by Cola Bilkuei
For us in the military, Itang had a purpose. It was a feeding centre designed to nurse us back to health after our months of walking. There was a hospital where we were weighed, and had our health checked and our ages estimated. Everyone loved being in that hospital. It was the first time since I had started the march that I felt truly looked after. Having said that, when I’d arrived in Itang the bones were showing through my skin, especially the ribs, so for me the stay may have seemed better than for those others who had not lost so much weight. Those of us who were underweight got to eat in a separate area about half an hour’s walk from the rest of the group. The nurses in that area were caring, and the food, sweetened flat bread called ‘papa’ eaten with a chicken or beef stew, was better than any I had ever tasted.
Looking back, in some ways taking us to Itang was cruel, not because it was bad but because it did nothing to help us prepare ourselves for what was to come next.
By March 1988 we were finally taken to Pinyudo, where we would be put together with the rest of the children who were taken from different parts of Sudan and moulded into an army. It took us a week to walk from Itang to Pinyudo. My feet had begun to heal in Itang. Now came a new test: we were walking barefoot on a bitumen road, which was very hot, and the soil we walked on was coarser here, so my feet began breaking up again. Soon my blisters and cuts were burning with pain and I was straggling along like a cripple.
My first impression when we arrived at the Pinyudo camp was amazement: there were so many children. Most were thinner and younger than me, some with eyes bulging. It was a sea of little people; they were everywhere you looked. All up, more than 20,000 children had been brought here. They were all working, carrying firewood or doing other jobs such as building new houses, fixing houses that had fallen down, digging trenches, and fixing fences. It looked like a great big confusing workhouse.
Instantly I knew, no matter what had been said to us before, no matter how many good things we’d been told, that this was not right. I couldn’t believe that this was what we had travelled all this way for. Afraid I would be separated from my cousins in this overcrowded place, I wanted to run back to Itang or, better still, all the way back to my village in Sudan.
As we marched through the gates of the camp I tried to take in as much as I could, but my mind felt as though it was racing to keep up with everything happening around me. There were so many people, it was hard to know where to look. Suddenly there was a lot of movement and one group began running after a boy, yelling that he was a thief. The thief, who was running so fast he could have been an athlete, looked as though he’d get away. He would wish that he had. As soon as he was caught he was dragged to the ground and the group who had been chasing him began bashing him, whilst others gathered round and cheered.
Around them, everyone else carried on as if nothing had happened. Children were carrying loads of firewood, some were standing on parade, others just looked lost.
I continued walking, pushed along by the shuffling feet behind me. As the newest group to enter the camp, we were the day’s entertainment. Children and officers stared at us as we passed. I couldn’t work out whether they were pleased to see us or if they resented our intrusion into what had become their home.
Around us was bare ground, with no trees except in the distance, and smoke rising from fires tended by children cooking maize and beans. It smelt as though the bush was on fire, the smell of the smoke just managing to overshadow the smell of human waste – not a pleasant combination!
I had expected some kind of formal parade of our own when we arrived, but instead we were herded quietly towards the dormitories, small rooms that slept up to thirty of us. They had mat walls, wooden frames and grass roofs. We would have to make our bedding. The other boys had tied together rectangles of sticks from the bush and covered them with grass as their ‘mattresses’. As I looked inside the first dormitory we came to, I wondered how I would ever manage to sleep with so many others in one room. We weren’t yet allowed to know which was our room – that would be decided later in the day. Everything now seemed quiet – I was resigned to this being my fate by now, and I just wanted to get on with it. The sooner I got through this, the sooner I could go back home.
My first impressions of Pinyudo shocked me. Everything was rough and ramshackle, and from the aggressive mood in the place it was clear that this was not a town with a school, this was another tough army situation. Immediately boys asked the sergeant about the schooling and food and friends we had been promised, but he would respond with harsh orders and arguments.
The silence was broken by groups of older boys coming around, ordering us to do things.
‘Wash this, you’re the newcomers – it’s your job to do our work,’ said one of them.
‘You have to give us your clothes, you have to make a contribution,’ said another.
As a new camp entrant you were able to ‘choose’ a set of clothes – a T-shirt and a pair of shorts that you had to pull out of a lucky-dip bag – but I ended up giving mine to these older boys. Giving clothes away seemed better than risking a bashing. This was a cycle that was repeated with each new group that entered the camp. We were simply the latest and easiest pickings. Later, we would be expected to take the clothes from the next group in.
When we had settled, the parade that I had expected earlier was organised. In total there were ninety of us new arrivals. We were broken into smaller groups of around thirty. This was the new basila that I would eat with, sleep with, train with and potentially fight with. None of my cousins was with me, something the army did intentionally. Some of the boys who had intimidated us earlier turned out to be in my basila. I figured I had already shown them the respect that they were after.
During the parade we were welcomed to the camp by a head teacher (who was also an SPLA officer) and told some of the basic rules. We would be banned from going to the Ethiopian shops, or associating with people outside our group. Some Sudanese women and children were living there, the wives and children of men who were fighting somewhere else. We couldn’t mix with them, or with the Ethiopians who lived in Pinyudo. Military police controlled our movement, sitting on the fringes of the markets to make sure we didn’t come in. Anyone who left without authorisation would be punished – without mercy. The punishment would involve beating, being put on cooking duty, cleaning dishes, having to get endless loads of firewood or being made to walk for hours to find water for the camp. Our drinking water was obtained either from the one tap in the camp, about thirty minutes’ walk away, or from the river running alongside Pinyudo. The walk to the river took forty minutes, but at least there wasn’t a long queue when we got there. We were not allowed to travel out of the camp, even if we were sick. Travel passes were needed before we were allowed to get medical treatment. If we got a travel pass we had to then walk more than ten kilometres to the Pinyudo hospital. Visiting friends in other basilas was not permitted unless we had special permission from our leaders. We were reminded that we were here to stay for as long as we were told. Beyond that, we had no idea what the future held.
With the rules clearly spelt out, we were given jobs to do around the camp. I was given the task of collecting firewood. From now on I would spend hours each and every day bringing in firewood from wherever I could find it in the forests around Pinyudo.
As I set about collecting my first bundle of firewood, I was able to have a proper look around. It seemed as though everywhere I looked someone was cooking over a fire. I wondered if there would be any wood left for me to collect. Still as shy as ever, I found it hard to make conversation with strangers. Instead I chose simply to look and listen to find out information about my new home.
It became obvious to me that the camp was not just for the military. There were civilians here too. It was hard to tell the difference, though, because we were told not to wear uniform in the camp. I would learn later that this was because staff from the United Nations would often come to the camp to offer aid. Before Pinyudo
, I knew next to nothing about the UN. In Pinyudo, all I was told was that they were people from other countries who brought us food and clothes, but if they saw us in our military uniform we wouldn’t get anything, as they would see us as purely members of the army who, they believed, were part of the trouble. So the UN was, for me, not a place to go for help but a potential trap to work around.
Very few of us were allowed to speak to the white people in the camp anyway. Those who were allowed were told what to say. The army leaders had a knack of getting children who didn’t speak any English to represent the rest of us. When the white people asked their questions the children answered freely, but the translations that were given were nothing like what they had really said.
The truth about Pinyudo quickly emerged. Pinyudo was the official, UN-backed refugee camp, and the SPLA wanted it to look like that, but the reality was that it was a military camp in all but name. The SPLA officers didn’t show their guns or wear their uniforms, as the UN would not give food or shelter to men carrying guns. The SPLA built schools and the UN gave us pens and books and blackboards, but it was all part of the charade to trick the UN into giving us rations. Once we had our UN food in our hands, SPLA officers would come and requisition half, to send to frontline soldiers.
Two hours’ walk from Pinyudo was Marakus, the real army camp that the UN didn’t know about. This was where the SPLA stored their guns, uniforms, army transport vehicles and tanks. Here we would receive the harshest of our training, away from the prying eyes of the UN.
Marakus was an open place with some big mat-and-grass buildings in the middle of the bush.
I remember my first night there. In the dormitory buildings, wooden poles were dug into the ground, and bedding was stretched between these poles and set up like bunks. The first night was all right, and I kept to myself. In Pinyudo I had been disappointed and unhappy, and on my toes with the fights going on every day. It was a waste of time, all the pretending we had to do for the UN. I wanted to be trained properly, straight away, and given a gun so I could protect myself. I was impatient now to become a soldier.
In Marakus there was no laughing, there was no sickness, and we were on our best behaviour. If we complained, no one would listen to us. At best the officers in charge would make fun of us; at worst they would reward us with a heavy punishment. If they thought we needed it the leaders were also licensed to torture us at their will.
The military police did the punishing. The morning started with a whistle, and they would beat anyone who was not up and running fast to assembly to stand at attention. I had to race to get ahead of the next person so that he’d be punished instead of me. The typical punishment was thirty strokes of a stick, but they also made us stand with our arms spread and stones in our hands for a couple of hours. If our hands dropped, they beat us. Another punishment was to make us run to the river and jump in fully clothed, then beat us as we ran back, soaked. Or they would make us roll in the sand in wet clothes, and beat us if we refused. Or they’d bark orders: ‘Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down!’ Or you would have to crouch-jump for two hundred metres. These punishments would happen every day, even for the most minor offences.
For three months we were taught how to handle attacks, how to defend, how to shoot and how to kill. We were given replica guns to train with and were told that it was our job to defend our country. The discipline that I had faced at home was nothing compared to the discipline dished out in the camp. They would make us stand in the sun with arms extended and a stone in each hand. They would make us collect water, carry it back in heavy buckets, then pour it out and go and get it again. Everything we did in training, they beat us with sticks while we were doing it. At least at home I knew that I might be beaten because my family wanted me to be respectable; here it was to put me in line and keep me there.
Apart from training us in combat, the military spent a lot of time manipulating us with stories to justify the fighting. Most of what they said, I had already heard from my father. They told us that Muslims came down to Sudan in the eighteenth century from the Arab world. They came as traders, and when they settled they began to force Africans to be Muslim. When the Sudanese refused and wanted to keep to their own cultural and religious backgrounds, the traders began to kill the locals and force others, including women like our mothers and sisters, and children like ourselves, into slavery. They told us about the extremes of sharia law enforced by the Muslims: if you stole, the Arabs cut your hand off. They told us that the Arabs had stolen our water from our rivers and exploited the oil that came from our land.
To make us angry, they told us that our families were now being killed by Muslims. Not having any contact with home, we couldn’t tell if they were telling the truth or not, and many of us believed our families were dead. I believed them, and was distraught. I wanted to fight now. They said we needed to use our guns to defend our country or we would be pushed off the land. I thought back to the attack on my village the year before, and the near-death of my grandmother. What they were saying made sense to me.
Everything about Marakus was harsh. It was as if we were no longer human. Tuk tuk, a kind of foot rot, was everywhere. Your toes would itch and soon you would have an infection that could only be treated by putting your feet close to an open flame. We were working so hard, in unsanitary conditions, already weak and malnourished and boys got sick all the time. I was extremely lucky, as I never got badly sick. The soldiers didn’t care if we were sick; in fact, if we were and we complained they would punish us. I remember one child making the fatal mistake of complaining to the corporal about feeling sick. The corporal passed the complaint on up the ranks, first to the sergeant and then to the senior trainer, who was not impressed. I remember him yelling out words to the effect of ‘Bullshit’. Then he ordered the military police to rough the boy up. It was as if they were testing him to see how sick he really was, only they didn’t care what the result was. In the end they beat him so badly that the boy begged to be killed. His final torture was the granting of his request – only they would not give him a quick death; instead they waited for his injuries to take their toll. Several hours later, he died.
His wasn’t the last story like this. When other children ‘died in training’, the military covered it up by saying the child had simply been sent to another hospital. Those who had been witness to the truth were threatened with death themselves. I would eventually witness the disappearance of many of those who had walked and trained and lived alongside me.
On the other hand, if you had genuinely committed a crime and were deemed deserving of death, you were put up as an example for all to see. The rest of us would be warned that we would be next. This was a threat that we took seriously.
The first time I saw someone being executed was in Pinyudo in 1989. We were back in the main camp and had been told the night before that the SPLA leader, John Garang, was going to be coming. Everyone was excited because to us at the time he was considered a hero. Every time the military leaders spoke, they would say something about what a great man John Garang was. They referred to him as ‘The Chairman’, or ‘Doctor’, or ‘C-in-C’ for ‘Commander-in-Chief’. Even though I didn’t know much about him, I held John Garang in great awe. Some nights they would play military music over loudspeakers: this meant either that the SPLA had captured a town or that John Garang was coming.
I was as excited as anybody else to see the fabled Garang. I didn’t have negative feelings yet about the SPLA, even though life was so hard in Pinyudo and Marakus. The SPLA wasn’t the bad guy in this war. The SPLA wasn’t going into villages like mine and shooting people. The SPLA was protecting the southerners from Muslim militias. My father and two brothers had joined the SPLA, and I saw following them as my duty. I was training as a soldier – this was hard, and hateful, but necessary. I might have hated individuals who were cruel to us, but I had not yet turned against the SPLA.
I still hadn’t seen Garang. Normally everyone would be up around 5 am, but
this night I remember not being able to sleep amid all the singing and talking around camp. From about 3 am, people were starting to prepare for the arrival of our leader. By the time the sun rose, everyone was ready for our grand parade. A military car with a loud speaker was going through the camp instructing everyone to assemble in an area that was normally used as a kind of parade ground. Once we were all gathered, a commander addressed us. He told us the SPLA were winning the war, and our homeland Sudan was being reclaimed. The parade erupted in cheers. He continued, mentioning individual villages and towns that had been liberated. My village was never mentioned, and I still didn’t know anything about what had happened there. As far as I knew, Baal and Panaruu had been captured and all my family incinerated.
The commander then announced that the Chairman was not coming to the camp. The disappointment instantly changed the atmosphere of the parade. He started to talk about the need for discipline and the respect for law within the camp. As he did this, two men and two boys were herded in front of us. They each had their hands tied, and one thick rope was tied around their legs, connecting them all. The two men were in their early twenties and the boys were roughly the same age as me. The commander’s tone became harsh and he told us the men were accused of rape. A woman and her daughter had gone to the military police and accused the two men, who were brothers, of sexual assault. The younger two boys were said to have used their guns in order to steal and intimidate people within the camp. This, the commander said, would not be tolerated.
All four of them were petrified. The younger two were visibly shaking. Eleven soldiers then made their way across the front of the parade and lined up facing the prisoners. After a moment of silence the commander announced that all four would be put to death by firing squad. He called on the soldiers in the squad to draw their guns. Everyone in the camp was silent with fear. The two young boys had now wet themselves and were trembling uncontrollably, tears running down their faces. I couldn’t help crying as I stood watching them about to die. The older two, stricken with fear, closed their eyes, flinching with each movement of the rope.
