Juba, once the region’s capital, has become its Sarajevo. There are no uplinked television cameras there, no reporters or photographers sending out images of suffering. Those trying to provide relief to the region must fear for their lives. Two weeks ago, the government announced the execution of Andrew Tombe, a senior Sudanese employee of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Juba. It claimed Tombe had collaborated with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). “There has been a reign of terror in Juba,” says Nancy Lyons, a nun from California, who last saw Tombe in the city on Aug. 5 sitting in a government security office. “Many people have been picked up and never seen again.” Rebel-controlled areas aren’t safe, either. Last week the United Nations withdrew its employees from a region southeast of Juba after three relief workers and a Norwegian journalist were killed, apparently while in custody of an SPLA splinter group.
Sudan is a country with a deeply split personality: Arab in the north, African in the south. For decades southerners, mostly Christians and animists, have chafed under the far-from-benevolent rule of an Arab government in Khartoum, dominated now by fundamentalist Muslims. During nine years of civil war more than 1.5 million southerners have been displaced, fleeing atrocities committed by all sides. Seven months ago, with arms supplied by Iran and China, the government launched an offensive, capturing more than a dozen towns from the SPLA. The main rebel faction, led by John Garang, is now trying to recoup by seizing Juba, where about 300,000 people are trapped in the siege.
Two weeks ago Herman Cohen, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told Congress that Khartoum was “following a policy of forced Islamization and to a certain extent ethnic cleansing” in the south. Human-rights groups charge Khartoum also is attempting to destroy the Nuba, dark-skinned people of mixed religious beliefs who live along the dividing line between north and south. “Tens of thousands of Nuba have been driven from their homes by the Sudanese Army and government-backed Arab militias,” said a joint report by Africa Watch and Survival International issued last December. “Thousands of men, children and women have been killed in raids and massacres.”
Khartoum has quite intentionally kept the war under wraps. It bars foreign journalists and Western diplomats from the south, and it expelled the last Christian missionaries from Juba in August. One U.N. delegation, led by Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Eliasson, visited Juba for six hours on Sept. 16. Its members found a desperate situation. Thousands of people lived without shelter or sanitation, their homes on the outskirts of town shelled by the SPLA or demolished by government forces to deny cover to attacking rebels. Rations were meager. “The city is afraid of being forgotten by the outside world,” Ed Tsui, one of Eliasson’s senior aides, said later.
Some of the region’s refugees are running away from the scorched-earth campaigns carried out by the Sudanese Army or allied Arab militias. Others are trying to escape from hunger, tribal massacres or SPLA abuses. The displaced live in desolate camps or depend on the mercy of distant relatives. Jean Luc Siblot, a World Food Program field coordinator, recently returned to Nairobi, Kenya, from Mundri, a southern town where 15,000 displaced people are living in abandoned buildings. “All of the children are naked,” he says. “They are just left with nothing.” Many are suffering from malaria, diarrhea, bronchitis or tuberculosis.
While its own citizens suffer, Khartoum has donated 1,000 tons of food and medicine and $500,000 to help suffering people in Muslim Somalia. Sudan already is such an international outcast-it receives virtually no Western assistance other than emergency food-that non-Muslim foreigners have little leverage on the government’s behavior. Military intervention seems out of the question, even under the U.N. aegis. Meantime, news from Juba is sparse. Amnesty International says government forces may have deliberately killed “at least 300 unarmed civilians and prisoners” in Juba. Sometimes corpses are spotted bobbing in the currents of the White Nile. These scanty accounts from Juba are all the world can hear. But like screams from a neighbor’s house, they are painfully difficult to ignore.
