Seed of South Sudan (13 page)

After a short time the UN asked for a delegate to visit the compound and they worked out a solution. The situation changed, and wheat grain replaced the
miath
. We did not know why the
miath
was substituted, only that it caused a great deal of illness. We did know that the camp was growing—quickly. In this time, there were about 50,000 people in the camp, and there were 53 groups of Sudanese. Of these, there were 17 groups of boys. In addition there were community groups of 18- to 50-year-old people gathered in their tribal and national groups. Among the refugees were Sudanese, Burundis, and Somalians. In addition there were people who wanted to form communities around their faiths. There was a Holy Cross Catholic Church community group, and there was an Episcopal Church community group.

From 1996 to 1999, the camp became even bigger. They had to build a larger distribution center. This was probably to accommodate large numbers of Rwandan refugees, as well as even more refugees from Somalia, as these increased the numbers at Kakuma in 1996. Now the camp held 80,000 or more.

The biggest change for us was that we had to each go get our food, and it resulted in extreme mistreatment from Kenyan police. The first sign of change was Kenyan workers employed by the UN building a huge metal wire fence around the new center. Within the outside fences, they built little columns, narrow paths bending back and forth so that refugees would queue up in these lines for food, rather than have food brought to their groups where the group leaders could distribute it.

The first day that they tried to have the refugees line up in this way for a bi-weekly ration, there was trouble. The Kenyan police were the ones who were directing the lines. When people did not move fast enough or objected to the long lines, police beat them with a stick. These police beat and beat those who were their targets. They struck on the joints—elbows and knees especially—where the pain is the greatest. I will never forget these scenes of beatings by the local police, who were hired by the UN to do this.

In terms of food, it was no different in amount. But when we had control of our own food, it felt more secure. As refugees, this was all we had. If I volunteered and coached volleyball for years, I received no pay. Like anyone else, all I had was this ration every two weeks. If I broke a pen or it ran out of ink, I traded half a cup of wheat—half of my food for two weeks—to replace it. Food was our currency, and we wanted to control that currency. To know we would not starve was very important.

But this food fight we did not win. We were forced into the fences, to stand in line for hours and hours for a single ration. In fact, I had to choose whether to eat or to go to school. If I stood in line, sometimes it would take two days to receive a ration. I had to be absent from school all that time, and I missed lessons that I needed to understand later information.

The Kenyan police carried this stick called a
rugu
, a Kiswahili word. They beat people even when there was no reason. They beat people like animals. Even though the UN saw that the police were beating them to a very dangerous point, nobody would say, “These are the people, don't do that.” So it was a really bad life. Those blows to the joints would hurt for days.

There were some occasions when we traveled back to Loki for short visits. There was a checkpoint on the way; the cops would be up there. You would travel by bus, or
matatu
, a minivan that runs from Loki to Kakuma and from Kakuma to Lodwar. If you are in this area, and they see you are Sudanese, knowing you don't know Kiswahili, they would put you in this house they have and tell you that you have to provide travel papers, or you have to give them money. If you don‘t have the money, they put you in jail. I had found myself some papers, but I still had to give them money. That time was really bad.

The police, like other Kenyans, were thinking we were a people who do not have a country or do not have a good place. But if you go to South Sudan now, there are Kenyans everywhere. They have learned about our country and found it has many things to like. When we were in their country, they looked at us like we were not human. And they said we were bad people. We tell them, “You know what—we stayed in your country for nine years, and so we know what Kenya is like. We are physically very close to you, yet we didn't know what Kenya was like, and Kenyans didn't know what South Sudan is like. Now you see our country is not even like your country; we've got a lot of resources, a great deal more than in northwestern Kenya, and we have a good country.”

In Kakuma, thanks to Father Madol and thanks to the large Catholic population in the town of Kakuma, we had a big Mass under the tree, and the Catholic people in the town supplied other needs to the refugees. They even sent people to lots of competitions like choir competitions. The Episcopal Church was also very big there. The choirs would compete. They would go to Lodwar, the headquarters of the Turkana District, and they would be part of the competitions. This is where they also had leagues to play soccer and basketball and volleyball, and since I was coach of volleyball for Zone 2, I went on many of these trips.

The people we met there would say, “Why don't you people have a good country? People are fighting there, and you are competing with us?”

And we'd say, “Well, what do you do? It doesn't mean that if people are fighting in Sudan we don't do other activities.” They thought that we would not have any talents to show other people, that we were coming from the bush and had no special skills. But we won a lot of volleyball championship cups from them.

This change in how we got our food was traumatic to some people. The presence of the Kenyan police was more evident—they were everywhere. By this time, the camp had grown to more than 80,000, and included many Somalians who'd been moved from two camps in northeastern Kenya where there was a lot of violence. For those in the camp, the process of getting food meant not going to school. Since we had traveled so many miles over so many years to get to safety to have a future while southern Sudan was under assault, we were pretty unhappy with this situation.

Majok Marier (left) and Stephen Chol Bayok, friends since the Pinyudo Refugee Camp.

At the same time we knew there were not many alternatives. The war still raged in southern Sudan, and we knew from our forced exit from Pinyudo and the sudden move from Kapoeta that returning to the war zone was fraught with dangers. We did not hear much current news of the war, but we knew that there were no prospects for ending it anytime soon. This was in 1996; the war had begun in 1983. So there wasn't much hope we could go back home.

The coordinated protest to challenge serving the
miath
instead of an edible grain gave us a sense of ourselves as a strong force for change. We were not able to take part in the war, but we could strengthen ourselves in the camp. One way we did this was through our community meetings. Here everyone spoke Dinka, and so we could talk easily about what we knew of the war, and about other things.

If it was a perfectly dark night and I could not see the person when I heard it, I would still know another Agar Dinka by the sound of the voice. The way the person speaks would tell me, even if I could not see the person's height—we are a very tall people—or other physical markings. That is how I identified my friend, another Lost Boy, Stephen Chol Bayok.

I am one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. The name refers to survivors of the longest war in African history that caused many of us to walk hundreds of miles to three different countries seeking refuge. Many of us resettled in the United States in 2001. The civil war broke out in 1983 between the south Sudanese, who are Christian, and north Sudanese, who are Muslim. Most people around the world see it as civil war, but in fact, it was a religious war. Because it was the religious war, Darfurans who are African and Muslim in western Sudan, joined Arabic north Sudanese who are Muslim to fight their African brothers in the south. The Muslims in Sudan wanted the entire nation to be Muslims.

The most important factors that caused civil war in Sudan are religion, race, power and language. Within these factors, the most important factor that leads to civil war in Sudan is religion. Muslims in northern Sudan want Islam to be the national religion. For example, the government of Sudan was under the control of the National Islamic Front (NIF) until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 ending the civil war was signed between north and south. This NIF government was the signal that determined the entire nation should be an Islamic nation. However, Christians in southern Sudan did not want a national religion, but instead they wanted freedom of religion. From the 1950s to 1987, Muslims in north Sudan tried very hard to convert Christians and other believers to Islam. For example, Muslims must be given a job before a Christian, and the Muslims do this successfully by tracing names such as Stephen, John, and so on. The Islamic Government used this job discrimination in order to convert the Christians to Islam.

Another more important factor which led to the war is power. Muslims do not want Christians to lead them because most of them believe that Christians are pagan and that nonbelievers should not rule them. Another is race. African descendants live in southern Sudan whereas Arab descendants live in northern Sudan. Each race sees the other race as less important in the country in term of cultures and traditions. There are two different cultures and traditions in the country. For instance, Arabs marry their cousins but Africans do not. Another less important factor, which leads to civil war in Sudan, is language. Arabs in Sudan speak Arabic but Africans speak their own languages, dialects, and English. Arabs want Arabic to be the main language in Sudan but Africans want to use all languages.

The government of Sudan passed sharia laws as the nation's supreme laws of the land in 1982 due to the pressure they received from the Islamic nations which support the government financially and militarily, such as Iraq. These sharia laws would have been applied to both Christians in the south and Muslims in the north. South Sudanese did not want sharia law to be applied in the south because sharia law dishonored Christian values. Sharia laws have more disadvantages then advantages. For instance, sharia laws say if a person steals something, their hand should be cut off; if a woman commits adultery, she should be stoned to death. This application of sharia laws to the entire nation and failure of the government of [Ja'afer] Nimeiri to implement the requests of Anyana One, the first civil war, in agreements in Addis Ababa in 1972 that ended the first war, fueled the second civil war. Without alternatives for south Sudan, they formed the rebel group called the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) and started the war in nineteen eighty-three. The SPLA/M captured many towns in the south from 1984 to 1986.

Because the SPLA/M was very successful on the battlefield, the government's solution to the civil war was to destroy the source of the SPLA/M's power. The source of the SPLA/M's support was known to the government: the Christians in the south. So, in 1987, the government of Sudan ordered the army to destroy villages in south Sudan. This destruction was aimed to destroy the power of the SPLA/M and to introduce sharia laws and Islamic culture in south Sudan. In 1987, the government destroyed almost all the villages in south Sudan without the intervention of neighboring countries' governments or the international community. So, with the aim of killing specific groups of people in a particular area, was this civil war, genocide, and a holocaust?

I was born in a small village called Maborkoch near Rumbek town in 1977 in southern Sudan. Life was beautiful and good. However, in 1987 when I was 10 years old, the Islamic government of northern Sudan destroyed my village. The destruction happened around 3 p.m. the time children played outside far way from parents. I was one of the children who were grazing cows and playing as we usually did. Unfortunately, we heard gunshots. When we looked around, we saw helicopter gunships bombing the villages. A few minutes later, those who were fortunate enough to escape the destruction arrived in the bush. Because of gunfire and the bombing, the cows ran back to the villages. The merciless soldiers on the ground did strictly what they were told by the government; they killed people and cows and burned down the entire villages. Those of us who were fortunate enough to live remained in the bush. At around 9 p.m. we went to the villages. There was nothing but dead people and animals, some on fire. That was the end of my beautiful childhood, and I felt that there was no need to live anymore. However, in the same night, something moved me. That something was not fear because I gave up on life and wanted to die, but something in me told me to get up and walk. I got up and walked, not knowing where I was going. So, I walked to the east because the soldiers who destroyed our villages came from the west and north.