, 23 other people were killed in raids on Narus.

Many young people are forced into the militia. Bishop Johnson recalls how one child soldier told him that he had joined the SPLA because “if I don’t take up a gun they will come and take my mother and my sister.” The bishop says that during the past five years the SPLA had generally stopped recruiting child soldiers but that the Sudanese army had kidnapped young people from the streets.

In the areas of southern Sudan, where the conflict still rages, children are being killed and women are being raped. Unicef told me that “children are being crippled, nails put into their knees, and their Achilles’ tendons deliberately broken so they can’t run. There are serious serial human rights abuses.

The Government connives by arming the tribes who are involved.” All this in a country where 10 per cent of children die before they are five; where life expectancy is just 56 years; where 92 per cent per cent live in poverty; and where, in a vast land mass, there are a mere 20 secondary schools. In recent months the Sudanese Government has been intensifying its attacks on the areas around oilfields with the aim of depopulating those districts.

Since the oil began to flow in Sudan, Khartoum has been able to increase its military spending from £110m to £220m. Sudan has a military-technical pact with Russia. Bishop Johnson is scornful of the morality of Western oil companies: “Every barrel of oil they extract is half full of oil and half full of blood. When people decide where to buy their petrol they should remember that”, he says.

The Khartoum Government also generates funds through the sale of people; raiding and slaving has become a way of life. Even the SPLA will resort to selling slaves, Bishop Johnson says, if they see it as a way of raising money. “It should,” he says, “be a crime to hold someone as a slave.” As to their destiny – “some have been sold on to Libya”. The Sudanese Catholic Bishops’ Conference opposes the buying out of slaves by Western groups, believing that this simply multiplies the problem. “It’s like too many aid programmes. It seems a reasonable response at the time, but it is not a solution. It’s better to tackle the causes”, Bishop Johnson says. Buying out slaves feeds the market and becomes a useful hard currency earner for local warlords.

When the Machakos peace process resumes, early agreement is needed on a complete ceasefire. No social progress can be made without an end to the bombing.

The United States recently proposed that there should be a verification mission to ensure that both sides honour their undertakings. This should be broadened to include UN participants, and it should focus less on the military issues and more on the human rights questions. The mission should examine abductions from the south; it should seek a reduction in arms; and concentrate on conflict resolution and initiatives that deepen civil society. Its most useful ally in these objectives will be the Sudanese Catholic Church, which, in the south, was described to me by Unicef and Save the Children as the only credible non-governmental agency.

Neither the SPLA nor the Government seem to know what to do next. Neither has a plan for the future; both appear interested only in a fight to the finish. From the international community they need carrots and they need sticks.

No one who has been engaged in this war of attrition has been accountable to the people who suffer, and no one at the talks will be truly accountable either. What Sudan proves is that wars are easier to start than to finish. Sudan is an object lesson in what happens when peaceful methods for resolving conflict are abjured.

Lord Alton is an independent Crossbench peer. He is treasurer of the all-party parliamentary Cafod group; and he is professor of citizenship at Liverpool John Moores University.

Mark Rowland Marketing and Fund-raising Manager Jubilee Action

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