An advocate for Africa

I had heard about African Rights, and its directors Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar, in various articles in the international press. But it was above all Fr. Renato Kizito Sesana who advised me to visit the organisation during my stay in England. Fr. Kizito, as our readers will no doubt remember, was the author of our January cover feature on the Nuba people of Sudan and will, in the near future, be publishing some articles on Africa in our magazine.

Africa Rights is an organisation which is dedicated to working on issues of grave human rights abuses, conflict and famine in Africa, and to working towards civil reconstruction in that troubled continent. It attempts to give a voice to Africans concerned with these pressing issues, and to push for more accountability from the international community.

In spite of his heavy schedule, Mr. de Waal kindly agreed to be interviewed at the organisation’s headquarters in London.

Conte: You and Rakiya Omaar are the founders of ‘African Rights’. When was the organisation born and what are its principal aims?

de Waal: African Rights had a very curious and unexpected beginning. What happened was that my colleague, Rakiya, and I were working for Africa Watch; she was the director, I was the deputy. In 1992 we had been working a lot in Somalia. At the end of November 1992, when President Bush proposed sending the U.S. Marines supposedly to save Somalia, we took one look at the proposal and said that we couldn’t support it since there were no human rights guarantees and it was based on an erroneous reading of the situation. Facts used to justify the intervention were just contentions, so we opposed it. But Human Rights Watch in New York and Washington supported it very strongly and very clearly instructed us to do so too. We refused, and as a result Rakiya was fired, so I resigned. The next day we decided that we weren’t going to be silenced so we set up our own organisation, African Rights, with a slightly different philosophy. We wanted to have our agenda set by the people in the countries where we were working rather than applying a set of principles derived from Western tradition which may be very valuable, but which may not speak to the realities of the people in African nations. We also wanted to feel freer to criticise international organisations be they aid agencies, the U.N., western governments, or western militaries that get involved in Africa, and evaluate them in a systematic, structural way. We hope that our criticism will lead to improvements.

One of the most troubled African nations is currently the Sudan. In recent years, the conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian and Animist south has ravaged the country. Is this conflict really over or not?

It’s not over, and actually I very much fear that it’s getting worse. We have tried to focus on the neglected aspects of the conflict. We have two main programmes in Sudan. One is to look at the development of non military civil institutions in southern Sudan. The second is looking at the marginalised people in the north. You talked about the war between North and South, but there are substantial areas of the North that are also affected by war. There are three in particular that I would point to: one is the Nuba mountains, the second is South Blue Nile and the third is the Beja hills. There are also several million displaced people from the south in these marginal areas, who are subject to discrimination and abuse. To date, our major activities have been with the Nuba. When we set up African Rights I was already working with some Nuba groups both inside and outside the Sudan. The Nuba at that time had had no humanitarian aid at all since the war began in 1985, no human rights monitoring, no real publicity to their plight. So we began to work on how we could get there, do research, and monitor human rights. It became clear that we would need to set up an infrastructure for getting regular access to non-government held areas. It also became clear that the Nuba people in those areas were extremely dynamic and resourceful. Partly because of the way in which they had been so completely isolated, they’d really become extremely self reliant and developed a real model of village democracy.

Regarding the conflict between the North and the South, do you think it is really a question of a religious war or something else?

The war arose from a question of power and money. Essentially, the government wanted power, and certain economic resources that were in the South such as land and oil. Religion was used in a very cynical way in the North in the late ‘70s and ‘80s as a way for Nimeiry (the ex-head of state in Sudan, overthrown in 1985), who was not a religious man, to gain legitimacy. Sudan is so diverse, so difficult to rule, and there’s no single common concept or faith in the broader sense of a political idea that can unite. Nimeiry found that he had to make alliances with various groups, and some of these were mutually incompatible. In the late ‘70s he began to see that the more conservative Islamist groups that had been opposing him were actually extremely powerful, and above all, extremely well financed with solid links to the Arab world and to the United States. As part of his shift towards the western bloc he began to take these groups on board and to use Islam as a central idea for legitimising his rule. In doing so, he antagonised the some former allies, and tried to buy them off with mixed success. One group he failed to buy off were Southern army officers who mutinied. So Islam emerged as a sort of political strategy, but as the war went on, it took a more extreme path through the National Islamic Front.

Who has been financing all this?

The Sudanese state is pretty much bankrupt but there is a very powerful Islamic international set; a sort of network with banks and individual financiers, many based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, who have a lot of money.

You are one of the very few non Sudanese who has visited Nuba territory. Why and when did you go?

We went as an organisation at the end of 1994. My colleague Yoanes Ajawin went first, and I went a few months later. We’d been involved in the Nuba mountains for some years and had recognised that the area was completely cut off from other people, and that people there were suffering quite appalling abuses. But as we got more involved with the Nuba, we found that they were hardly limited by their isolation; they were extremely self-reliant and had developed many strong institutions which were supporting their resistance. Initially we had planned to direct our Nuba campaign internationally towards the West and to say: Here are the poor suffering Nuba, they need help, but increasingly we recognised that the salvation of the Nuba people lay primarily with the Nuba themselves and that the best service we could do them was to bring their cause to the attention of the world, and to support what they were doing themselves. In particular we began supporting two organisations: the Nuba Mountain Solidarity Abroad which is a Nuba organisation engaged in human rights and the Nuba Relief Rehabilitation and Development Society which is the indigenous democratically elected Nuba relief organisation which has become extremely strong. In April-May of 1995 we flew in with a BBC TV crew and travelled around the Nuba mountains on foot. It was an astonishing and very emotional experience to see places that had been completely isolated for 10 years, and people who believed they’d been entirely forgotten by the world. The hospitality towards us was quite astonishing. And the extent to which they had fallen back on their own resources and mobilised themselves was really very inspiring.

Did you get permission from the Sudanese government for yourself and the BBC crew, or was it an unofficial visit?

It was entirely unofficial. The Sudan government has put a very strict embargo on any access to the Nuba Mountains apart form one or two areas under government control. It had given instructions to shoot down planes trying to enter the area, and completely forbidden UN access. We got in clandestinely by flying from Kenya to a strip in a non-government-held area, an operation which took about a year to set up; it was quite complicated and not always risk-free.

During your period with the Nuba did you ever fear for your life?

I felt very nervous flying in. It was an extraordinary trip, although one or two aircraft had gone before. Yoanes, who I mentioned earlier, had gone to prepare the ground for us, but the plane that we went on was the first major flight that took any substantial number of people. As we took off from an intermediate place which was an airstrip in southern Sudan, we saw a lot of the Nuba who were there to wave us off and we realised that we were carrying a lot of their hopes. We felt a tremendous weight of responsibility. But once actually inside the Nuba Mountains, our security was extremely well taken care of by the Nuba.

Early in 1992 the Sudanese government declared a jihad (Holy War) against the Nuba. What have been the consequences of this jihad?

The jihad was really the turning point in the Nuba War, it was the most dramatic, the most extreme effort by the Sudan government to completely crush Nuba resistance, and also to transform the political, social, economic, religious and cultural identity of the Nuba. The jihad involved a number of things. One was massed artillery, infantry and air assaults on the Nuba Mountains involving more than 40,000 troops which failed, at immense cost of human life on both sides. Vast areas of the Nuba Mountains were destroyed, and many villages were burned. People were forced into local garrison towns, or trucked outside the Nuba Mountains altogether. It appeared that the strategy of the Sudan government was to completely remove the Nuba from their ancestral homeland. That also failed, partly because there was some international opposition, but mainly because of the simple military fact that they couldn’t defeat the Nuba resistance. Nuba soldiers were going into battle with just a few bullets in their ammunition clips but still they were resisting the Sudan army because they knew the territory, and they knew it was a fight for survival. In the longer term, the Jihad has seen the creation of ‘peace camps’ which are essentially concentration camps, set up as a sort of archipelago across the Nuba mountains, where people who have been burned out of their villages and rounded up by the army are taken. The men are either killed or forcibly conscripted into the militia. The women are usually raped or married off to soldiers, and often made to work as unpaid labourers on farms or in the garrisons. The children are often made to work or are taken away for Islamic education in special schools.

Is the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) doing anything to help the Nuba people?

The SPLA in the Nuba Mountains is led by Yousif Kuwa Mekki , a remarkable man and a Nuba. He has a very deep cultural commitment to the Nuba. Before joining the SPLA he led an underground Nuba organisation called Komolo which wanted to give new pride to the Nuba. The Nuba leaders have displayed a remarkable depth of political commitment to their people. They have an excellent record on human rights and on setting up institutions to serve the people ranging from judicial institutions and elected councils to schools and clinics, using the most meagre resources.

In 1992 in the midst of the Jihad, when it appeared that the very survival of the Nuba was in doubt, the Nuba leadership convened a conference of 200 community leaders from all parts of the Nuba Mountains. For six days, they debated whether to continue the war, because their people were suffering the effects of the war itself, famine and so on. The leaders decided that they would continue the struggle, but also that the democratic structures should remain and be strengthened.

According to your findings, are western nations taking an interest in the grave situation you’ve seen within the Nuba nation?

There is an interest, no doubt, in Europe, the United States, and neighbouring countries. There is a lot of concern about what’s happening. There are two problems: one is that it’s extremely difficult to do things on behalf of the Nuba because of the practical problems of getting there and the total determination of the Sudan government to block everything; and the second is that, essentially, the Sudan government is forcing western governments to trade off the Nuba against people in the south. It is saying things like: Operation Life Line Sudan can continue; you can get access to some areas in the south where people are hungry or ill and need assistance, but don’t talk about the Nuba. For years, every time the Nuba issue has been raised it’s been traded-off for some other genuine set of humanitarian interests. There’s now a great need to push the Nuba further up the agenda..

Do you see any possible solution to this situation?

I think there is a lot of hope. The extent to which the Nuba have been able to resist and organise themselves shows a tremendous self-reliance and self-confidence. The Nuba know who they are, and they know what they want. They want cultural, political, and social autonomy, and they know that they can resist almost any forces that are turned against them.

In a recent article, you said that many funds raised to help poor people in Africa are misused by local political powers, and so in a way, these funds often just help to perpetrate injustice.

The largest humanitarian programmes in the Nuba mountains are run by the United Nations, UNICEF and the UN Development Programme. UNICEF has 29 so called child-friendly villages in southern Kordofan. It is extraordinary that in an area where the Sudan government is systematically perpetrating appalling abuses against Nuba children, UNICEF has set up what it calls a child-friendly village, and the UN can channel humanitarian funds to such a project. Even worse, the UN Development Program has what it calls an area rehabilitation scheme in and around Kaduqli, and is working with the Peace and Development Administration, an arm of the Sudan government, which aid workers have called ‘the humanitarian arm of the Security Services’. This body administers the Peace Council. When the army destroys a village or rounds up people at gun point, killing some of those who are too weak to run away, and herding the rest into a peace camp, it is the Peace and Development Administration that takes care of them. This strategy is now being financed by the UN Development Program, an appalling misuse of funds.

On the other hand the funds that are donated to the Nuba Relief Rehabilitation and Development Society, which have been used by a democratic organisation to support the just resistance of a people are extremely effectively used, and the more that can be given to them, the better.

Some people say that religious organisations are more effective because the funds go directly to the missionaries on site. Do you agree?

I think that any international organisation which works with a local partner that is there on the ground is almost by definition more effective than one that has to send its own volunteers. In the Nuba mountains, we have the New Sudan Council of Churches, local church organisations, and also local Muslim organisations that are working extremely effectively along side the Nuba relief society. The support of such organisations is certainly imperative if the human rights situation is to improve.