by Ninie Hammon
“Not everybody. There’s certainly no silence coming from your brother, none a’tall. He’s shaking things up a bit. I’ve a little something off the wire about him that I thought you might be interested in reading.”
Even the dirt and grime couldn’t hide the genuine smile that lit Ron’s face.
Olford reached over and opened the nightstand drawer to retrieve his pipe and tobacco. “You smoke?”
Ron shook his head.
“I know, I know, your ‘Surgeon General’s Report’ and all that.” He wrinkled his nose and muttered softly under his breath, “Rubbish!” He looked up and told Ron with a degree of belligerence, “I am absolutely certain that my food would not properly digest without a smoke after a meal!”
The Brit loaded the small basin, lit the stringy tobacco, took a couple of puffs on the curved mouthpiece and sighed a sweet-smelling poof of white into the air. He propped himself against the headboard with a couple of lumpy pillows, stretched his long legs out on the garish orange-flower bedspread and peered at Ron over his wire-rimmed glasses. “Fire away. I’m listening.”
“Just look at those,” Ron nodded at the pictures. “They tell the story better than I can.”
Olford thumbed through the photos; Ron moved to the window and stared out.
Olford’s room was on the front of the hotel and a wide view of Khartoum spread out below the fourth-floor window. It was not a pretty sight; the capital of Sudan was not a pretty city. It was hot, dry, dirty, poor, crowded and chaotic. And brown. The dominant color outside the windows of the bus that brought Ron downtown from the dock had been brown. Brown dirt streets, brown thatched roofs, brown bamboo fences separating one brown mud house from the next. No grass, no trees, no shrubs, no flowers, no hills or streams. Khartoum was flat, profoundly drab and almost colorless. Ron looked up and shaded his eyes against the glare—except for the blue, he thought, the relentlessly blue sky that sat like an upturned bowl on top of the city.
The crowds of people and vehicles crammed into the street below also granted a reprieve from the brown. Arab men and women in robes and scarves of white mingled with tribals dressed in bright primary colors—red, orange, purple, green and royal blue. Their wild floral and print dresses stood out against the black skin of women who balanced on their heads everything from water pitchers and trays of fish to baskets of bread and fruit.
It occurred to Ron that the streets of the capital were a word picture of the whole country—diverse, complicated, confused and in disarray. Without traffic lights, drivers of every conceivable kind of conveyance fought their ways through the noisy, clogged streets and stopped wherever and whenever it suited them. Battered blue buses, yellow taxis with loudspeakers mounted on the top blasting words in Arabic that Ron couldn’t understand, camouflaged jeeps carrying green-uniformed soldiers, rumbling motorcycles, black stretch-limousines with tinted windows, horse-drawn carts, buzzing mopeds and bicycles all clawed their way forward in the traffic war below.
Ron could see a large white sandstone mosque on a busy corner three blocks away, with the spike of a minaret reaching into the cloudless sky. The muezzin proclaimed azan, summoning the faithful to Dhuhr, the midday prayer. The crowd of men streaming into the building had traffic snarled for blocks in both directions.
“What is this?”
Ron glanced over his shoulder at the photo Olford held up.
“A young man I ran into in the Mangalatore Refugee Camp near Kajo Keji, about ten miles north of the Ugandan border.” He pictured the camp—14,000 people living in mud and straw huts surrounded by plots of limp, leaning corn.
“When the militia raided his village, they tortured him. To finish the job, they tied him down and burned a log on his stomach. Amazingly, he lived through it. His father was the ranking Episcopalian bishop in the region. The militia chopped the man’s head off in front of his family.”
Ron turned toward Olford and leaned back against the window sill.
“Being an Episcopalian bishop in southern Sudan is like walking around with a Shoot me! sign taped to your forehead. There are a good portion of animists and traditionalists mixed in, but most of the people I’ve run into in the south are Christians of some flavor.”
“I got a quote from Lieutenant Gen. Omar Bashir’s office I plan to use in a piece I’m working on,” Olford said.
Bashir was the Sudanese army general who had staged a military coup in 1989 that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Sadeq al-Mahdi. Al-Bashir had immediately banned all political parties, dissolved Parliament and allied himself with radical clerics in the National Islamic Front. Two years later, al-Bashir implemented strict Sharia law throughout Sudan—for Christians and animists who predominated in the south as well as for Muslims in the north. The law was enforced by Muslim judges and a newly created Public Order Police.
In 1993, al-Bashir was appointed president, and within a decade, he was an annual contender on the Ten Worst Living Dictators List compiled by Freedom House, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.
“Bashir says he intends to accomplish something neither we British nor the Egyptians were able to do, unite northern and southern Sudan. And do you know how he intends to do that?” Olford answered his own question before Ron had a chance. “By Islamizing the whole country.”
Olford wasn’t saying anything Ron didn’t already know, but he enjoyed the accent so he let the Brit talk.
“I’m serious—the bloke’s dead set on it. In his radio address last week, he said that within a couple of years, he intends to see every man, woman and child in the whole country facing Mecca five times a day to pray—whether they like it or not!”
Olford’s lips twisted in a rueful smile. “And if they’re Christians or animists and they choose ‘or not,’ he’ll starve them to death or kill them outright.”
Olford’s words triggered images in Ron’s mind so powerful they took his breath away, and he stared at the floor for a few moments before he spoke.
“I was there, just twenty-seven years old, my first job as a freelancer.” His voice was not much louder than a whisper. “I was in Cape Town when apartheid fell. I shot pictures of the prison cells where they tortured Mandela’s followers; I talked to the survivors. It was the same year the Hutus butchered eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days in Rwanda, and I covered that, too.”
He raised his head and looked into Olford’s eyes. “I’ve seen it, Rupert. What’s happening right now in southern Sudan is just as bad.”
There was silence between them. Olford scrambled to grasp the magnitude of what Ron had said. Oh, he knew there was bloodshed here, certainly people were dying. But he didn’t think, never dreamed... He lifted the pipe to his lips, inhaled deeply and created a cauldron of blood-red tobacco in the bowl.
Ron’s mind went mercifully blank for a heartbeat, a computer screen after a hard drive crash. It was part exhaustion, part self-preservation. He continued to stare into space for a few more seconds, then his mind re-booted and he engaged the real world again.
“Khartoum has all the cards!” He was as frustrated as his exhaustion would allow him to be.
“Dictators always do.”
“Do you know who has veto power over relief efforts—relief efforts!—to the southerners?” Ron didn’t wait for Olford to respond. “Bingo—Khartoum. Give the man a cupie doll!”
He walked over to the tea set and picked up one of the cups. It had a delicate silver rim around the edge and a crescent on the side, one of those funny-looking eagles with arrows in one talon and a mace in the other. Surely not Olford’s family crest; that would be too much!
“I can document that there are more than five hundred applications from humanitarian aid organizations gathering dust in some third-string administrator’s desk. I know three different agencies ready to airlift food to the south right this minute, as we speak.” Ron turned around and faced Olford. “But Khartoum won’t let them, has been telling them no
for months now.”
Ron spoke to the ceiling, addressed the whole world as it sat in box seats and watched the carnage. "What part of the militant Muslim government in the north is trying to starve out Christian tribes in the south don’t you understand?”
“Would you mind very much?” Olford gestured toward the tea service.
“Huh?”
“Some tea, would you mind?”
‘You want me to...?” Ron was confused. He looked from Olford to the teapot and back to Olford.
“Yes, that would be very kind of you. Mify, please—Milk In First. No sugar. Thanks ever so.”
I can’t believe I’m doing this, Ron thought, as he poured milk into the cup and steaming tea in on top of it. I didn’t travel ten days up the Nile River on Noah’s Ark to fix Ichabod Crane here a cup of tea!
When Ron handed Olford the cup and saucer, the Brit’s face positively beamed. “Sorry for the interruption,” he said. “Do go on.”
Ron had lost his train of thought and was rapidly losing his patience, what little of it he had left. The British and their tea! He’d read somewhere that Field Marshal Montgomery had been quietly sipping his tea while his tanks were out kicking Rommel’s butt at El Alamein during World War II. Their little piece of civilization in the midst of barbarism.
Focus! The best story in the world won’t matter if nobody publishes it. This guy’s the key.
“I was telling you about Khartoum’s perfect gotcha.”
“Gotcha?”
“Gotcha. Catch-22. Heads I win; tails you lose.” Ron could see the Brit wasn’t tracking with him, so he just plowed ahead.
“They’ve done a neat little end run around the United Nations. The Sudanese government forced the U.N. to agree to notify them anytime the U.N. planned to dispense humanitarian aid—basic stuff, food and medical supplies—to the people in the south.”
Ron paced back and forth in front of the window as he spoke, venting like steam whistling out of a kettle. “The U.N. has to tell Khartoum when and where the cargo plane will drop supplies. Makes it all neat and tidy. The U.N. gives the government the drop site; the government dispatches a welcoming committee, and...’’
He stopped pacing and stood very still. The anger-fired energy drained out of him, and his voice got quiet, like he didn’t have quite enough air to speak. “I got to a site near Kapoeta on the Ethiopian border less than an hour after a U.N. cargo plane dropped food out of the sky.” His blue eyes turned hard and cold. “I saw what happened to those people.” His voice was husky. “I saw.”
More than 200 Acholi, Madi, Bari, Lulubo and Lokoya villagers had been waiting for days, hidden in the tall grass and trees encircling the target meadow west of Kapoeta. All of them displayed the ugly visage of malnutrition and starvation. The men’s ribs were clearly defined on their bare chests. The women’s gaunt limbs poked out of the lengths of ragged fabric that formed shapeless shifts. Their eyes were sunken, their cheeks hollow. The naked children were listless; the babies’ cries pathetically weak, like the mewing of tired, sick kittens.
The first sound they heard was a distant drone, more a vibration in the air than a sound. A sudden, instant excitement crackled and sparked in the crowd like static electricity. An airplane was coming!
Some of the men ventured into the field and spotted a silver dot in the sky, steadily growing larger as it descended. Once the airplane was clearly visible—a transport!—the rest of the villagers rushed out. Hope granted them energy, and they jumped up and down and shouted, waving their arms above their heads to signal the huge cargo plane as it began its low-level approach.
Crouched beneath the protective cover of an acacia tree’s spreading branches, an old man and his grandson knelt immobile. Though at 70 his vision had dimmed, the grandfather carefully scanned the trees beyond the field. His black face was leathery under a puffy cloud of white hair and he had no teeth. His skin was taut across his chest, his limbs thin as smoke, his bony frame testimony to his own slow starvation. He wore three strands of beaded necklaces around his neck and displayed the ritual scarring on his chest and face that distinguished him as a Lulubo warrior.
The boy’s father and older brother had been killed when a roving band of mercenaries attacked their village. The boy, his mother and two little sisters had been out gathering firewood and hid in the bush until the guerrillas were gone. But the grandfather was too old to fight and too slow to run, so he’d crawled in among the butchered corpses of his son, grandson, friends and neighbors, smeared their blood on his body and face and pretended to be dead.
The grandfather continued to stare out into the field until his nine-year-old grandson could take it no longer.
“Papawa, aren’t we going to get some of the food?” The boy was naked except for a small loincloth, his body emaciated. “You’re the oldest, and everyone will let you go first, but if we don’t hurry, there might not be anything left.”
Laying his hand tenderly on the boy’s shoulder, the grandfather looked into his upturned face.
“I must look after you and your mother and sisters now and I am old,” he said. “That is why I am waiting. I have lived too long to act like a young gazelle that jumps out into the open with no thought of danger. There still could be jackals lurking in the bush.” The starving child persisted. “But Papawa, I’m hungry.” The old man patted him reassuringly on his small, bowed back and spoke without looking down. His tired eyes continued to examine the field and the surrounding brush and trees. “Filling our stomachs is important, but it is more important to make certain that at the end of the day, we still have stomachs to fill.”
The grandfather took his gaze from the field momentarily and glanced into his grandson’s eyes.
“No animal is completely defenseless. A gazelle cannot fight, but he does have a weapon—caution. If he is to survive, he must use that weapon. He must be absolutely certain there are no lions lying in wait before he goes into the open field to graze.”
The little boy’s hunger was far more intense than his sense of caution. “But Papawa, look at all the other men. They’ve been careful. They’ve been watching out for danger. They wouldn’t be out in the field if they weren’t sure it was safe.”
“My son, if you wish to grow to be as old as I am, you must learn this lesson. Every gazelle has to take care of himself. He cannot depend on other gazelles to see the danger. It takes just one lion to bring death, one lion hidden so well that all the others missed it. If you are the gazelle the lion attacks and drags away to be devoured alive, it will not comfort you that all the other gazelles thought it was safe to graze in the field.”
Flying now beneath the few clouds that littered the sky, the plane slowed its engines. The Swiss pilot spotted the villagers in the field and smiled at his copilot.
“Look, there’s a reception committee. I’ll bank it a little right so the pallets fall clear.”
The huge plane leveled off at 200 feet, and the pallets of millet, flour, rice and powdered milk dropped out of the aircraft, raining life and hope down on the villagers below.
Hitting the ground at intervals of about 100 feet, each tightly wrapped cellophane container kicked up a shower of dirt and sod before tumbling to a stop. Specially packaged and cushioned in high-tech plastic and rubber, the dry goods inside suffered little damage.
The first two packets were still rolling when the villagers swarmed over them, ripping and tearing at the wrapping like a school of piranha. The boy had been wrong. Even if he and his grandfather had been waiting with the others, the old man wouldn’t have been afforded the deferential treatment that was his right as an elder. Life in southern Sudan had been reduced to the survival of the fittest.
Without pausing to extricate one parcel at a time, the hungry villagers sliced the bags open, grabbed fistfuls of raw millet and wheat flour and eagerly shoved it into their mouths. They poured the powdered milk into their buckets or folds of cloth held out by the women and children, pushing and elbowing their
neighbors who were struggling to do the same thing.
When all the supplies had been dropped, the pilot banked the huge transport and made one last pass over the meadow. None of the relief workers on the plane said anything. They watched in silence as the villagers tore into the food supplies.
To be so hungry you would fight for a handful of raw grain... The pilot shook his head. It was the same every time they dropped supplies, and he never got used to the sight. As the big plane lifted up over the trees and began to climb with a roar out of the valley, the pilot caught one final glimpse of the field. He spotted a very tall villager digging his hands into a torn-open sack of dried milk, his face smeared with white dust like a little kid eating a powdered sugar doughnut. His mind took a snapshot of the man, framed it and hung it up with the caption: They were starving to death, and we fed them.
There’s probably not another thing I will ever do in my life that matters as much as this, the pilot thought as the plane climbed over the ridge. Today, we made a difference. Today, we saved lives!
The young man with white powder on his face could still hear the roar of the departing transport when a bullet tore into his back, ripped through the left ventricle of his heart and blew out his chest. His spurting blood turned the white powder pink as he pitched forward onto the milk sack.
He was tall, an easy target.
The Fedayeen militia opened fire as soon as the plane disappeared over the ridge. They had been dispatched when the government in Khartoum was notified that the United Nations intended to drop humanitarian aid in this meadow today. Members of the militia had silently edged into position in the treeline at the far side of the field, undetected by the villagers in a feeding frenzy around the packages.
Within seconds after the first shot rang out, the rat-tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons, the pounding of galloping horses and the shrieking of injured and terrified villagers drowned out the fading drone of the departing transport.
In an instantaneous, mad, screaming, panicked stampede, men, women and children fell over the pallets and knocked each other down as they frantically scrambled to get away from the death bearing down on them. Some raced for the trees, but the distance was too great, the marksmen too accurate. Bullets found their marks with sickening, thunk, thunk sounds, and one after another the villagers went down.
