Creating Devastation and Calling it Islam: The War for the Nuba, Sudan

The war in Sudan is conventionally mis-described in terms of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) "fighting for more autonomy for the mainly Christian and animist South." This is wrong on several counts. First, the SPLA is fighting for a "new Sudan" in the whole country, and includes significant groups of non-Southerners among its forces. The Nuba people of southern Kordofan are prominent among these. Second, there are Muslims serving in the SPLA, including the late Yousif Kuwa Mekki, the charismatic Nuba leader who died in March 2001, and his successor, Abdel Aziz Adam al Hilu. Third, there are no animists in Sudan: followers of traditional religions are mostly theists--"noble spiritual believers" in the apt and sensitive terminology of the now-replaced 1973 Constitution. An even more egregiously wrong characterization of the conflict is "Christian rebels" against a "Muslim government." The war in Sudan is fundamentally about greed and identity. And religion has become an integral part of the contested identities of Sudanese, nowhere more so than in the Nuba Mountains.

Caught in the middle are a diverse group of peoples who give name to the mountain range in the center of the country: the Nuba. Celebrated by anthropologists and photographers for their dancing, wrestling, and body painting, ¹ the Nuba are facing the possible demise of their culture. The Nuba peoples number approximately 1.5 million, however, they comprise more than forty different ethnic groups with a variety of languages, united by the fact that they are black Africans distinct from their Sudanese Arab cattle-herding neighbors. The Nuba include followers of Islam, Christianity, and traditional religions. Neglected and discriminated against by successive governments in Khartoum, many Nuba sympathized with the Southern-led rebellion of the SPLA in the early 1980s. In 1985, civil unrest ignited in the Nuba Mountains between units of the SPLA and local Arab militia. Since then the region has been one of the fronts in Sudan's civil war.

For the first ten years of the conflict, the rest of the world knew nothing of what was happening there. Army and militia forces burned swathes of villages, and hundreds of Nuba chiefs and educated people were detained and murdered by security forces. In 1992, the government launched one of its largest military campaigns, aiming to clear the SPLA from the region, partly by forcibly relocating hundreds of thousands of Nuba away from their villages to "peace camps" around army garrisons, in some cases hundreds of miles away. The campaign failed, but the war continued, characterized by violence against civilians: killings, burnings, and rape. ² Throughout this period the mountains were sealed off, and no humanitarian assistance was permitted.

In 1995, following documentation of the war and human rights abuses by the British NGO African Rights and the BBC, outside attention was belatedly drawn to the Nuba predicament. A small relief airlift was established into the SPLA-held enclaves where about 300,000 people were living. While the opening up of the Nuba Mountains has allowed the international community to witness the suffering of the Nuba, it has not translated either into a large-scale relief program (the United Nations has yet to deliver on repeated promises to activate a significant relief effort) or into political action to achieve peace. There have been serious government offensives every year since 1996, ³ as well as well-publicized incidents of aerial bombardment of schools and hospitals. ⁴

The war has many dimensions. The Nuba conflict is part of the wider Sudanese war, which is being fought for state power, for control of the nation's resources, and for ideology. It has its local aspects: merchants and government officers in Kordofan State (which contains the Nuba Mountains) covet the rich farmland in the valleys between the Nuba hills. Sudan's oil fields lie immediately to the south of the mountains; clearing the roads and...