|
Julie flint & Alex deWaal,
Darfur: a short history of a long war. Zed
Books, in association with International African
Institute, 2005. 151 pages.
Gérard Prunier.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Cornell
University Press, 2005. 212 pages.
David Morse.
The Iron Bridge (1998)
*
* * * *
With the Lost Boys in Southern Sudan
By David Morse
"Starting from Zero" (Part 1)
To the extent that the media
spotlight is ever directed at Africa, it has focused on
Darfur, in western Sudan, where several hundred thousand
people have died in ethnic violence since 2003. Just
next door, beyond the glare of the spotlight, however,
is South Sudan, where an estimated 2.2 million
people were killed in two decades of bitter internecine
fighting. There, a fragile, three-year-old peace
agreement is rapidly coming apart. A new conflagration
in South Sudan would engulf Darfur, dwarf the carnage
that has taken place so far in the region, and launch
sub-Saharan Africa into the age of energy wars.
Both the danger—and its ethnic
character—were brought home to me very personally in a
single moment on a recent trip to South Sudan as I tried
to tell myself that the two-year-old Dinka boy pointing
a pistol at my chest meant no harm. But the
pearl-handled automatic looked real enough. "Khawaja,"
he said. (Dinka for "white person.")
I was relieved when the man who was
perhaps the toddler's father, a big-bellied lieutenant
colonel in the Sudan People's Liberation Army, grinned
and held the bullet clip aloft to show he'd removed it
from the gun. He was visibly a little drunk.
"He's very intelligent boy," he said
proudly, "You see, he points the gun at you because he
thinks you are Arab."
We were sitting on makeshift stools
in a dark, narrow, crowded bar in Kuajok, a state
capital in South Sudan—the only bar in town. Kuajok is
under construction. Three years ago it was just a
village. Since it was designated the capital of the
newly formed state of Warrap, one of the ten states that
make up South Sudan, its population has mushroomed. The
few masonry buildings that survived two decades of civil
war in Kuajok are undersized and shabby. Everything else
has been cobbled together from poles and mats of woven
rushes. The bar, where I was trying to find something to
eat, is attached to a guest lodge—a compound containing
half a dozen thatched huts with padlocks and no
latrines, just shallow holes dug in the ground. A sign,
lettered on a cotton sheet announcing the Warrap State
Safari Guest House, is ripped right down the middle and
readable only when the breeze is blowing just so.
Kuajok is a boomtown. All that's
missing is the money.
One of the few visible public works
in progress is the main road through town, now being
rebuilt. Dump trucks rumble back and forth carrying the
red, gritty, compactable soil used here for building the
all-weather roads so desperately needed throughout
southern Sudan, where the rainy season brings ground
transport to a near standstill. A school for girls also
nears completion, privately funded through UNICEF; but
there is no hospital at all, just a pathetically
under-equipped clinic. In separate interviews, the state
ministers of education and health used the same phrase:
"We are starting from zero." Warrap— the most populous
of South Sudan's states, as well as the newest—has a
hard time just meeting its modest payroll.
The same is true, I discovered,
throughout South Sudan. Everywhere, a shortage of cash,
everywhere a backlog of unmet human needs. The rainy
season means sorghum can be planted; it brings
subsistence farmers to their knees, slashing the earth
with straight-bladed hoes. But because of poor
sanitation and lack of clean water, the rain also brings
cholera, guinea-worm, and dysentery. It means children
will die.
Six hundred miles to the north,
Khartoum's Arab elite are awash in oil money. From
near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s, Sudan has tripled its
gross national product in the past seven years.
Consumers buy giant flat-screen plasma TVs, expensive
new cars. The capital city, Khartoum, has new roads, an
elevated expressway, weapons factories constructed by
the Chinese, and Malaysian-built refineries that pipe
oil to tanker terminals on the Red Sea. Sudan's proven
oil reserves are estimated at a fairly hefty 5-6.5
million barrels, giving it the fifth largest reserves in
Africa.
But South Sudan, where most of that
oil actually comes from, remains one of the poorest
regions on the planet. Historically marginalized by
Khartoum—first under the Ottoman Turks, then under the
British, and now under Arab Islamists who control the
central government—the South, black African and
religiously diverse, has zero manufacturing capacity.
Everything from building supplies to salt has to be
trucked in from neighboring Uganda or Kenya.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement
(commonly referred to as the CPA), signed in January of
2005, was supposed to address these inequities. Brokered
by the U.S. and Kenya in painstaking, seemingly endless
negotiations, the CPA was an acknowledgment by the
warring parties—the National Islamic Front, representing
the government in Khartoum, and the Sudan Peoples
Liberation Movement (SPLM), representing the rebels in
the South—that neither side could win the bloody civil
war that had staggered on for 21 years. The agreement
was not truly comprehensive: It did not include the
three western Sudanese states known as Darfur, which
were just then erupting into violence; nor did it
address the needs of other marginalized regions and
constituencies suffering under Khartoum's yoke.
Nevertheless, the agreement was hailed as a triumph by
the Bush administration and by an international
community eager to see the conflict resolved.
Whatever its limitations, the CPA
did, at least, address the only partly ideological root
causes of the conflict in the South. Khartoum had,
indeed, wanted to impose fundamentalist Islamic law on
all of Sudan; but, from the beginning, the conflict was
largely over wealth-sharing. Increasingly this civil war
also became a "resource war."
Under the CPA, South Sudan was to
have the status of a semi-autonomous state, with control
over its internal affairs. Revenues from the southern
oilfields were to be divided 50-50 between Khartoum and
the newly formed Government of South Sudan. The CPA also
provided for a plebiscite, scheduled for 2011, in which
the South could vote to secede. This future vote was
meant to placate southerners who feared Khartoum would
not keep its word.
So now, three years into the CPA,
southerners are asking with increasing agitation: Where
is the promised oil money?
The sight of that toddler pointing a
pistol at me was unsettling, but not nearly as
disturbing as the explanation the Colonel offered:
because he thinks you are an Arab. A gregarious
bully who seemed to be part of the security detail
assigned to the group I was with, the colonel, perhaps
reading my expression, retrieved his pistol and tucked
it into the fanny pack under his belly. But if the
pistol was out of sight, the words hung there, a
reminder of the larger danger that lay just beyond the
bar's jury-rigged walls. Subsequent events have
confirmed my assessment—that this sprawling,
dysfunctional country is again slipping into the racial
polarization of "Arab" versus "Black" that has prevented
it from becoming a coherent nation. Sudan is again
poised at a precipice.
The enmity between slave-taking Arabs
and black Africans goes back centuries, long predating
Sudan's existence as a nation. "The Sudan," as many
people still call it, is in fact a comparatively recent
amalgamation: North and South were thrown together for
the convenience of a hastily departing British colonial
government in 1956. The British left the Arabs "in
charge," much as the Belgians did with the Hutu in
Rwanda. Even so, the ethnic tensions might now be
transcended, were it not for the way Khartoum
manipulates them to its own immediate advantage, here as
in Darfur. Now, the whole country -- including the three
western states that comprise Darfur, where two million
displaced people already live at the edge of disaster,
dependent on outside aid—appears ready to plunge into a
bloody ethnic war.
Following the "Lost Boys"
I was in southern Sudan as a
journalist, along with filmmaker Jen Marlowe, sponsored
by the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the
Nation Institute's Investigative Fund. Marlowe had
traveled to Darfur in 2004, helping to make the
documentary film
Darfur Diaries; I had been to South Sudan
previously, thanks to my interest in events in Darfur.
We both wanted to better understand the relationship
between Darfur and the South, and to see whether the CPA
was working—and if not, why not?
We were accompanying three Dinka men
in their mid-to-late twenties—Samuel Garang Mayuol,
Chris Koor Garang, and Gabriel Bol Deng—who were
visiting their villages of origin for the first time in
20 years. Their odysseys had begun in the mid-1980s when
their villages were attacked by militiamen on horseback.
These Arab militias, known variously as murahaleen
or mujahideen, had been acting as proxies for the
Khartoum government, which was intent on depriving the
southern rebel movement of its support among its own
people, while clearing the energy-rich region for oil
exploration.
Young boys at the time, the three had
fled for their lives along with thousands of others,
trekking for months, across rivers and desert, to
Ethiopia. There they stayed for several years until the
Ethiopian government fell to rebels allied with Khartoum
who bombed the UN-supported refugee camp and drove them
out again. This time, they fled south into Kenya, where
they spent nine years in Kakuma refugee camp (whose
population swelled, at one point, to 85,000).
Finally, in 2001, under the
sponsorship of American church groups, these three—all
Catholic—were among 3,800 young southern Sudanese
refugees resettled in the United States, where they
became known as the
"Lost Boys," a whimsical reference to Peter Pan.
There are a few "Lost Girls" as well, but boys were
especially targeted by the murahaleen out of fear
they would join the rebels, and so made up the bulk of
the exodus.
Our three Lost Boys, who had shared a
hut at the camp in Kakuma, were settled in different
American cities. They got jobs. One worked in a
hospital; another in a factory handling freight; the
third tutored fellow refugees. They worked hard,
adjusted to their strange, new surroundings. Saved
money. Remitted some to relatives and friends in Kakuma.
Started college. Became U.S. citizens.
Two of the "Boys" had no idea whether
their parents were alive or dead. Gabriel Bol Deng, the
oldest, thinks he was nine or ten when his village was
attacked. While tending his father's cattle several
miles away, he heard shots and saw militiamen on
horseback in the midst of his herd, firing guns and
swinging their swords, driving the cattle north. He hid
in the tall grass and, when they were out of sight, ran
toward his village to warn the others, but black smoke
was already rising from the round thatched huts known as
tukuls.
Two fleeing villagers prevented him
from going any closer, but one was quickly shot dead.
Once again, Deng escaped into the grass. He later
returned to the burning village and found bodies, but no
sign of his family; then he ran until darkness fell,
when he had to climb a tree to avoid being eaten by
lions or hyenas. So began a trek to Ethiopia that lasted
months, part of an exodus—led by a few adults—of
thousands of boys of all ages clumped into groups,
dressed in rags or naked, bombed and strafed by Sudanese
government planes, feet bloody. Some drowned in rivers;
others were eaten by crocodiles and lions. Dying of
thirst, they drank any water they could find; some drank
urine. Starving, they chewed on inedible plants or ate
dirt.
Now, as summer approached in 2007,
Deng and the others—who had not seen each other, only
e-mailed and talked on the phone, since 2001—were
returning to visit their villages. They weren't sure
what they would find, though they desperately hoped to
find their families alive. They wanted to know what
peace had brought, and what lay in store for their
people. These young men—Dinka, but also Americans,
schooled now in the world of paved streets and vacuum
cleaners, iPods and laptops—were about to take another
dizzying odyssey, this one into the past and, possibly,
the future.
Of the three returnees, Deng seemed
the most fully formed and took the greatest pains to
make himself accessible. He struck me as idealistic but
also open-eyed. During the seven weeks we traveled
together, I came to value his insights. Deng is a
natural leader: he expresses himself forcefully, yet
knows how to listen. Stocky, with blunt features, he
maintains a stolid expression, occasionally transformed
by the flash of an irrepressible smile. He networks
relentlessly and would probably make a good,
conventional politician, but for now he is
single-mindedly in pursuit of a dream that springs from
his experience as a refugee. He wants to establish a
primary school in his childhood village, Ariang.
Deng was about thirteen when he
attended school for the first time in that refugee camp
in Ethiopia. There, he realized the power of education.
He had just graduated from first grade in 1991, when the
camp was attacked. After another harrowing trek, in
which many of his young companions were shot or drowned,
he eventually ended up in Kenya at Kakuma camp. He was
about fifteen when he finished second grade there. The
instruction was better at Kakuma. The UN provided
trained teachers for the upper grades. Determined to
advance as quickly as possible, Deng sold okra that he
grew in a garden behind his tukul to pay for
private classes during school-term vacations. Rations
were spare, so sometimes he went hungry in order to
learn, but he managed to skip from third to fifth grade.
"We had no paper to write on," he
recalled. "No books. I learned to listen very carefully
to the teachers. I separated cardboard from boxes into
layers so I would have paper for taking notes."
On May 20, 2007, two days before we
took off from New York's Kennedy International Airport
for Africa, Deng graduated from Le Moyne College, a
Jesuit school in Syracuse, with a B.A. in math
education. He is now pursuing a master's degree.
Homecoming in the Shadow of Darfur
The bond between the three men was
palpable the moment they embraced at the airport and
lapsed into Dinka. Although they had assimilated in
different ways into American society, they shared some
striking similarities. All three brought several changes
of fashionable clothes that they would keep scrupulously
clean, while Marlowe and I got by with backpacks and
grubby T-shirts. When we missed a meal—which often
happened—I would complain that I was "starving," whereas
they, who had actually experienced starvation, endured
without comment or complaint; yet they rejected food
that affronted their pride—if, for instance, they did
not feel adequately welcomed in a place.
As a group, whatever their individual
differences, all three were strikingly compassionate.
Each wanted to give something back to their people. The
chartered single-engine Cessna that took us a thousand
miles northwest from Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, deep
into South Sudan carried a cargo of medical supplies and
300 insecticide-treated mosquito nets—most of it
purchased by Chris Koor Garang, the youngest of the
three, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and was recently
certified as a nurse. Garang had raised money on behalf
of a U.S. faith-based nonprofit called
Jumpstart Sudan, which had built a new clinic in the
town of Akon. (Jumpstart was founded by another "Lost
Boy,"
Akot Lual Arec.) During the three weeks that we
planned to use Akon as a base for overland travel,
Garang would volunteer his nursing skills.
The third man, Samuel Garang Mayuol,
lives in Wheaton, Illinois just outside Chicago. Taller
than the others and soft-spoken, he seemed the least
focused; yet he commanded respect. When he talked,
others listened. Mayuol had already completed an
Associates Degree in business and was launched on a
degree in marketing and business accounting. Of the
three, he alone knew that one of his parents—his
mother—was still alive. This he had learned from cousins
in 1998, while still at Kakuma, and years later he
managed to talk with her on the phone. Mayuol wanted to
do something for his village, but wasn't sure what—apart
from helping with the purchase of the mosquito nets. By
the journey's end, however, his mission was clear.
After a six-hour flight from Nairobi,
with a stop for refueling, our plane touched down on the
red clay landing strip at Akon, a county seat about 300
miles northwest of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and
about 45 miles south of the Darfur border. A few miles
east of that border—at the border between Warrap state
and Southern Kordofan—is the oil-rich region of Abyei,
claimed by both North and South. Abyei could easily
become the flashpoint for Sudan's next war.
Akon's proximity to Darfur is worth
highlighting. Darfur, portrayed as if in a vacuum by
much of the American media, shares several hundred
crucial miles of border with South Sudan—one reason
their destinies are inextricably linked. Scholars like
to argue about the ethnic, religious, environmental, and
historical distinctions that set Darfur apart; but, to
put it simply, Darfur is just the most recent
manifestation of a larger schism that has pitted the
ruling Islamo-Arabist elite in Khartoum against the
black periphery. At bottom, it is all the same war. For
this reason, it is hard to imagine a separate, viable,
lasting peace in either Darfur or the South while the
other remains at war.
Within minutes of our arrival, we
were welcomed with exuberant singing by a delegation
that included tribal elders and the county
commissioner—a graceful Dinka woman, standing easily
six-and-a-half feet tall in a colorful flowing garment
and speaking eloquent English. She would make available
a new Toyota Land Cruiser for our travels to nearby
villages—as authorized by the wife of Salva Kiir
Mayardit, the president of South Sudan.
Surreally, the World Health
Organization compound, where Marlowe and I stayed, has
Internet access and cold, filtered water. But outside
the W.H.O. stockade is a world— apart from the
occasional bicycle or motor vehicle—that conjures a
distant past, where life is very close to the bone: a
terrain alternately dusty and muddy, with scrawny
children and wandering goats; a tented marketplace whose
vendors sell sorghum, groundnuts, sugar, charcoal, and
conical blocks of snuff, but little in the way of fresh
fruit or vegetables, which generally have to be imported
from Uganda. Wells with hand-pumps discharge water of
uncertain quality.
Akon's brick secondary school, which
serves the surrounding villages, is dark and decrepit;
the children ragged; the younger ones crowded together
on the cement floor. Only the upper grades have desks.
Girls rarely make it that far, most having dropped out
to work in the fields or care for younger siblings. The
teachers we interviewed had not been paid for months.
Soldiers had gone eight months without pay. These were
the first hints we had of the financial crisis that had
overtaken the new government in Juba. Little was being
reported.
"Nothing We Can Do Is Enough"
We stayed in a group, visiting each
man's home village in turn. At each, our Land Cruiser
was swarmed by children who wanted to touch it, peek
inside, and gaze into the rear-view mirrors. The shrill
ululations of women would split the air and the young
men would be embraced by aunts, uncles, and others from
their long-lost lives.
Colorful robes would be thrown over
each of us. Spearmen dressed in crimson or white tunics
would hold down a young bull for us to step over and
then slaughter it. They poured water from a gourd onto
the feet of the returning men to purify them and to bind
them again to the village, then spat on their foreheads
in blessing.
Apricot-colored dust rose from the
feet of dancers. Drums throbbed. Bottles of soda and
traditional chairs made of hewn wood and strips of
cowhide, or ubiquitous molded plastic lawn chairs from
Uganda would be brought out for us. The three men
received a steady stream of well-wishers and, in the
midst of this joyous celebration, they learned who had
died. Dinka are famously proud and stoical, not inclined
to show pain. But these homecomings were overwhelming;
each man, at some point, shed tears.
Deng got an enormous reception at
Ariang. He has, he figures, close to 600 relatives,
since his father had five wives and his uncles on both
sides several wives apiece. The Land Cruiser stopped a
couple of miles away as excited well-wishers began
running across fields, flocking past us. Deng got out
and walked, carrying a toddler at one point, looking the
part of a hero.
After the rites with the bull had
been performed, he was taken aside by his uncle, led
into his mother's family tukul, and there gently
told that both his parents had died. Deng bowed his
head. It was the news he had, for years, prepared
himself to hear. His parents were not young. Still, he
told me afterward, the knowledge had filled his heart
with grief. "It was the hardest news I ever heard."
At the celebration, Deng searched the
crowd for his childhood friends—the age-mates who are so
important in Dinka culture. Later, when he did the math,
he was stunned to realize that only perhaps a third of
them had survived. The civil war had cut deep into
Ariang—and now, ironically enough, peace, too, was
taking a toll. As he visited the various tukuls
the following day and spoke with families in private, he
began to grasp their desperation. W.H.O's measles
immunization program had not yet reached Ariang, owing
in part to the poor roads. Earlier that very spring, 35
children had died of the disease in this village alone.
Some showed signs of malnutrition. "People tell me that
with the peace signed they are no longer running," Deng
said, shaking his head, "but nothing else has changed."
In the face of such poverty, such
hardship and suffering, he suddenly felt overwhelmed by
a sense of helplessness. The other men voiced similar
feelings. Garang, the nurse, realized his cargo of
medical supplies—which had taken him so much time and
effort to assemble and deliver—was a pittance. The need
was too great. He treated a snakebite victim, a
four-year-old girl with an abscess in her foot that
reached to the bone and smelled of gangrene. She would
probably die, he told me, despite his best efforts,
because there was no hospital to perform an amputation.
More than once Garang said, in anguish: "Nothing I can
do is enough."
Shortly after our arrival, he
received good news: his mother and father were alive—and
in Kuajok. He sent a cousin by motorcycle with word that
we'd be coming, and we shortened our stay in Akon in
order to have a few extra days in Kuajok, only 60 miles
away as the crow flies but half a day on a road— more
nearly a track—that would become increasingly impassible
in the rainy season, which was beginning in earnest.
The tenuousness of life in the South
made Garang's reunion with his parents the more
astonishing. He had only been about seven when he fled.
That he had walked 1,000 kilometers, survived parasites
that threatened to kill him, made it to Kenya, and ended
up a man with the means to return, bearing gifts; that
his parents, who had fought together in the rebel army,
had somehow endured two decades of bombs, land-mines,
and famine, to be on hand to greet him—all of it seemed
little short of a miracle.
We arrived in Kuajok at dusk,
eighteen passengers crowded into a Toyota pickup with
all our gear. (We never traveled anywhere without
promptly doubling our number in cousins and hangers-on.)
When we pulled into the Garang family compound, where
family members had been waiting for hours, pandemonium
broke loose.
Garang's parents were still officers
in the Sudan People's Liberation Army, and much of the
extended family was decked out in the ill-fitting
butterscotch uniforms of the SPLA as well. Ecstatic
embraces were followed by extravagant heel-clicking
salutes by cousins.
Later, we made the trip south to Wau,
the capital of Western Bahr-el-Ghazal state, between
rains, squeezing into a 4x4 Toyota van—nineteen of us
now, including Garang's parents (his mother toting an
AK-47 as part of our security detail), and three young
children. Those 70 miles were on a road that seemed to
consist of little but an endless braiding of
water-filled ruts. Whenever it became a lagoon, the
driver was forced to abandon it entirely. Once, he
zigzagged so far afield, skirting around household plots
of sorghum, that he had to ask directions. Incredibly,
this is the main road to Uganda.
Three times the size of Juba, the
southern capital, Wau is a full-fledged city, with a
population of more than three million. It is connected
by rail to Khartoum to the northeast and Nyala in Darfur
to the northwest. Wau boasts numerous single-story
masonry buildings, including indoor markets, a
university, a hospital, 11 mosques, and a large Catholic
mission complex whose brick walls hearken back to
British colonial days.
Outwardly, the city looks intact, but
the appearance is deceptive. Posters warn pedestrians of
the danger of unexploded mines, left over from the civil
war. The university of Bahr-el-Ghazal is barely
functioning, crippled by a student strike over lack of
teachers, classes, and textbooks. Although the single
hospital is the largest in the region, its monthly
payroll has shrunk by nearly half in the last year.
Hospital administrator Ater Chawul Malisal opened a
cupboard to show us the meager available supply of
Chinese-made medicines. "It is not nearly enough. Since
the CPA was signed, there is peace, but no drugs."
Neither he, nor the medical director, Dr. James Patrice
Ibrahim, had been paid in three months.
Ibrahim, who wore a striking
chartreuse dashiki, was even more outspoken. Shortfalls
in salaries, medicines, and personnel had all worsened,
he told us, since the CPA. He blamed poor planning in
Juba. "I have no budget. I have to ask for everything.
Even diesel fuel. The [state] minister of health is in
Juba now three weeks, looking for an ambulance, looking
for salaries."
We encountered similar frustration
everywhere we went. Part of the price of South Sudan's
new semi-autonomy is that the ten southern state
governments, which are supposed to deliver basic
services, and which previously had been funded at least
meagerly by Khartoum, now depend wholly on the
government of the south. And clearly, very little money
was coming out of Juba.
Something was seriously wrong. Oil
had triggered the longest civil war in Africa's history.
Today, oil exports are the driving force in Sudan's
economy. Oil was supposed to fuel the peace. Why isn't
that money reaching the South?
We were well positioned to hear the
opinions and complaints of ordinary southerners. Western
journalists, when they arrive at all, usually zip in and
out of the South in a day or two with an interpreter, or
they interview only those who speak English. Our
advantage was that the three Lost Boys were chatting
informally in Dinka everywhere we went for seven weeks.
They caught the drift of public opinion in all its
nuances in ways no western journalist could possibly do.
What they encountered above all was cynicism.
To our surprise, in the areas of the
South we visited, blame was as likely to be directed at
Juba as at Khartoum. The Sudanese People's Liberation
Movement was criticized for not getting out into the
countryside, for not improving living conditions. SPLM
officials were accused of feathering their own nests, as
well as engaging in nepotism and outright corruption.
We found some truth to this, but we
expected to discover other answers in Juba—our next
stop. Answers are important. Huge and strategically
located, Sudan is nearly a million square miles in area,
straddling the Nile and bordering on ten countries. At
the moment, southern Sudan is bearing the brunt of the
industrial world's quest for resources. Sudan's
stability, or lack of it, may well hold the key to the
future of Africa.
In Juba, we got some surprises.
David Morse is an
independent journalist and human rights activist whose
articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire,
Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times
Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel,
The Iron Bridge
(Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum
wars in the first two decades of the 21st century. He
traveled to South Sudan most recently with support from
the
Nation Institute's
Investigative Fund
and the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and wrote
this article during a residency at
Blue Mountain Center. Morse may be reached at
his website:
dmorse@david-morse.com .
(photo: left to
right) Chris Koor Garang, Gabriel Bol Deng, Samuel
Garang Mayuol: by David Morse (used with permission)
Copyright 2007 David Morse
First published at http://www.tomdispatch.com
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
posted 15 October 2007
With the Lost Boys in Southern Sudan
By David Morse
The
Coming Collision in Sudan (Part 2)
Even before the Cessna touched down
in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, I knew that we were
on the front lines of what may someday be a huge war;
that we were witnessing the opening skirmish in a series
of resource wars in which countries like Sudan and
Nigeria now figure prominently, but which may spread to
most of Africa. Not only is this continent rich in
mineral wealth; but the inhabitants of a number of its
countries can still be driven from their land—raped
and killed—with impunity. Today's resource-driven
conflicts are but an extension of the slave trade as
well as the ivory, gold, rubber, and diamond trades that
have fed on Africa, undermining and corrupting its
people's attempts at governance.
Oil was the precipitating cause of
the 21-year-long civil war in Sudan. The South had the
oil; the North was the center of power. When the North
first moved to seize the southern oilfields in the
mid-1980s, a rebellion began—and, immediately after
that, came the attacks on southern villages that caused
our "Lost Boys" to flee for their lives. The
Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in January of
2005, was supposed to heal the rupture between North and
South and divide the oil equitably.
In neighboring Darfur, the more
immediate issue is water: water for grazing versus water
for farming, the competition between herders and farmers
exacerbated terribly by drought, global warming, and
encroaching desert. Some of the poorest, most
disenfranchised Arabs had no place to graze their herds,
so they were easily recruited into the militias known as
the Janjaweed, along with common criminals, and
given license to steal, rape, and kill.
Oil and water don't usually mix. In
this case they do. Neither Darfur, nor South Sudan can
be understood in isolation. They are part of the same
marginalized hinterland that is struggling with the
central government in the North for access to resources.
Actions in the past few days have
dramatized their connectedness. One of the Darfur rebel
factions threatened to withdraw from peace negotiations.
Why? Because of Khartoum's failure to honor the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement in South Sudan. And while
water triggered the conflict in Darfur, oil continues to
fuel it. Oil pays for Khartoum's increasingly
sophisticated arms purchases from Russia. Oil buys
China's support at the UN Security Council, so that a
culture of impunity can go largely unchecked. Oil buys
the quiescence of the good citizens of Khartoum, who
pretend not to know what is going on 500 miles away.
Rumors abound that Darfur itself may contain oil
reserves beyond those located in its southeast corner—as well as valuable deposits of uranium and gold.
I had riches of my own. Traveling
with Gabriel Bol Deng and two other "Lost Boys" through
South Sudan offered filmmaker Jen Marlowe and me a
privileged glimpse into the heart of Dinka society—its elaborate handshakes, its female healers and
dancers, its songs and genealogies. Marlowe captured
much of it for the
documentary film she is now editing and trying to
fund. Even the painful moments—the stark poverty, the
belly hunger—were part of our journalistic witness;
an opportunity to assess the strength of a tenuous peace
in a region that has been almost constantly at war for
the better part of a century. It was also, we knew, a
window that could slam shut at almost any moment.
Oil Does Not Last Forever
The fractures in the Comprehensive
Peace Ågreement, or CPA, seemed to be widening just in
the weeks that we were traveling in the area.
"We are not getting all our oil,"
cabinet minister Dr. Barnaba Marial Benjamin told me in
his office in Juba, speaking of his government's $300
million budgetary shortfall. The problem—as I had
been hearing for two years now—was that Khartoum was
stalling on demarcating the border between North and
South that runs through the northern reaches of the
country's richest oilfields.
Benjamin also singled out Khartoum's
failure to implement the protocols designed to resolve
the dispute over Abyei, which holds some of the richest
oilfields. "The oil we are getting is from the few wells
which are deep inside the South." So instead of sharing
revenues evenly, as dictated by the peace agreement, he
suspects Khartoum of taking 100% of the oil from all but
those few wells. Lack of transparency and the presence
of Khartoum's troops in the oilfields leave the South
with no way of tracking the oil or auditing the revenues
it should receive according to the CPA.
Benjamin's title is Minister of
Regional Cooperation for the Government of South Sudan:
He combines the roles of foreign minister and secretary
of commerce. Sporting a subtly burnished golden silk
necktie, and fluent in English, Benjamin is an energetic
speaker who uses the full range of his voice—which,
when he complains about those northern troops in the
southern oilfields, is both shrilly indignant and
somehow endearing. One gathers that, in addition to his
other roles, he is a lobbyist, importuning
non-governmental organizations and friendly governments
to help his impoverished but mineral-rich quasi-nation.
We are seated inside one of perhaps a
dozen modular trailer-style offices parked near the site
of a new complex of two- and three-story government
buildings under construction. They may appear modest to
a Western visitor, but for southern Sudan this
constitutes a building boom, confirming the impression
many southerners have that the government is focused on
Juba, to the neglect of the countryside. Later, we will
learn that Juba's road-building program is being
curtailed for lack of funds, as is road-building
throughout the South; and, in September, Darfur scholar
and activist Alex DeWaal will email me on return from a
trip to Juba, saying that he found the city on "a war
footing." He added, "It would be tragic and stupid if
the internationals by focusing attention on Darfur
blindfolded themselves to the prospects of an even
greater tragedy that could be imminent in the South…"
The situation is deteriorating as I
write. But when we were in South Sudan, government
officials were still trying to put the best face on
things.
Only a year and a half had passed
since I was last in Juba and yet the city was barely
recognizable, its population having exploded from
100,000 to a million. On the previous trip, I happened
to see the foundations being poured for Juba's first
modern gas station—probably the first in South Sudan.
(In Kuajok, for instance, petrol is sold in glass
bottles and jerry cans from stands.) Now, the capital's
streets are full of cars. The airport has expanded
rapidly. Our pilot, Captain Saleh, confirmed that the
runways had been lengthened by at least a third to
accommodate large passenger jets.
Sometimes, not far away, we could
catch the throaty diesel roar of tanks engaged in
maneuvers—a reminder that, in this embattled land,
fully 40% of the national budget goes to defense. A
reminder that the war might come tomorrow
Back to Dr. Benjamin, who was
explaining that, in 2006, Khartoum had paid the
government of South Sudan a little over one billion
dollars as its annual share of oil revenues, based on a
production level of 300,000 barrels per day. With
production expected to increase to half a million
barrels per day in 2007, his government had assumed its
share would rise to somewhere between $105 million and
$115 million per month "But no!" says the minister
indignantly, "We are getting less! One month it dropped
to $44 million!" The government is forced, he says, to
go begging, looking for grants from "our friends" to
make ends meet.
Benjamin's explanation is passionate,
if a bit simplistic. To begin with, Khartoum's own
projections may have been overly optimistic, inflated by
its bullish oil minister Awad Ahmed al-Jaz. A
hard-headed report from the Economist this June
calls al-Jaz's prediction of an increase of up to one
million barrels per day next year
"too rosy." The country's original oilfields, which
produce valuable low-sulfur oil known as Nile Blend, are
already "maturing," as indicated by a drop in production
from the 300,000 barrels per day Benjamin cited to
254,000 barrels in the first quarter of this year.
Higher in sulfur, the new Dar Blend now coming on-line
is reportedly selling for only a third of the average
international price of crude oil.
The knowledge that some of Sudan's
best oilfields are already starting to decline should be
sobering to all parties. It puts Khartoum's stalling
into perspective. Oil does not last forever.
In the meantime, Khartoum's refusal
to remove its troops from the oilfields only reinforces
the South's worst suspicions. Benjamin hedges his words.
He does not quite say that Khartoum is stealing the
South's oil, or accuse Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir
of "acting in bad faith" —a charge leveled by the
South's President, Salva Kiir Mayardit, last January
during a public celebration of the second anniversary of
the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Instead, Benjamin
speaks of "certain elements within the National Congress
Party"—the ruling party in Khartoum—who seem
intent on scuttling the peace agreement.
He and his colleagues in the
government wondered, he explained, if Khartoum had a
"Plan B" in mind that prompted them to sabotage the CPA.
"Well," he said, as if addressing Khartoum directly,
"Have you got another plan, by refusing to implement the
CPA?... Why are you buying modern aircraft, MiG-29s and
the rest? Whom are you going to fight?… So have you a
'Plan B'? And that's why we say to the international
community 'Help us, we don't know what the hell is going
on.'"
The CPA, the minister emphasized, is
an international agreement. Its implementation should be
monitored by all its signatories. It was signed onto not
only by the two warring parties—the Sudanese People's
Liberation Movement (SPLM), the political arm of the
southern rebels led by John Garang, and the National
Congress Party (formerly the National Islamic Front),
representing the Government of Sudan—but also by the
UN, the European Union, the African Union, the Arab
League, and individual nations including the United
States, which helped broker the treaty. "I should not
have to shout this from the rooftops! You don't give
birth and then forget… You need to nurse it, see that it
grows properly."
The peace, he said, cannot "grow
properly" if the flow of international aid to the South
slows to a trickle, as has happened. The attention
concentrated exclusively on Darfur, the catastrophe
du jour in the West, has been a disaster for the
South. Most of the money pledged by wealthy nations at
the Multi-Donor Trust meeting at Oslo in 2005 and
specifically earmarked for development in the South has
been diverted to humanitarian aid in Darfur.
In a second interview, I was joined
by Gabriel Bol Deng, who asked Dr. Benjamin what his
government was doing to "support our brothers and
sisters in Darfur." The minister assured him that the
SPLM supports the delivery of humanitarian aid and the
deployment of UN troops in adequate numbers in the
region; but, he stressed, the marginalized people in
Darfur "need a political settlement." The CPA offers
"the nucleus of peace that can spread throughout the
Sudan." By the same token, "If the peace process in the
South collapses, then the whole country goes back to
war."
During a brief audience with
President Salva Kiir Mayardit, I asked about the charge
of "bad faith" he had leveled at Khartoum. He denied
only that he had hurled the accusation in anger at
Bashir personally. "I did not abuse him," he said.
This seemed to catch the essence of
his government's official stance toward its former
enemies, and now partners, in the new Unity Government—an edgy bluntness combined with an attempt at surface
equanimity: It is not Bashir personally, not even the
Bashir regime, but rather "certain elements" that are
sabotaging the CPA.
Under this studied calm lurks a grim
principle of asymmetrical warfare: When a guerilla
operation goes conventional, it loses its chief
strength, its ability to hit the enemy and disappear. In
any future conflict, the South and the other hinterlands
of Sudan will be vastly outgunned. Just as Khartoum's
oil pipelines and other infrastructure were once
vulnerable to a ragtag rebel guerrilla army, now Juba is
vulnerable to the well-armed North's superior airpower—which makes Benjamin's reference to ‘Plan B' ominous
indeed.
A Collision Course in the Sudan
Is a political resolution of the
North-South impasse even possible?
Pagan Amum, the Secretary General of
the SPLM, claims to think so. More sedate than I
remembered him from an interview in 2005, he was
nonetheless clearly determined to remain publicly
optimistic. A heavyset man with a thin goatee who has
charge of the SPLM's daily workings, he spoke softly
about the prospects of achieving peace throughout the
whole of Sudan via the political process enabled under
the CPA.
Just as the old Sudan People's
Liberation Army (SPLA) is "transforming itself into a
modern conventional force," he insisted, so the SPLM is
"transforming itself from a rebel movement into a
political party that can organize on a national scale—not just in the South, but in the north, the east, the
west," it will be able to compete with the National
Congress Party for control of the central government, he
said, even in time for the national elections
(officially scheduled for 2008, but almost certain not
to happen until 2009, after a necessary census is
conducted).
In preparation for elections, he
claims that an SPLM organizing campaign has already
registered 600,000 members, with a goal of two million.
"SPLM is the political party that can actually achieve a
united Sudan, on a new basis—a Sudan that can be for
all Sudanese."
Back in 2005, I had heard Amum spin
out a similar vision of a secular Sudan, committed to
gender equity and religious freedom—over beers at a
table in the outdoor Afex Café, a hangout for SPLM
bigwigs and NGO workers in the heady days of the
then-new peace when a young almost-country was drafting
its new constitution. The tables were in a mango grove
overlooking a bullet-riddled, rusting barge half sunk in
the White Nile. In those days—even given the
mysterious death of the movement's charismatic if
autocratic leader, John Garang, in a helicopter crash
three weeks after his installation as vice president of
Sudan—and before this grinding poverty-in-peace had
taken its toll, it was easier to dream of, and sound
convincing about, a Sudan that might help democratize
and unify the whole of Africa.
Now, for all his talk of grassroots
organizing, Amun seemed to lack either a real plan or
deep conviction when it came to a unified Sudan. (My
traveling companion Deng later pointed out to me that
Amum had tellingly staffed his office only with members
of his own Shilluk tribe.) When I asked the secretary
general whether his optimism was now somewhat
"manufactured," he denied it and pointed to recent,
(exceedingly modest) "achievements": The National Oil
Commission, charged under the CPA with overseeing oil
contracts and revenues, had, after two long years,
finally met; Khartoum had formally agreed to withdraw
all 14,000 of its troops from the South by July 9, 2007,
then only a few days away.
I didn't know which to find more
astonishing, Khartoum's announcement that it would
withdraw its troops from the oilfields (which I had not
gotten wind of), or the idea that Pagan Amum believed it
would actually happen.
The jointly constituted Boundary
Commission that was to settle the division of the oil
lands was, he also pointed out, finally going to meet.
"They have given us a firm date that, by February of
2008, the boundaries will be demarcated." Could he
believe that, either—when Khartoum's promises have so
famously been written in disappearing ink? And where was
his outrage, given that five years had passed without
boundaries being demarcated in a region where Khartoum
was assumedly pumping the oilfields dry?
Over two months later, back in the
U.S., Deng expressed his growing impatience as the
situation deteriorated. He found himself incensed at the
gap between the lofty rhetoric that officials like Amum
continue to spout and their inability, or unwillingness,
to deliver services to the villages of the South, to the
people. "During the war, the SPLA were stealing their
cows or eating off the same plate with them. Now they
need to give something back!"
Even if the organizers of SPLM's
political campaign actually succeeded in challenging
Khartoum's dominant National Congress Party, it seems
unlikely indeed that its hardliners would ever
voluntarily relinquish power at the ballot box. It's
worth recalling that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir
came to power in a military coup in 1989, the fifth coup
since Sudan achieved independence in 1956. Historically
ungovernable, Sudan has little experience with
democracy.
The vote Sudanese are eyeing most
warily is a plebiscite in 2011, also authorized by the
2004 peace agreement, in which southerners supposedly
will be allowed to vote on secession. Originally
intended as a safety-valve for those southerners who
came to the negotiating table doubting that any sort of
agreement for a unified Sudan would work, the 2011
deadline is raising ever more apprehension as it grows
closer.
Will the North allow the South, with
its oil reserves, to pull out of the federation?
Virtually everyone in the region
considers such an outcome inconceivable. Not peacefully,
anyway. But if some of the benefits of "peace" don't
arrive soon, most think the South will vote
overwhelmingly to secede—and if the crisis in Sudan
hasn't already hit a full boiling point, it will then.
That North and South are on a
collision course is clear to all. On a bus-ride to
Nairobi, I sat next to a woman who killed the boredom of
the 14-hour trip by confiding to me her black-market
scheme to smuggle cigarettes from Kenya into South
Sudan. She expected to make lots of money and then hoped
to eventually move up to smuggling gold. She described
the border crossing-points, gave me phone numbers, "They
wouldn't check you," she said, clearly dreaming that my
white skin would make me a perfect mule. "But," she
cautioned, "you've only got three years. You make your
money and get out. That's when they vote. And then they
will go to war." She mimed an explosive poof!
with her hands.
Final Ironies, Saving Graces
A word about corruption in the new
government. We encountered evidence of petty corruption
firsthand. When it came time to leave Kuajok and settle
our account at the Warrap State Safari Guest House, for
example, we found that the SPLA colonel with the
two-year-old who held me a gunpoint had disappeared and
stuck us with his $56 bar tab. "That's corruption," said
Chris Koor Garang, but he paid the bill, not wanting to
cause trouble.
Political patronage is rampant in the
SPLM. Jobs are handed out to relatives, former rebel
commanders, and party loyalists, undercutting efforts to
create a professional bureaucracy based on merit. Larger
scale corruption came to light last March, when South
Sudan's minister of finance and economic planning,
Arthur Akuien Chol, was charged with skimming public
funds by vastly overcharging the government for Toyota
Land Cruisers. President Kiir placed Chol under house
arrest, reiterated a "zero tolerance for corruption"
policy, and in July reshuffled his cabinet. Efforts are
said to be underway to eliminate "ghost" civil servants
from government payrolls.
Deng is a big fan of President Kiir—who is not only Dinka but grew up near his childhood
village, Ariang. Deng likes his humility, his rough-hewn
quality; but Kiir, he says, is in "a hard place. If he
tries to get rid of the people who are corrupt, they
will turn against his leadership. He's in a hot-seat,
and it's up to him to take bold steps."
In short, it seemed that, yes,
corruption in the new state exists, but no, it is not
yet rampant; not, for example, as in neighboring Kenya
where bribery is commonplace at every level of
government and society. At the moment in South Sudan,
nepotism, tribalism, and cronyism are the most
persistent impediments to professional efficiency—and, of course, lack of funds. A further impediment to
the smooth functioning of government is its very
newness: Virtually every agency is working with draft
laws, while the various state constitutions go through
the process of approval, and this, for instance, hinders
the writing of contracts for activities like uranium
prospecting that might actually produce funds for the
fledgling quasi-state.
While we were flying home from
Nairobi, the July 9 deadline for
Khartoum's pullout from the southern oil fields came
and went without action. UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-moon waited six weeks to express his disappointment
to the Security Council, calling on Khartoum to live up
to its obligation under the CPA. Months later, however,
the northern troops still have not budged, nor are they
likely to without vigorous international pressure.
Thus far, the "war" between South and
North is only a war of words, though it is escalating.
Asked about his northern colleagues, President Kiir
upped the ante in
speaking to the New York Times. "They are
cheating us," he said bluntly.
The three Dinka men, those former
"Lost Boys" we traveled with—so intimately familiar
with the costs of war—have returned to lives in
Syracuse, Tucson, and Chicago. They remain intent on
completing their educations here and doing what they can
to nurture the peace there. Deng, who later confessed to
me that he had secretly hoped to break ground on the
school he plans to build at Ariang, now realizes it is
going to be a much longer process than he ever imagined.
It will have to include such obvious, but major,
educational tasks as training teachers—and other
projects that, in many societies, would have nothing to
do with starting a school, such as bringing clean water
to Ariang. "A school is not just a building," Deng
comments. At the end of December, when his own semester
is over, he plans to return to Ariang.
Chris Koor Garang has learned the
same lesson when it comes to bringing a functioning
clinic to the town of Akon. It's one thing to build a
structure, quite another to staff and equip it. Right
now, the clinic building in Akon is locked up and unused
for lack of funds. So Garang is spending time raising
money. Next spring, he expects to help train nurses,
though in conjunction with what organization he has not
yet decided.
Samuel Garang Mayuol—the only one
of the three who had no clear plan of his own as we
began—came away with a clear sense of mission, once
he saw the circumstances in which his people subsisted.
As soon as he can afford to, he expects to return to
drill wells so that his village, Lang, will have clean
water. For now, he sits on the board of a nonprofit
called
Lost Boys Rebuilding Southern Sudan.
The irony of their personal
situations is far from lost on these men. For all the
wrenching upheavals and suffering they endured, they
have obtained educations and material advantages of
which they would never have dreamed, had they not been
torn from their lives. In fact, it's that very awareness
which drives these three extraordinary young men, but
it's worth remembering that they are among the fortunate
ones. Not all their peers who accompanied them to the
U.S. have fared so well. Some have never recovered from
the endless traumas involved in their flights and
escapes, from the loss of family, of society, of
everything that matters deeply to a child. Some are
simply ordinary people, who have been terribly damaged;
some are descending into alcohol and drug abuse.
And what of that two-year-old,
playing with the pistol in the bar in Kuajok? In 2011,
he will be six—exactly between the ages of Garang and
Mayuol when they fled into the night. Will that child
have a school to attend? Access to medicine? A
childhood? Or will he end up traumatized, at one end or
the other of a gun, the victim of another resource war?
Unless the international community can widen its
spotlight from Darfur and take an active role in
monitoring implementation of the peace agreement in
South Sudan, the answer already seems painfully clear.
David Morse is an
independent journalist and human rights activist whose
articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire,
Friends Journal, the Nation, the New York Times
Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel,
The Iron Bridge (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a
series of petroleum wars in the first two decades of the
21st century. He traveled to South Sudan most recently
with support from the
Nation Institute's Investigative Fund and the
Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and wrote this
article during a residency at
Blue Mountain Center. Part 1 of this two-part report
was
"Starting from Zero." Morse may be reached at:
dmorse@david-morse.com.
Copyright 2007 David Morse
Source:
Tom DispatchDavid
Morse interviewed Sudanese
refugees in South Sudan and Kenya last December, and is
currently working on a book. His articles have appeared
most recently in Alternet, Northeast, The San
Francisco Chronicle, Salon, TomDispatch, and
elsewhere
Publications List.
*
* * * *
Lost Boy Returns
Home and starts Business To USAID
By Patrick J
Perner
Winrock
International, working with partner organizations
through the Volunteers for Economic Growth (VEGA),
implemented USAID’s Agriculture Marketing and Enterprise
Development (AMED) Program in Southern Sudan during
September 1-
September 30, 2008.
During this time, Winrock recruited members of the
Sudanese Diaspora to help assess the existing capacity
of sectors and provide assistance required to upgrade in
terms of human resources and information technology, as
well as to work with local administrations and
Ministries to support and assist them.
An integral goal of
AMED’s work has been to build the capacity of local
government to work with communities to identify,
prioritize and collectively address community needs and
support good governance. The project worked with county
commissioners and their staffs, and with the state
Ministries of Local Government; Social Development;
Education, Science and Technology; and Agriculture,
Livestock and Forestry. In this endeavor Winrock also
built capacity on the civic side, strengthening
development committees, farmer organisations, business
organizations, and Boards of Governors (BOGs). Here is
one Sudanese Diaspora story that needs to be told in
accomplishing AMED’s goal…
Two years ago, a
member of the Sudanese Diaspora, Mabior Deng Manyok,
locally known as Juke volunteered for AMED program. He
had nothing but the desire to help rebuild his war torn
country. Juke is one of the Sudanese children that were
affected by the civil war during the 80s. His story is
one that is touching. He trekked thousands of miles with
so many other children who later became known as the
‘Lost Boys/Girls’ of Sudan. Their experience taught them
to never take life for granted. At first arrival in the
US, these Sudanese young people wasted no time. Many
began going to high schools, some went to colleges and
technical schools, and others went to the labor force.
They continue to fascinate everyone around them through
their sense of resilience. Juke went to Middle Tennessee
State University, studied Information Technologies and
also began an MBA.
Juke, like many other Southern
Sudanese who were given residency status in the United
States of America, equipped himself with skills that
were desperately needed to help Southern Sudan –
Information Technology (IT). Juke reflected on his
reason to assist Sudan, and stated, ‘It is important
that I am here because South Sudan was in Civil War for
a long time and many people did not have an opportunity
to learn. I have come back to teach my fellow countrymen
about IT, and business. This is making a positive
difference for my country. When you have the opportunity
to learn something, you must give back and teach others
as well as advocate for private sector development’.
Juke is one of the Sudan’s Diaspora that has returned
to help his country thanks in large part to assistance
provided by USAID’s AMED Project, under the VEGA
Alliance led by Winrock International.
In November 2006, Juke performed a
six month volunteer assignment with the Ministry of
Environment, Wildlife and Tourism to teach and train
local administration personnel in computers. Juke
stated, ‘as a result of my assignment with USAID’s AMED
Project, the Sudanese local administration and Ministry
learned about computers and how they can be used to
impact change at a local and government level. This was
basic to intermediate training in computers’.
In May 2007, Juke
was selected as a ‘Volunteer of the Year’ and received
an award for his commitment, which was presented in
Washington D.C.
And then Juke made
another long-term commitment to his country. Since
taking part in his assignment with Winrock International
under USAID’s AMED Program, Juke has now decided to stay
in his homeland and has started two companies in Juba,
Sudan. One company, known as IT Solutions has 3
employees, and the other company South Sudan Business
Week is an English Weekly newspaper that employs 10
people. His company IT Solutions received a US$5000
grant from USAID’s AMED Project.
As our core belief
in small enterprise development, USAID’s AMED program
has made it possible for Juke to pursue his dreams and
help his homeland. His business fits right in with the
overall private sector development in the government of
Southern Sudan and employs a number of Sudanese people
who would most likely otherwise be unemployed.
There is no better
example of the resilience of the Sudanese people than
that of Mabior D. Manyok (Juke). Juke mastered himself
with the skills of the 21st century at Middle
Tennesse State University in the United States and has
come home to Sudan to pass on this knowledge. He is the
heart of the Sudanese Diaspora. His IT skills have not
only transformed himself, but also now his homeland.
When Juke took his
volunteer position, he did not realize the sense of
greater contribution he was about to render. And it has
been a contribution that not only has transformed his
life, but now is set to transform his homeland country
of Southern Sudan. The Sudanese Diaspora, like Juke,
have shown they can make a significant contribution to
change in Sudan and are proving willing and able when
provided the opportunity.
The Juba Post of 10-16th
page 13 September 2008, Juba, South Sudan
* *
* * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
 |
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
posted 14 March 2008
|
