Tribal Warfare Heaps More Woe on Destitute Victims in Hostile Terrain of Sudan

The tall Dinka tribesmen wear castoff European dresses that barely reach their knees.

The women wear ivory bracelets above the elbow but metal bracelets made from mortar shells on their wrists.

Their clothing tells the story. Sudan’s Dinka people, perennial survivors, are destitute victims of war.

The men’s dresses are handouts plucked from the bottom of some suburban drawer in Europe and packed in a plastic bag to be donated to Third World needy.

The men do not mind. It is all the clothing they have after fleeing across some of the world’s most hostile terrain to escape certain death.

Now they and their families await uncertain food supplies from the rebels’ relief organization or any aid agency that endeavors to bring supplies from distant Uganda, a nine-day trek from Kampala across a war zone and glutinous mud.

Trapped in a nine-year war between rebels and the Khartoum government, the Dinka are victims of tribal clashes between feuding wings of the rebel Sudan Peoples Liberation Army.

Early in this month, 1,000 Dinka marched into this garrison town because they could take no more. They walked for 200 miles surviving on grass and water from puddles.

“A man came to me one morning and said: “My people have decided to move or they will starve,” said Charles Akulep of the Munich-based Action Africa In Need charity.

“We have been told another 7,000 are arriving, but we don’t know when.”

The newcomers have fled to escape massacres by their ethnic cousins, the Nuer, following a split in the SPLA between its Nuer and Dinka leadership.

The mainstream, led by John Garang, draws its support from Dinka. The breakaway Nasir faction groups mainly Nuer.

Dinka living in the Jonglei province on the East bank of the Nile have fled to areas under Garang’s protection to escape reprisal by the Nuers armed by the Nasir faction.

The fugitives say a Nuer militia raided their villages in the middle of the night with automatic weapons and hand grenades and burned people alive in their huts. Young girls and cattle were taken away as bounty.

Their stories are impossible to verify in this wilderness, but aid workers familiar with the long history of insurrection and tribal carnage of southern Sudan believe them.

There are no telephones, electricity or paved roads around Mundri. Development never reached the town. The broad avenues and high-rise banks of Khartoum are 750 miles away.

Elephant grass has taken over the area, towering even over the tall Dinka. The only landmarks are the occasional carcass of a truck blown up by a mine in the guerrilla war.

Mundri “hospital” is a shell. AAIN wanted to start a preventive health care clinic but found that emergency needs were more pressing and switched its focus.

“There was no point concentrating on preventive health when everyone was dying of hunger,” said Akulep.

In the conflict, the SPLA wants to break the domination of the Muslim fundamentalist government in Khartoum over the Christian and animist people of the vast bush and swamp of southern Sudan.

But the government’s hand has been strengthened by the split in the SPLA and there are many allegations by Garang’s faction that the Nasir group is a government-funded wrecking tactic.

In recent months, fighting between the rebels and with the government has sounded alarm bells in the offices of aid agencies stationed in Kenya.

They fear that a new emergency on the scale of Somalia is lurking in the remote region because war has wrecked farming and shows no sign of ending.