Because of Who They Are: Genocide in the Nuba Mountains

By – Slater Armstrong

I have some thoughts and questions on genocide as it relates to the Nuba Mountains of Sudan that hopefully will prompt further consideration.

According to the Genocide Convention:
…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II

and according to the discussion of the Nuba Mountains on the IAGS Listserv:

…. the Rome Statute also includes a contextual element that demands that a genocidal act must be part of a “pattern of similar attacks.”

this regime’s historic behavior clearly demonstrates a “pattern of similar attacks” NOT ONLY in the much discussed and commonly defined Darfur Genocide, but more than equally so in the much neglected and overlooked Nuba Genocide which took place during the “civil war” between the North and the South from the 1980′s through 2002. Is it not this very “pattern of similar attacks” that brought Sam Totten to the Nuba Mountains this past winter, seeking to verify the first genocide of this regime against the Nuba people.

What is lacking or missing here according to the legal definition of genocide from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide? If Darfur is under genocide, then most certainly are the Nuba.

The very name of the state you have clarified in references as South Kordofan (not to be confused with South Sudan) is from the Arab-Islamic renaming of the region. Each mountain in these Nuba Mountains bear the names of the tribes associated with them. Names of towns and villages also bear the names of the tribes.

If the extremely fragile state of their identity as people groups, cultures and societies will only be examined purposefully, the evidence that they are at the “end” and not the beginning of this genocide will surely come in to focus. There should be the same imperative from the community of archaeologists and anthropologists that rushed to the scene of the Aswan Dam last century to preserve the historic riches of that region along the Nile. According to the Sudanese, as well as themselves, these are the remnants of the civilizations that populated those historic sites, minus the Arabization experienced by their brothers and sisters still living there in Nubia. (The Nubians and Beja peoples at the northern border of Sudan are also facing similar initiatives and campaigns by the way.)

The Nuba have resisted this forced Arabization for centuries, and are a constant “thorn in the side” to all who have tried to “tame” them and bring them under the common culture of the Arab identity. They continually are saying, “WE ARE NOT ARAB!”

In case you are not familiar with the extremely informative article on Landmines in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, this expert opinion of Roger Winter should carry some clarity and weight in your determinations. I have highlighted some of the statements more pertinent to our conversation.

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Landmines and recovery in Sudan’s Nuba mountains
(Africa Today Vol. 55, No. 3 (2009)
Introduction
Traditionally, many of the Nuba people of the Kordofan
region of Sudan have located their homes and village
communities on the face of rugged mountains, collectively
known as the Nuba Mountains. Their choice of this
architectural mode was an integral part of a complex
adaptive response to hostile influences that threatened
their homeland (for reference to the contemporary defensive
value of hillside settlement, see Varhola 2007:48). Over
the past two hundred years, the world of the Nuba, which
once stretched over most of the arable clay plains of
today’s Kordofan region, was progressively circumscribed as
a result of direct actions by an array of outsiders. Such
actions ranged from open warfare–punitive campaigns by
Mahdist armies in the 1880s; British colonial government
pacification campaigns, which lasted for about thirty years
following the defeat of Mahdist forces, in 1898; and from
1985 to 2002, Sudan government military and paramilitary
campaigns–to gradual encroachment and settlement in
traditional lands by groups that were not previously
inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains, such as the Baggara
tribes, which migrated to Nuba lands from northern
Kordofan, elite Sudanese businessmen (collectively known as
jellaba), who hailed from other parts of the country, and
other ethnic groups, which migrated from the western
stretches of the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa
(Cunnison 1966; Manger 1994; Saeed 2001; Salih 1995).
Previous research examined every conceivable aspect of
existence in the Nuba Mountains, including history,
kinship, artistic traditions, linguistic heritage, patterns
of culture, and social and economic organization (for
instance, de Waal 1995; Faris 1972, 1989; MacMichael 1912;
Manger 1994; Nadel 1947; Rahha12001; Riefenstahl 1974;
Saeed 2001; Sargar 1922; Stevenson 1984; Varhola 2007). Its
findings show that the Nuba have a long history and an
ancient culture, and that they constituted what Nadel
(1947) described as “a bewildering complexity” of more than
fifty ancient ethnic groups, which inhabited the southern
and western provinces of Kordofan region (Faris 1989;
Stevenson 1984) and, despite tribal individuality (Faris
1989; Nadel 1947), have coalesced around a singular
contemporary “Nuba” identity, derived from a shared
homeland, strong similarities in social values, customs,
physical attributes, social organizational patterns, and
patterns of economic activity, and a long collective
history of conflict with “outsiders” (Varhola 2007)………………..(skpping ahead)
41). To understand the
reasons behind this perception of future Nuba-Baggara
relations, one has to examine Baggara involvement, from
1985 on, in the government’s war against the Nuba people.
In July 1985, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army
(SPLM/A) extended its field of military operations into the
Nuba Mountains. This marked the start of seventeen years of
open warfare against the Nuba people. At the beginning,
Major-General Fadllala Burma Nasir (General Nimeiri’s
national defense minister, architect of some of the war
effort against the SPLM/A, and later a member of the
Command Council that ousted Nimeiri, in April 1985), who
was from the Miseriya Zurug Baggara, armed and formed two
of the Baggara tribes, the Hwazma and the Miseriya, Nuba’s
historical adversaries, into militia forces (locally known
as the Murahaleen) and unleashed them on Nuba populations.
Murahaleen attacks caused massive destruction of
traditional farmlands and villages and the death of many
Nuba (de Waal 1995; Rahha12001). In 1986, the
democratically elected government of Prime Minister El-
Sadig El-Mahdi, grandson of the Mahdi, reorganized and
further empowered the Baggara (traditional supporters of
Mahdist ideologies for more than a century) Murahaleen
militia to continue executing pogroms against the Nuba
people.
Under the Islamist regime of Brigadier Omar Hassan Al-
Bashir (30 June 1989 to present), some officials in the
national government of Sudan went further and repeatedly
expressed overt intentions at exterminating the Nuba people
and in the process resorted to all means, including the use
of Baggara militias, to achieve a “final solution” to the
“Nuba problem” (Africa Watch 1992; Rahhal 2001). 2001). First,
from 1989 to 2001 the amount of Nuba land given through the
Mechanized Farming Corporation to enterprising “others” was
tripled, from the five million hectares already sequestered
in 1986 (Rahha12001:46). In addition, the Nuba people were
subjected to killings through extrajudicial executions, the
destruction of villages through direct military ground
offensives, indiscriminant shelling and air bombardment,
and pogroms inflicted by Baggara tribal militias (Rahhal
2001; Varhola 2007:48). These atrocities culminated in the
forced removal of an estimated total 173,000 Nuba men,
women, and children (Hassan 2005:65) from traditional
homelands to what government authorities called “peace
villages,” designed to hold up to 500,000 people (Center
for International Development and Conflict Management 2002;
Rahhal 2001:49). The brutality the Nuba experienced there
in the form of forced labor, beatings, torture, forcible
rapes of women and young girls, and outright executions of
educated people was proof that they were intended to
function as death camps of the sort sometimes seen at
violent war zones elsewhere in the world (Africa Watch
1992; Burr 1998; de Waal 1995; Human Rights Watch 1996;
Rahhal 2001). The 400,000 who escaped the government’s
dragnet were ultimately confined to the SPLM/A-Nuba
liberated enclave, which consisted of approximately one
hundred eight-five villages scattered over the Dilling,
Lagawa, west Kadugh, Buram, Nagurban, Heiban, and Delami
administrative regions (ACT International 2003:4). These
areas were increasingly encircled by landmines, planted by
government forces and the SPLM/A-Nuba forces as part of
combat or defensive maneuvers (Landmine Monitor 2002). In
2002, it was estimated that 90 percent of the fertile plain
in the Nuba Mountains was unavailable for cultivation, and
that the entire population in the rebel enclave could not
access water points because of the actual or suspected
presence of landmines (ACT International 2003; Landmine
Monitor 2002).
Demographic Stress: 1985-2002
The war situation in the Nuba Mountains between July 1985
and January 2002 created difficulties that prevented the
national government and international agencies from
compiling reliable demographic data. Figures of the total
Nuba population and its relative weight in the total
Kordofan region or total Sudanese populations were “best
estimates,” most likely derived from historical natural
fertility and mortality census statistics. Estimates of
Nuba war casualties should be treated likewise, since the
deaths have usually occurred in small numbers in hundreds
of villages that have been isolated from the outside world
(Burr 1998; U.S. Committee for Refugees 1998).
Published statistics indicate total Nuba populations of
1.03 million in 1983 (Saeed 2001), 1.6 million in 1995
(Verney 1995) and 2.1 million in 2002 (Encyclopedia of the
Orient 2005). These figures appear to represent a net
increase in the total population size by about 56,000 each
year from 1983 to 2002; however, counterbalancing the
annual population growth figures with war-mortality
statistics reveals the significant demographic attrition
the Nuba have suffered since 1985. The reported war
casualty statistics may overlap and must therefore be
carefully interpreted. For instance, Burr (1998) reported
that more than 100,000 to 200,000 Nuba were believed to
have been killed in a nine-year period from 1989 to 1998,
and according to de Waal (1995), in a nine-month campaign
between May 1992 and February 1993, government forces
killed between 60,000 and 70,000 Nuba civilians. Rahhal
(2001) reported hundreds of annual killings from 1991 to
1994. Though the casualty statistics are almost impossible
to reconcile, even a conservative extrapolation from each
set of estimates suggests considerable population attrition
(net of any figures representing mortality from natural
causes), averaging from 16,000 (for Burr’s estimates) to
86,000 (de Waal’s and Rahhal’s estimates) deaths per year.
Technically, these averages suggest that the 56,000 figure
representing annual net increase in the Nuba population
(calculated by the author from the 1983 and 2002 total
population estimates) was either effectively reduced by one
third, suggesting a less than normal population growth, or
completely surpassed by the total annual death statistics,
suggesting actual population decline. In fact, a handful of
studies that have examined Nuba war-time demographic data
have already classified the situation in the Nuba Mountains
as an outright genocide (Africa Watch 1992; Burr 1998; de
Waal 1995; Fein 1997; Rahha12001; Salih 1995).
(these are just excerpts from Roger Winter’s informative article. it is worth reading in it’s entirety, but is seems too long and inappropriate for me to post it here.)

I am also including a letter that was leaked and publicly denounced by Abdelaziz last fall that demonstrates the intentions of Vice President Taha and Ahmed Haroun. Though it doesn’t have the verification for use as evidence at this point, the authenticity of the communique is found in the veracity of these attacks on the people of the Nuba Mountains. Couple this with the public statements Bashir has made about “cleansing” the land, etc., and I would hope that any fear of overuse of the term genocide might be assuaged.

Translated from Arabic to English by Gafar O. Kangam/11/29/2010 Page 1 (Arabic Writing – couldn’t copy from pdf image file)
Translated from Arabic to English by Gafar O. Kangam/11/29/2010 Page 2
In the name of Allah, the Compassion and the Compassionate
Very Confidential
To auspice of brother Governor of Southern Kordofan State
Orders of brother Vice-President of the Republic during his first visit to the state
To the brother Governor of Southern Kordofan
The evaluation of political-security and strategic plans for parties in the coming period
Strategic plan No.: (11). Quadrupled plans towards the Modern Southerners.
1) It is required to recruit descendents of the Modern Southerners into security forces and into non-security institutions so as to enable for controlling them through military commands.
2) Disrupt return of their elites and their Diaspora from returning to the region so that they will not take part in political, social, and cultural activities in the region; and it is essential that they be absorbed and organized to weaken the Modern Southerners.
3) It is vital to revive religious institutions (Islamic teachings, Islamic moralization, Islamic charities….etc.); and enlisting a large number of the descendants of the Modern Southerners in the above-
Translated from Arabic to English by Gafar O. Kangam/11/29/2010 Page 3
mentioned projects, especially in the chosen areas until it is possible to control their intellects.
4) And then, occupy them with internal and external quarrels so as to enable for extorting them from their roots.
My Notes:
[The title “brother” is as used by theocratic (Islamic in this respect) states as a manner of addressing state officials].
[The term “Modern Southerners” is a derogatory labeling that is applied to everyone who does not agree with agenda of the ruling National Congress Party in Khartoum within the region in general; but more so to those who are in the areas commonly known as “the Librated Area” within the Nuba Mountains].
[The religious revivalism establishment mentioned-above is a reference to establishment and expansion of Maddrassas (Kora’anic schools) in Nuba Mountains. This is a very critical move (in my view) particularly since the Nuba Mountains is an exceptional region of the entire Sudan. There exist Pagans, Christians, and Muslims. The region is also an ethnically diverse where lives of people of Arab ethnics and African ethnics interact].

The mass graves, executions, and forced starvation should also be weighed, along with the “forced breeding” through rapes and enslavements, and the “peace camps” from the last genocide all clearly demonstrate the intent to end the cultural and racial identities of the Nuba. Chasing them out of their lands, scattering the communities throughout the world is an effective way to ensure that their customs, their songs, their dances are lost for all time. Having spent much time with the diaspora community here in America, and contrasting that against my recordings of their singing and dancing in the Nuba, they are not able to maintain their own culture, language, and identity under such conditions.

Be assured, this is the intent of Khartoum’s regime, Bashir, Haroun, Taha, Nafi, et al. – cleansing, exterminating, dislodging, Arabizing, Islamizing, enslaving, dissipating, etc. are all perpetrated against these noble peoples for centuries. This regime simply wants to finish it, to “find a solution” to the “Nuba problem” once and for all!

Thank you for letting me be a part of your critical conversation and deliberation.

___

Slater Armstrong has been actively involved in advocacy efforts for persecuted Christians in Sudan since 1997, preserving their culture through audio and video recordings of their indigenous expressions of song and dance. Slater has spent the last 10 years researching the history of the Nuba as a “federation” of people groups, developing succinct multi-media presentations that discuss the heart of who they are and why they are under constant threat of genocide. He is founder/co-founder of several organizations, including the newly formed Nuba Mountains American Advocacy Group, Inc. where he serves as vice-president, and develops and manages their website, endnubagenocide.org.