SUDAN-POLITICS: Nubas break Ranks with Main Rebel Group

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jul 2 1996 (IPS) - Members of the largest black minority in northern Sudan have broken away from that country’s main rebel group, accusing it of turning its back on their struggle against genocide.

According to poet and novelist Mohammed Haroun Kafi, his people, the Nuba, are angry at the way the Sudan People’s Liberation Front (SPLA) has treated them although thousands have given their lives for the its 13-year insurgency against Khartoum.

This is why, he explains, he and other Nuba have broken ranks with the SPLA and formed an independent movement to fight for the rights of the people of the Nuba Mountains in north-western Sudan.

“We are now on our own. We are no longer under the command of the mainstream SPLA leadership,” said Kafi, who announced the formation of his SPLA/Nuba Mountains Movement last week.

Thousands of Nuba, attracted by the vow of SPLA leader Col. John Garang when he launched his rebel group in 1983 to “liberate Sudan from the minority Arab clique”, joined the rebel group over the years and many died fighting the Sudanese army in the south.

“Later we discovered that we were being used by the southerners to fight their war,” says Kafi.

The crack in the Nuba-Southerners alliance surfaced after three top rebel officers broke away from Garang in 1991 and began pushing for independence for the south.

The final stroke came when Garang, to the chagrin of the Nuba, signed an accord with north Sudanese political exiles in the Eritrean capital, Asmara, last year. Under the agreement, the northern opposition recognised the SPLA’s demand for self-rule for the south.

Kafi sees this as a sign that the SPLA is concerned only with the future of southern Sudan and intends to leave the Nuba to their fate. “Every agreement signed, the south wins,” he said. “What’s going to be the fate of the Nuba? We feel that the Nuba have been betrayed.”

The 47-year-old writer-turned-rebel vows that his forces will keep fighting until their culture, traditions and political rights are recognised. He said his followers in the Nuba Mountains would have to to be on maximum alert and would crush any attempt to stop the Nuba from shaping their destiny.

The new rebel leader has also called upon Yusuf Kuwa Makki, the highest Nuba commander in Garang’s SPLA-Mainstream to “liberate himself from the bridles and the chains he is in” and join the SPLA/Nuba Mountains.

The Nuba Mountains have long been on the agenda of rights groups such as Amnesty International, Africa Watch and Africa Rights, which have accused the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum of perpetrating human rights abuses against the Nuba.

In a 350-page report titled ‘Facing Genocide’ and produced in mid-1995, the London-based Africa Rights documented cases of Nuba civilians being shot on the spot by pro-government Arab militias.

But it also reported the lynching of “a number of senior Nuba officers” by SPLA forces for refusing to be transferred to the frontline in the south.

The some one million Nuba are an amalgam of ethnic groups who speak about 40 dialects. Mainly farmers and herders, they have traditionally practised their own religion, although many have become Muslims and Christians. They also have a totally different culture from the predominantly Arab peoples who live around them.

“The Sudanese government doesn’t like the Nuba’s culture or religion and its reaction is to try and wipe them out,” said Survival International, which is also based in London, in a recent report.

“This is a genocidal crusade of biblical dimensions which must be stopped,” added the organisation, which defends the right of the tribal peoples to decide their own future and helps them protect their lands, environment and way of life.

“The fact that some 40 percent of the Nuba are themselves Muslims does not save them from the onslaught,” it said.

British photographer George Rodger, who visited the Nuba Mountains 46 years ago, charged in a recent document that the Nubas’ troubles began in the 1970s when German film director and photographer Leni Riefenstahi published books portraying them as they used to be in the 1950s-60s.

In their seclusion, the Nuba people might have remained unmolested, he said, “but revealed by coffee-table books in their uncircumcised nudity was more than the Islamic fundamentalists could accept… Rumours has it that the simple tribesmen were given the choice — be circumcised or be shot.”

The Nubas have been living in their mountains since the 17th and 18th centuries, when they fled there to escape Arab slavers who captured children and young people for sale at slave auctions in Zanzibar, Baghdad and the coastal towns of Arabia.

Now they have nowhere to hide. Suleiman Rahel, Secretary General of the Nuba Solidarity Group Abroad, told IPS not long ago that he wondered why the world was looking on while the Nuba were being exterminated.

“Sometimes I wonder whether this is the beginning of the end of the last of the Nuba and its culture in the Sudan,” he said.