Untitled Document

THE BEGINNING OF EXTERMINATION

Since ancient times the Nubian mountains have been cut off and separated from the rest of the world. All the important African caravan paths have avoided them. The colonial British simply had the entire area sealed off, reputedly to protect its population from Arab slave hunters. While in the Arabian North of Sudan, England was building schools and training administrative staff, the Southern Sudan, including the Nubian mountains, were left to Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

In 1978 the American corporation Chevron discovered oil in the area of Bent to the south of the Nubian mountains. According to some reports, the quantities involved are bigger than in Saudi Arabia and they have not yet been divided.

The northern Sudan is populated by the Creoles who are proud of their Islamic culture they acquired from the Arabs who have been colonising Bilat el Sud (in Arabic: the land of black people) from the Red Sea for the last six centuries. Southern Sudan is populated by indigenous peoples (Dinke, Shiluki, Ingassani, Azanda,...). They lived in almost complete isolation from the outside world. So Southern Sudan - more than anywhere else in the world - had preserved a kind of free and unregulated natural reserve in which tribal nobility were peacefully and majestically walking around. That was the story up to 1983 when the dictator Nimeiri proclaimed a shariyat – under Muslim fundamentalist law - that prohibited their tradition. Like other peoples in Southern Sudan the Nubas saw this prohibition as a brutal imposition of foreign, Arabic will. So they resisted.

Sudan's civilian war reached the Nubian mountains in 1985, i.e. two years after resistance against Arabic domination erupted to the south of Sudan. That year, a unit of the Sudanese Liberation Army (SPLA) attacked a camp of Arabic nomads situated south of the line of demarcation that divides the state into Southern (African) and Northern (Arabic) Sudan. In this extension of the battlefield the government army led by the National Islamic Front answered with systematic mass killings of the civil population. At the same time, the government supplied weapons to nomads from the Baggara tribe who had from ancient times been wrangling with the Nubian farmers about the right to pasture. In the name of persecuting the SPLA’s soldiers, the united Arabic forces started to kill, rob and burn on a mass scale. The culmination of that large-scale offensive took part between 1991 and 1993 when the Sudanese government announced a sacred war against all disbelievers, Christians and "wayward" Muslims. The goal of that djjihad was to get rid of all the resistant inhabitants from the Nubian mountains and to thereby secure the planned pipeline route that the government had started to build on in order to connect the oil fields in the southern part of the mountains with the refineries along the coast of the Red Sea. They prepared a plan for the complete exile of all Nubas. Since the politics of cruel and open violence had not seen any success and the Nubian rebels - then already incorporated with the SPLA - were not prepared to surrender, the government forces adopted new tactics. Instead of sheer force, they used a so-called "soft grip" by establishing militarised camps called Dar el Salaam ("peace camps"). In September 1993, a spokesman for the Khartoum government announced that there were 91 "peace camps" where 167,000 "ex-savages" were being kept under control.