This report is based on a visit to southern Sudan and Sudanese refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda from late June to late July 1993 by a delegation from Human Rights Watch/Africa (HRW/Africa, formerly Africa Watch) consisting of Jemera Rone, counsel to Human Rights Watch, and John Prendergast, a consultant to HRW/Africa. The delegation visited the towns of Nasir, Ayod, Waat, Kongor, Lafon, Nimule, Aswa, and Atepi in southern Sudan, and refugee camps in Uganda and Kenya, and interviewed about 200 victims of the war and other witnesses to the violence. Interviews were also conducted in London, Cairo, Nairobi and Washington, D.C.

HRW/Africa sought to visit Khartoum and other locations in government-controlled Sudan, but was denied permission--at the same time that the government was announcing to the world that everyone was free to "come and see for yourselves." The government initially granted Ms. Rone a visa and agreed on a date for the visit in June 1993. At the last minute, the government asked to defer the visit until July, and then cancelled that visit as well, also at the last minute, without any mention of a future date. The Sudan Embassy in Washington, D.C. even announced in its U.S. publication that HRW/Africa was about to visit. Since it cancelled the July 1993 visit, the government has abstained from any contact with HRW/Africa.

In contrast, HRW/Africa encountered few problems entering the areas of Sudan controlled by the two rebel factions. HRW/Africa met and discussed its human rights concerns with several people in the leadership of SPLA-Nasir/United. Such high-level meetings were not granted by SPLA-Torit, however.

This report is based primarily on the field work of Jemera Rone and John Prendergast. It is based on eyewitness reports where possible, although the eyewitnesses are generally not identified for safety reasons. Because of the preference for first-hand accounts, this is not an exhaustive account of violations during the war in 1991-93. For instance, the tragic situation in the Nuba mountains in south Kordofan is not covered in this report, but was reported in our publication "Sudan: Eradicating the Nuba" (September 9, 1992). The information in this report, however, is fairly representative of the types of abuses that occur throughout the south in the war.

The report was written by Jemera Rone with the help of John Prendergast and edited by Karen Sorensen, research associate of HRW/Africa. HRW/Africa would like to acknowledge with thanks the informed comments of Dr. Douglas H. Johnson of St. Anthony's College, Oxford, England and Dr. Andrew N. M. Mawson of Amnesty International, London, England, on the draft report. We are grateful for the assistance of many others who have asked to remain anonymous.

Anya-Nya the southern Sudanese rebel army of the first civil war, 1955-72

Anya-Nya II rebel south Sudanese forces who, together with former members of the Sudanese army, formed the SPLA in 1983; also, some of those forces that defected from the SPLA later in 1983 and became a militia force of Nuer in Upper Nile province supported by the Sudanese government; several Anya-Nya II groups over the years were wooed back to the SPLA

EEC European Economic Community

Hunger Triangle A name adopted by relief organizations in 1993 for the area defined by Kongor, Ayod, and Waat, in Upper Nile province, where hunger was especially acute

ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross

Murahallin Arab tribal militias

NGO Nongovernmental Organization

NIF National Islamic Front, the militant Islamic political party which came to power in 1989 after a military coup overthrew the elected government

Nuba The African people living in south Kordofan's Nuba Mountains; some are Muslims, some Christians, and some practice traditional African religions

OFDA Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, within U.S. Agency for International Development

OLS Operation Lifeline Sudan, a joint United Nations/NGO relief operation for internally displaced and famine and war victims in Sudan which began operations in 1989.It serves territory controlled by the government and by the SPLA. Much of its work in southern Sudan is through cross-border operations conducted by OLS' Southern sector based in Nairobi.

PDF Popular Defence Force, a government-sponsored militia

RASS Relief Association of Southern Sudan, the relief wing of SPLA-Nasir

Red Army SPLA military unit composed of minors

SPLA the Sudanese rebel army formed in 1983 headed by Commander-in-Chief John Garang; in 1991 it split into two factions

SPLA-Nasir the faction of the SPLA that broke away from John Garang's leadership in August 1991, led by Riek Machar and based in Nasir, Upper Nile

SPLA-Nasir/United same as SPLA/United, used here to refer to the rebel movement led by Riek Machar after March 27, 1993

SPLA-United the name that SPLA-Nasir and other SPLA dissidents adopted after they united on March 27, 1993

SPLA-Torit the faction of SPLA that, after the August 1991 division, remained under the leadership of John Garang, based in Torit, Eastern Equatoria province, until that town fell to the government in July 1992; also known as SPLA-Mainstream

SPLM Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the political organization of the Sudanese rebels formed in 1983, of which John Garang is chairman

SRRA Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association, relief wing of the SPLA-Torit

Triple A camps displaced persons camps in Ame, Aswa and Atepi created in 1992 in Eastern Equatoria and evacuated in 1994 due to government military advances

UNDP United Nations Development Program

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF United Nations Children's Fund

White Army An informal local self-organized defense force of Nuer in Upper Nile province, also called "Decbor"

WFP World Food Program

The civil war that has raged in southern Sudan since 1983 has claimed the lives of some 1.3 million persons, southern civilians.1 The specific causes of death vary--victims either have been targeted, or they have fallen in indiscriminate fire, or they have been stripped of their assets and displaced, such that they have died of starvation and disease. All the parties to the conflict are responsible for these deaths, including the government and the rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A, hereafter SPLA), who in 1991 split into two factions, SPLA-Torit and the breakaway SPLA-Nasir. All parties have waged war in total disregard of the welfare of the civilian population and in violation of almost every rule of war applicable in an internal armed conflict.2

Sudan is internationally recognized as an economic basket case.3 In the underdeveloped south, war, flood, drought, disease, and mismanagement have rendered useless ordinary survival strategies and made millions wholly or partially dependent on emergency food assistance provided by the United Nations (U.N.) and foreign agencies--that is, when the government or rebels do not prevent the civilian population from receiving this relief.

Sudan, with approximately twenty-five million people in nearly one million square miles, occupies the largest land area of any country in Africa.4 The southern third of Sudan, which occupies a larger land

area than many neighboring countries, such as Uganda, had a pre-war population of some five to six million. The population of southern Sudan is now estimated at four and a half million. The U.N. estimates that the population declined 1.9 percent in the year of 1993, and that the excess mortality in that year alone was 220,000. This report makes it clear, through one horrifying testimony after another, just how such a large toll could have been reached.

Among the abuses committed by the government in the southern conflict, documented in greater detail in prior HRW/Africa reports but also included here, are:

· indiscriminate aerial bombardment of southern population centers;

· scorched earth tactics against villages around garrison towns, burning and looting the villages and killing, displacing or capturing civilians;

· use of torture, disappearance and summary execution, particularly against residents of garrison towns in order to quash civic opposition to government policies, such civic opposition in Juba to the mandatory use of Arabic in what had been English-language schools, and forcible conversion to Islam;

· restriction of movement of the civilian residents of garrison towns--in Juba, forbidding them from leaving even in times of food scarcity--and placement of land mines and military patrols on the exit routes to enforce the ban on movement;

· killing civilians, pillage of civilian cattle and grain and burning of homes by tribal militias armed by persons and political parties aligned with the government to carry on its counterinsurgency war on the cheap and to "drain the sea" of tribes deemed supportive of the SPLA;

· cruel and inhuman prison conditions;

· lack of due process;

· abducting women and children; and

· severe restrictions on relief efforts by international and U.N. agencies, and impunity given to army officers and others who profiteer on relief food.

Among the abuses committed by the two SPLA factions are:

· indiscriminate attacks on civilians living in the territory of the other SPLA faction;

· pillage of civilian cattle and grain and destruction and burning of homes in the opposing faction's territory;

· taking food from civilians, directly or indirectly, by force or fraud;

· abducting civilians, principally women and children, from the territory of the other faction;

· siege of garrison towns by the SPLA-Torit, including on some occasions using starvation of civilians as a method of combat;

· torture, disappearance, and summary executions;

· holding long-term political prisoners in prolonged arbitrary detention, by SPLA-Torit;

· cruel and inhuman prison conditions;

· lack of due process;

· forcible recruitment, primarily of Equatorians, by SPLA-Torit;

· forced portering or carrying heavy military supplies by SPLA-Torit;

· creation by the SPLA of tens of thousands of "unaccompanied minors"--boys originally brought or lured to Ethiopian refugee camps for educational opportunities, who were then segregated from their families and trained and deployed as soldiers although some had not reached fifteen years old (the minimum age under international law)--and similar practices with boys inside Sudan, by SPLA-Torit; and

· denying unaccompanied minors the opportunity to be voluntarily reunited with their families.

The cumulative effect of the way the war is waged, in total disregard of the rules of war, has had a drastic effect on the civilian population of the south. Their hardship and starvation is the direct result of human rights abuses by all parties.

The year 1993 saw an expansion of international relief efforts in south Sudan for political reasons; the need had existed before, but the government had prevented access until shortly after Somalia was the subject of a U.N. peacekeeping action in late 1992. Approved flight access in cross-border operations to southern Sudan grew from seven to forty-five government and SPLA-held locations between January and December 1993, and another forty isolated locations were serviced by barge and rail convoys from the north. Operation Lifeline Sudan (Southern Sector)(OLS)5 coordinated from Nairobi, Kenya, provides the umbrella for relief activities for the U.N. and over thirty international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).6 About 150 international staff from U.N. agencies and NGOs were permanently residing in twenty SPLA-held areas serviced from the south in early 1994.7

At the beginning of 1993, the OLS estimated that 1.5 million southerners were in need of some form of assistance, with 800,000 requiring food assistance. Seventy-five percent of the food-dependent were considered "specially vulnerable," or almost entirely reliant on food assistance, not including the Juba population, which would bring that number to over one million people in southern Sudan who required food assistance.8

The U.N./NGO efforts accomplished much in 1993: child malnutrition rates were cut by 60 percent in the most seriously affected areas, and 95,000 children were vaccinated against measles, a major killer when combined with malnutrition. Despite these and other successes, the U.N. found that excess mortality was 220,000 in 1993, a decline of almost 2 percent, compared with a typical growth rate of 3 percent in peaceful African country. About 600,000 people, almost one-sixth of the estimated southern population, were still internally displaced. About 23 percent of households were headed by women, another indicator of impoverishment; in the most seriously affected areas, women outnumber men by as much as three to two.9

As for the year 1994, the Sudan government's military offensive again has caused tremendous shifts of population. Food shortages and disease naturally follow each one of these population upheavals; the direct and indirect death toll caused by the fighting in 1994 promises to rival 1993. The needs of the civilian population remain dramatic: the U.N. needs assessment for food and non-food items in 1994 for Sudan was $279 million, most of it destined for the south where more than two million people are estimated to be extremely vulnerable because of the breakdown caused by war, and recent crop failures.10

In Eastern Equatoria the Triple A camps, home until February to over 100,000 displaced persons, have been evacuated together with local villagers. These civilians have fled south and east, many to locations that are more difficult to access. The government reported it retook Pageri, which was an SPLA-Torit headquarters, on May 24, 1994, and reached Aswa to the south by May 29. U.N. and NGO staff were evacuated from Nimule south of Aswa on the Ugandan border, since Nimule appeared likely to fall next. In Upper Nile province, clan fighting lasting three months among the Nuer in Nasir caused most of the huts there to be burned to the ground and its population of 30,000 to move to Malual, Maiwut and Jikawo. About 10,000 of these people were said to be en route to Ethiopia where they would become refugees. The unaccompanied minors who lived in Nasir were scattered.11

None of these military changes mean that the war will come to a military conclusion, since the SPLA still controls most of the hinterland. These substantial government gains, however, mean that the numbers of vulnerable have risen and delivery of assistance to them is made more difficult.

The basic principle of African relief operations has been to define, usually according to nutritional status, the most vulnerable groups within a population and to target them with the minimum necessary food, water and shelter to sustain life. The problem in Sudan and other areas of Sub-Saharan Africa is that one is not dealing with a temporary emergency involving a normally robust and self-sustaining population which can eventually resume its former life. A process of sustained asset transfer which has taken place, particularly in Sudan and other faminized countries, is synonymous with the spread of mass impoverishment. Relief operations may, to varying degrees, help keep people alive but, at best, this is all they do. The way such programs are conceived and resourced means they areusually unable to tackle the process of resource depletion (war and looting) which is equated with recurring famine.12 These are human rights problems; the devastation of southern Sudan and its peoples can only be halted if the rules of war are obeyed, or if the war itself comes to an end.

Food and sustenance play an important role in internal conflict. They are both weapons and goals. In this situation the donor/NGO system can exercise a good deal of influence, some of it unintentional but nevertheless unavoidable. The donor/NGO safety net has been drawn into the effective partitioning of Sudan,13 in part because the Sudan government was actively hostile to and neglected the welfare of those civilians it deemed to be aligned with its enemy. The U.N./NGO cross-border relief operation into southern Sudan represents a means of slowing population displacement from and deaths in SPLA territory, making it more difficult or even impossible for the government to force a military conclusion. Similarly, the provision of emergency relief to garrison towns under government control means that the SPLA's ability to capture those towns through siege and starvation of the civilian population is significantly reduced.

International relief food thus has become an important element in the subsistence economy of southern Sudan. As a result, it is wrongly siezed upon as an asset to be taxed, confiscated, expropriated, or otherwise taken for the war effort by the government and the armed factions as well. The relief community is laboring against enormous logistical, environmental, financial and military odds to deliver a fraction of what the devastated southern population requires. U.N. agencies and NGOs involved in Sudan deserve praise for their active concern for civilian welfare, especially so where the parties to the conflict seem not only to have neglected the civilians but also to have targeted and stolen from them.

All parties to the conflict prey on the civilian population. They are sophisticated enough, however, to realize that when it comes to international assistance intended for starving civilians, the armed parties cannot confiscate the aid outright. They devise schemes that are little more than theft.

Armies that steal food from civilians violate the rules of war. So do armies that try to direct the movement of the starving civilian population to strategic military locations, where the armies can be reap the benefit of food and other assistance intended for civilians. While increased vigilance and tighter controlsmay deter some combatants from some forms of stealing, such controls in and of themselves will not cure the problem. The predatory practices of all parties must be confronted by the international community and the practices deterred through concerted international pressure.

The donor countries and the U.N. should warn the parties to the conflict that their indiscriminate killing, food diversion, looting, burning of civilian property, and other actions that weaken the capacity of the civilian population to become self-sufficient, are violations of the rules of war and will not be tolerated. These practices have already jeopardized the reception of the parties at the international level.

The international community should insist that, if the parties are to fight, they fight within the boundaries set by the rules of war and cease to prey on the civilian population. The international community should not be satisfied until the parties not only acknowledge that such practices are abuses and pledge to refrain from them, but also take firm disciplinary action against troops and officers who offend.

The current internal armed conflict, aside from its asset-transfer aspects, is predominantly a regional war of the north against the south and other marginalized areas such as the Nuba Mountains. The first civil war (1955-72) was also a regional war; it was less destructive and ended with an autonomy agreement for the south concluded in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Peace lasted only eleven years.

The role of Islam in Sudan, and Sudan's identification as an Arab or African state, are questions that have been open since independence in 1956. Elements of religion are present in this conflict because, since the military coup in June 1989, the Sudan government has been an Islamic fundamentalist state, run from behind the scenes by the National Islamic Front (NIF). Southerners are not, for the most part, Muslims but practice traditional African religions; a minority of the southerners are Christians.14 Both the traditional African religionists and Christians have resisted the attempts of the central government--whether the present one, the prior democratic one (1986-89), or the 1983 attempt of the Nimeiri military dictatorship (1969-85)--to apply Islamic law, or shar'ia, to the south.

Although a majority of the Sudanese population is Muslim, the NIF's view of Islam is not shared even by a majority of the Muslim population of Sudan. The fundamentalist NIF government won less than 20 percent of the vote in the last freeelections in 1986. The NIF differs considerably from the two main traditional political parties that developed over the decades in Sudan, which were based on Sunni Muslim religious and regional sects and families. These traditional parties failed to resolve the north-south issues and related issue of the role of Islam in the state and society.

To solidify control of government and enforce its vision of an Islamic state, the NIF and its allies engaged in serious human rights violations, such as torture, summary executions, and repression of all civil liberties, to stamp out the substantial political parties and civic organizations that were accustomed to play a role in Sudanese politics, even under dictatorships. Popular movements, engaging in strikes and street demonstrations, almost without bloodshed overthrew two military governments in 1969 and 1985. The NIF since 1989 has built up a police state, dismantled the civil service, and dismissed professional soldiers, replacing them with NIF party loyalists, making NIF overthrow by any popular movement much more difficult.

These serious human rights problems led the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to appointment a Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Sudan, Gáspár Biró, on March 10, 1993. He visited Sudan twice in 1993 and published a final report on February 1, 1994,15 in which he concluded, among other things, that two provisions of the Sudan Penal Code are "radically opposed" to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which Sudan has ratified. The two provisions are hudud offenses16 and gisas, or the institution of retribution.17

The Attorney General and Minister of Justice of Sudan attacked the Special Rapporteur, calling the legal conclusions "blasphemous" and claiming thatMr. Biró was a promotor of "satanic morality." The Attorney General told the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that the report was an "attack on the fundamental principles of Islamic penal law."18

Elements of race are also present in the conflict. Although a majority of Sudanese are Muslims, Arabs are not the ethnic majority.19 Those who have fought the central government with the SPLA have included non-Arab Muslims, such as the Nubans from the centrally located Nuba Mountains, not geographically part of southern Sudan but part of the central or transition zone of Sudan. About half of the Nubans are Muslims, but they too have been military targets of the government. Their considerable suffering is not detailed in this report, in part because it has been well covered in other reports by HRW/Africa and other human rights groups.20

The south is predominantly inhabited by African peoples, compared to the rest of the country where the majority claim Arab descent. The majority of southern peoples are Nilotes (Dinka, Nuer, Anuak, and Shilluk). The Dinka are the largest single ethnic group in Sudan. The Nuer are the second-largest group in the south. There are numerous non-Nilotic Equatorian tribes, related to others in Central Africa, but their total numbers are smaller than the Nilotes.

Many southerners have fled to the capital of Khartoum to escape the war, only to meet severe racial discrimination, forcible displacement and crowding into subhuman living quarters by the government,21 and state-supported attempts to convert them to Islam.

The war has not affected all parts of the south with the same intensity at the same time. In the late 1980s, northern Bahr El Ghazal was the area of greatest suffering, inflicted by tribal Arab militias supported by elements within the government. Their brutal raids on the Dinka of Bahr El Ghazal contributed to famine conditions. After the split in the rebel movement in August 1991, the scene of most intense battle shifted to Upper Nile province. The primary fighting was conducted not against the government but by one SPLA faction against the other for the next two years. Many observers believe that the strife between the two SPLA factions claimed more civilian lives than did the government army.

The suffering was intensified by the government's disruption of the U.N.-led relief effort and its yearly offensives launched to take advantage of the factional fighting that seriously weakened the SPLA's effectiveness. The government recaptured a string of SPLA-held towns in 1992, winning significant ground for the first time in years. The factional fighting in Upper Nile nevertheless continued and spread to Equatoria, claiming lives both directly, through indiscriminate fire and deliberate killing, and indirectly, through war-caused hunger and disease.

Violations of the rules of war are largely to blame for the estimated 1.3 million deaths of southern Sudanese in the first ten years of the current civil war. The lives of millions of civilians have been reduced to surviving by means of international handouts because the manner of combat practiced by all parties not only destroys their families but also robs them of the means of self-sufficiency and rips apart the survival strategies they customarily employ during times of food scarcity. Even before the war, subsistence in the flood-prone marshes periodically subject to drought was never easy--pastoralism with some farming has been and remains the most viable economy. Yet this economy has been crippled because civilians' cattle and grain are looted, whole areas are displaced time and again, and many civilians are unable to settle anywhere long enough to plant or replace their herds.

In this report, we wish to bring attention to the abuses not only of the government but also of the SPLA factions. We note that the government's abuses and repression are not excused by anything the SPLA factions have done, and viceversa. The government continues to commit gross violations not only of the rules of war in the south, but also in the Nuba mountains, and to violate the basic human rights of some twenty million Sudanese outside the war zones. Unfortunately, its gross violations continue as amply documented before.

We note that the SPLA claims the widest jurisdiction over the reduced (4.1 million) population of the south; the government's reach in the south, despite captures of towns and encouragement of tribal militias, is not long. Most of the territory and people of the south are under the control of the SPLA factions, if they are under the control of any authority, and they have been for several years.

Since our last major report on Sudan in 1990,22 the SPLA split into two and sometimes more factions. Until the split, it was difficult to find rebel insiders or witnesses willing to discuss SPLA abuses. The split itself generated more violations of the rules of war as each SPLA faction turned its guns on the civilian base of the opposing faction, and victimized civilians complained to us throughout the areas we visited.

The leaders of the SPLA factions must address their own human rights problems and correct their own abuses, or risk a continuation of the war on tribal or political grounds in the future, even if they win autonomy or separation.23 As one member of a small Equatorian tribe said to HRW/Africa with disgust after he had fled village burnings, looting, and summary executions by the SPLA-Torit, "And these are the ones who want to rule us in the future!"

Short of an end to the war, only the elevation of respect for human rights and humanitarian law to the top of the agenda of all parties will prevent the extinction of millions more southern Sudanese. The political leadership of the entire Sudan--north, south, east, west, transition zone, and in exile--must immediately assume responsibility for the survival of the southern peoples by exercising its moral and other authority to stop the continuing victimization of civilians in this war. Outsiders involved in the Sudan must insist on an end to human rights abuses as a primary means of preventing the obliteration of southern Sudanese.

HRW/Africa therefore recommends that the U.N. Security Council, among other things, institute an arms embargo on the warring parties in Sudan, with special attention to bombs and airplanes used by the government to attackcivilian population centers. We also recommend that the Security Council authorize a contingent of full-time U.N. human rights monitors to observe, investigate, bring to the attention of the responsible authorities, and make public violations of humanitarian and human rights laws. The monitors should have access to all parts of Sudan. They should be based in southern Sudan because the conflict is at its most extreme there.

Creating a contingent of human rights monitors to observe human rights and humanitarian law abuses in the field in southern Sudan is an appropriate step for the U.N. to take now as it expands and develops its protection to and assistance of internally displaced persons. The twenty-four million displaced persons worldwide now exceed the almost twenty million refugees.24 The internally displaced are similar to refugees except that they have not crossed an international border and therefore do not benefit from the same assistance or protections afforded refugees. Therefore, they are in many respects more needy.

In 1991, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights drew attention to the needs of internally displaced persons.25 A report on refugees, displaced persons and returnees was submitted to the U.N. General Assembly, suggesting that the Commission on Human Rights might consider creating machinery for addressing the human rights aspects of internal displacement to enable it "to deal with existing problems in this area with the necessary degree of urgency and in a concrete manner, bringing them to the attention of the international community and trying to generate the cooperation of all interested and concerned Governments."26

The Human Rights Commission appointed a special rapporteur on internally displaced persons, Francis Deng, a Sudanese born in southern Sudan.The Commission on Human Rights has issued his preliminary report;27 his work and that of others on this issue is continuing.28

One chief example of U.N. concern for the internally displaced is the Operation Lifeline Sudan (Southern Sector), since 1989 in the forefront of U.N. efforts for the displaced through cross-border operations directed from Nairobi, Kenya. OLS serves the displaced inside southern Sudan and thus helps prevent their mass starvation within Sudan and a larger flow of refugees to countries bordering on Sudan. This operation does not address the rules of war abuses committed by the parties, nor provide protection to the displaced.

The U.N.'s growing concern with the human rights problems of internally displaced persons could be addressed more readily in southern Sudan than perhaps anywhere else in the world. Human rights monitors could utilize an already-existing OLS logistical system provided for the delivery of relief supplies, yet the monitors could operate separately and would not burden those U.N. and NGO staff concerned with the emergency food operation. U.N. human rights monitors could be incorporated into the same program for personal security already provided to the rest of the OLS and NGO staff operating in southern Sudan.

Such monitors would be able to investigate abuses and report on them, thus raising the profile of abuses in the conflict. Increased U.N. reporting would lead to greater sensitivity on the part of the rebel forces, which would be an enormous benefit to the millions of people living under rebel jurisdiction. More attention paid to the government abuses would prevent the government from denying that such atrocities, particularly indiscriminate fire and scorched earth campaigns, occur. Coverage of abuses by all sides would illustrate to the parties that one is not being singled out and that all must conform to human rights and humanitarian law, no matter what their enemy's abuses.

The use of human rights monitors in this conflict could provide U.N. decision-makers with a prototype for deploying monitors in other conflicts, without committing the U.N. to equivalent action elsewhere.

There is already U.N. recognition of the severity of the human rights problems in Sudan: a special rapporteur was appointed to review human rights conditions in the country, and his reports indicate the need for more human rights attention to the Sudan, including attention to abuses committed during the armed conflict. Under the circumstances in Sudan, human rights concerns should not be deferred until the end of the conflict. The war has been particularly long-standing, lasting from 1955-72 and 1983 until the present, or twenty-eight of the last thirty-nine years. Its solution is not imminent and active combat is the rule of the day, subjecting the civilian population to new abuses of human rights and the rules of war every year, as this report illustrates. Human rights monitors, by regularly documenting and reporting on abuses in a manner that is beyond the capacity of nongovernmental organizations, would focus the attention of the parties and the world on the need for reform and respect for human rights.

Field human rights monitors could be hired specifically for Sudan to work under the supervision of the special rapporteur for Sudan, under the supervision of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, or under a separate and temporary human rights structure created by the Secretariat as in El Salvador and Cambodia pursuant to peacekeeping arrangements. The Centre for Human Rights has deployed monitors recently in the former Yugoslavia, where the conflict continues, and has opened a field office in Cambodia from which staff gathers human rights information for the reports of the special representative of the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Although there is not an armed opposition nor an internal armed conflict in Haiti, U.N. human rights monitors are being deployed there.

We recommend that the United States, the United Kingdom, and other concerned countries fully support these recommendations, and, while continuing to pressure the Sudan government to improve human rights and humanitarian access, also pressure the SPLA factions to improve their human rights performance. The government and the SPLA factions should be put on notice that the international community considers improvements in the following areas to be top priority: 1) due process, 2) political detention, torture and summary executions, 3) death penalty, 4) attacks on civilians, 5) means of acquiring food, 6) recruitment, particularly of minors, and 7) voluntary family reunification.

The Sudan government, because of its human rights performance, receives little foreign aid. That should continue until substantive improvement has taken place and until the human rights performance of the SPLA factions is significantlyimproved, there should be no consideration given to any assistance to the SPLA factions by any government.

Nongovernmental organizations play a vital role in the delivery of food and non-food relief to the needy in south Sudan. They, too, should use their influence to persuade the parties to conform their conduct to international standards of humanitarian law and human rights.

The devastation of the civilian population in southern Sudan is the fault of all the parties to the conflict. They have waged war in complete violation of the most minimal rules of war. The international community, including neighboring countries, donor nations and the U.N. should play a meaningful role in bringing pressure to bear on the parties to cease their violations, in the interest of the survival of the southern peoples.

During the period prior to independence in 1956, southern Sudan was administered separately from the north by the British under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium government1 which had ruled Sudan since the beginning of the twentieth century. The language of instruction in southern schools was English,2 and customary law was applied, with Christian missionary work encouraged and Islamic missionaries banned. Some Europeans and Christians looked to this separate administration to create a barrier to further Arab or Muslim penetration of Africa.

Armed conflict between north and south Sudan started in 1955, before independence. The conflict was punctuated by an autonomy agreement in 1972 that ended the first civil war between southern separatist forces and the central government, then headed by President Jaafar Nimieri, a military dictator. Members of Anya-Nya, the guerrilla army of southern Sudanese, were to be integrated into the national army, the local police, the prison service, and the wildlife service.3

By 1983, when the second civil war began, the autonomy agreement had been broken numerous times by the government. One such violation involved dividing the south into three regions, enabling the central government to deal separately with each and to play them off against each other on a tribal basis. The government also asserted control over the two most valuable natural resources of the south and all

Sudan-the waters of the Nile and oil-while failing to live up to promises to develop and educate the south.4

The second civil war was built on the shoulders of the first. The SPLM/A was formed in 1983 in Ethiopia from Anya-Nya II groups and Sudan army mutineers from the 105 Battalion stationed in Bor, Upper Nile, who escaped to Ethiopia, where they were joined by others.5

The SPLA experienced political divisions almost immediately. John Garang, a former Anya-Nya I guerrilla who became a Sudan army officer and received an American education, emerged as a leader. He advocated a united secular Sudan. Many Anya-Nya II leaders sought the Anya-Nya I objective of secession or self-determination; they were attacked in Ethiopia by Garang's supporters and his Ethiopian government army allies. Ethiopia was then governed by dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. There were shootouts and even military clashes between contending Sudanese factions, and John Garang de Mabior emerged as the chairman and commander-in-chief of the SPLA. The dissidents who did not escape to Sudan were either killed or detained in SPLA prisons in Ethiopia and Sudan.

The Sudan governments and political parties aligned with the governments tried to tribalize the first and second civil wars by using local rebels to fight guerrillas in neighboring territories. In the mid-1980s the remaining Anya-Nya II dissident officers and troops, mostly Nuers, formed a government militia also called Anya-Nya II. It rallied Nuers in its native Upper Nile province against the Dinka as represented by Garang's SPLA. Many Nuers, however, remained with theSPLA despite government efforts to portray the war as a tribal clash of the Dinka against everyone else.6

The Anya-Nya II attacked SPLA recruits as they were being marched from west to east, from Bahr El Ghazal to Ethiopia for military training in SPLA bases there. Anya-Nya II also prevented the SPLA from returning to Bahr El Ghazal in any large numbers.7 According to one authority, "The Anya-Nya II was, between 1984 and 1987, one of the most serious military obstacles to the supremacy of the SPLA."8 While a government militia, Anya-Nya II committed abuses against civilians believed to be aligned with the SPLA. The Sudan governments made no effort to curtail or punish these abuses.9

The SPLA undertook a policy of trying to win over Anya-Nya II, with some success. Commander Gordon Kong Cuol of Anya-Nya II led his men into an alliance with the SPLA in late 1987, and other Anya-Nya II forces followed suit, leaving a few Anya-Nya II with the government.10

Regional politics gave the southern rebels the opportunity to build up a large professional army. Mengistu, then dictator of Ethiopia and a client of the U.S.S.R., backed the creation of the SPLA and provided not only for refuge for hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees who streamed into Ethiopia, but also for military bases where the SPLA could train its recruits on hardware coming from the Soviet bloc. The rebels' political movement, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, adopted the Marxist rhetoric of the day, but the SPLA dominated the politics, which were focused not on socialism but on Sudanese north-south issues and especially on the military goal of capturing territory from the Sudan army.

Sudan and Ethiopia have had a long history of funding and facilitating each other's dissidents for purposes of mutual retaliation and attempted deterrence.11 Rebel Eritreans fighting for the separation of Eritrea from Ethiopia were aided by the Sudanese government. Southern Sudanese rebels were assisted by an Ethiopian monarch (deposed in 1974) and then by Ethiopian Marxist military officers.12 Both governments not only lost or delegated control of large parts of their territory to the rebels they sponsored, but confronted drought, famine, and massive refugee flows over periods of years.

There was also an overlay of Cold War allegiances. The Sudanese government was until the early 1970s aligned with the Soviet Union. In 1971, an attempted coup by the Sudanese Communist Party pushed Sudan President Nimieri into a closer alliance with the West.

Ethiopia was aligned with the West until the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selasse in 1974 eventually brought a group of junior Marxist officers into power in 1977. The Ogaden War (1977) was the excuse for the Soviet Union to switch its patronage from Somalia to the more populous Ethiopia, which had much better developed facilities for communications and naval access. The Soviets backed the Mengistu regime until it was overthrown in 1991.

From 1989 until the fall of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia in May 1991, the SPLA made major advances throughout the south, taking the towns on theEthiopian border and numerous towns in Upper Nile (Nasir, Akobo, Waat, Bor), Bahr El Ghazal, and Equatoria (Torit, Kapoeta, Nimule, Kajo-Kaji, Kaya, Yambio). By mid-1991, the momentum was solidly with the SPLA, which controlled most of the south with the exception of major garrisons such as Wau (Bahr El Ghazal), Malakal (Upper Nile), and Juba and Yei (Eastern Equatoria). The SPLA's border access to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Zaire was enhanced and OLS erratically supplied food and other humanitarian supplies to areas under government and SPLA control from 1989.

The SPLA's momentum came to a halt after the May 1991 overthrow of the Mengistu regime, when an eight-year patron-client relationship between Mengistu and the SPLA was destroyed overnight. The SPLA lost its military bases, principal supply lines, and main supplier of military goods.

The SPLA evacuated its bases and refugee camps in Ethiopia within a matter of days or weeks after the fall of Mengistu, and escorted hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees back into Sudan, where little provision had been made for them.

Once inside Sudan, the refugees' fortunes rapidly changed. The relief they had become accustomed to receiving in Ethiopia was not provided; what came to them was little and late, since the relief community had to negotiate often unsuccessfully with the hostile Sudan government over security and permissions.

In mid-1991, before the 271,000 Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia made their hasty repatriation to Sudan, the U.N. had warning that a disaster was impending. A later study criticized the U.N., concluding that "the OLS did not prepare adequately for the inevitable suffering that such a move would entail."13 By mid-1991, 130,000 repatriates had been registered in Nasir, 100,000 in Pochala, and 10,000 in Pakok, all just inside the Sudan border.14 In July 1991, just before the August Nasir-based rebellion within the SPLA, about 90,000 refugees from the Itang SPLA camp in Ethiopia were in the Nasir and Sobat basin areas of UpperNile.15 The OLS response was late and inadequate. Food relief did not reach Nasir until five weeks after the returning refugees started arriving in Nasir.16

At the same time, the exodus from Ethiopia disrupted the fragile subsistence economy of the Sobat basin and Ethiopian border in southern Sudan, which limped from battle to famine to flood and worse. Itang had served as a commercial substitute for the Arab traders in the Sobat basin; these traders, before 1983, had been the sinews of the southern Sudanese commercial economy. The Itang trading network, with surplus goods flowing from the refugee camps to the Upper Nile border and Sobat valley areas, collapsed overnight, and nothing took its place. The sudden appearance of hundreds of thousands of repatriated refugees with little international support put an additional strain on the SPLA and tribal relations.

The Uduk, a small Sudanese tribe who fled with the rest of the Sudanese refugees from Itang to Nasir, encountered such harsh conditions in Sudan in mid-1991 that they returned to Ethiopia as refugees in 1992, making this their fourth or fifth mass migration in the short period of three or four years, their numbers diminishing with each move, placing them at the top of the list of Sudanese groups most likely to disappear.17

The SPLA until 1991 had quelled several internal efforts at dissent with the help of Mengistu's army and internal security apparatus. With Mengistu's fall, the SPLA leadership became instantly vulnerable to more division. By the end of 1990, two senior commanders in the Upper Nile operational area, Lam Akol and Riek Machar, had been raising questions about the democratization of the SPLA command council, and by March 1991 their relations with Garang deteriorated.18 Garang had concentrated SPLA forces in Equatoria for a major wet season assault on Juba, leaving Machar's forces in Upper Nile lightly protected and vulnerable to government forces from either Malakal to the west or from Ethiopia to the east. Complicating matters were the huge numbers of refugee returnees streaming into the Sobat basin and eastern Upper Nile towns. They faced an aerial bombing campaign and continuous interruptions in the supply of international humanitarian aid to the area by the Khartoum regime.

On August 28, 1991, scarcely three months after Mengistu's fall, the three commanders of northern Upper Nile, based at Nasir--Riek and Gordon Kong Cuol, both Nuers, and Lam Akol, a Shilluk--called for the overthrow of Garang and broke with the main body of the movement.19 Joining them were the Upper Nile SPLA barracks at Ayod, Waat, Abwong, Adok, Ler, and Akobo.20 The stated goals of the breakaway group, known as the Nasir faction after the town where their main garrison was based, were of democratizing the SPLA, stopping human rights abuses, and reorienting the SPLA's objective from a united secular Sudan to independence for the south.

Many commanders remained loyal to Garang, who was not overthrown. The SPLA remained split, roughly along tribal lines, especially after the Nasir forces (mostly Nuer) massacred many Dinka civilians in an effort to captureGarang's home territory of Bor. The massacre touched off one of the most violent periods of inter-factional and inter-tribal fighting in southern Sudan's history. It exacerbated a desperate situation for the civilian population and led directly to the creation of the "Hunger Triangle," a pocket of famine from Ayod to Kongor to Waat, so named in 1993 when the U.N. and other relief operations were finally permitted access to the needy in this area of intense factional fighting.

Armed conflict and deliberate government strategies have largely been responsible for the long history of famines in Sudan; famine can be regarded as an outcome of a political process of impoverishment resulting from the transfer of assets from the weak to the politically strong.21 Four specific groups are chiefly responsible for the famines that have taken so many Sudanese lives during the second civil war; three of these groups have been vehicles for state policies and have been utilized as proxies by the government to attack the SPLA and its supporters at a relatively low cost to the government and without putting too much military recruitment pressure on the north.22

First of the groups were the government-aligned militias of Anya-Nya II, the murahallin23 and others. Their task was to attack and plunder other civilians and take their reward in the form of looted cattle. They also harassed and looted famine migrants. While the Anya-Nya II had a political agenda of building a separate state independent from the north, and had sharp political differences from their fellow tribesmen in SPLA, the murahalin never had a political agenda.

Second was the army, which supported militias, isolated some garrison towns from the surrounding areas by forcibly preventing civilians from fleeing besieged towns, created and maintained artificial scarcities of food in these towns, and actively obstructed relief efforts.

The third group contributing to famine was traders connected with the military. Because the army had sole control over the movement of commodities in garrison towns, some officers used this control as an opportunity to extract maximum profits in times of scarcities they helped to create. One egregious example was in Wau in 1987.24

Fourth was the SPLA. Three elements in its military policy were responsible for creating famine conditions: the siege of government-held towns, including obstruction of relief; the raiding, destruction and looting of villages; and the forced requisitioning of food from rural people. The SPLA policy began to change in early 1988, toward greater encouragement of relief efforts, probably because the SPLA realized that it would be unable to operate effectively in areas that had been depopulated and, as the SPLA controlled larger and larger territories, it realized the benefits of allowing relief to reach both sides. As detailed below, however, the SPLA has not abandoned its famine-creating practices and has in some respects intensified them.

The manner in which the government waged war through its three groups was instrumental in creating famine out of the war. Their actions were made possible by a central government policy which openly or tacitly encouraged them,25 and which, in turn, was made possible by the attitudes of the Sudan's donors and creditors, who were largely uninterested in the threat or reality of famine in the south. The attitude of the donors, however, began to change since 1988, with the creation of the OLS, with more attention paid to the desperate plight of southerners.

The raiding, displacement, and asset destruction did not affect all parts of southern Sudan simultaneously but created a situation of extreme instability at times in which ordinary economic activities and survival strategies became impossible. Even peaceful areas had their fragile economic and environmental balance destroyed after experiencing deluges of displaced relatives and others looking for food.

Although raiding occurred long before the civil wars, and often was settled by negotiations between tribal leaders and payment of compensation whereagreed, the practice changed in the second civil war when the raids became part of a larger political game in which negotiations for local compensation were not relevant. The objective became to take without compensating, to win war booty, and to impoverish the other side. The result was extraordinary impoverishment of the civilian population, resulting in periodic famines and large numbers of civilian deaths.

In 1989, an agreement with the Misseriya Arab militia and the SPLA put a stop to most of the government-funded Misseriya raiding that had occurred from 1984-88 and caused the famine of 1987-88 and the large-scale migration from northern Bahr el Ghazal.26 The negotiations were successful because in 1988, SPLA units established a cordon sanitaire along the Bahr el Arab (Kir River), the border between northern and southern Sudan, ensuring that without negotiations the cattle-owning Baggara tribes (including the Misseriya) could not have access to dry lands for their cattle.27 After this agreement, trade between the Dinka of Bahr El Ghazal and the Baggara was reestablished, with the Baggara having access to dry season pasture in the Dinka areas and the Dinka having relative freedom of movement in and out of southern Kordofan and southern Darfur.

The outside world was given a closer look at the mechanics of famine creation in 1993 when the government finally allowed relief agencies access to areas of the Upper Nile where the faction fighting had been fiercest. The fighting continued even as the relief agencies were attempting to bring assistance to the remaining civilians, whose resources were severely depleted.

As many of the testimonies of abuses in this report come from survivors of fighting in the Hunger Triangle (Ayod-Kongor-Waat) in Upper Nile, a closer look at this particular area is merited.28 The plight of civilians in the region shows just how destructive to civilian life violations of the rules of war can be, far beyond the killings, which were not inconsiderable.

For centuries, the harsh clay plains environment of the Upper Nile region in the Sudan has forced its Dinka and Nuer inhabitants to survive through mixedcultivation and herding. Agriculture alone was unreliable, due to the combination of erratic flooding, unreliable rainfall and clay soil. A millennium ago this led to the development of a mainly pastoral economy, in which the pastoralists move their cattle following the water as it dries up, until they come to rest on the toic.29

The economies of the various ethnic and political Upper Nile groups are linked together and form a wider regional system that enables each group to survive the limitations of its specific geographical area. The groups use a variety of networks of exchange, some based on kinship obligations, some on direct trade. Through these networks, the peoples of the region have enjoyed regular access to distant resources, crossing political and ethnic boundaries.30 As the historian Douglas H. Johnson has written:

We should recognize that people go where the food is, that in this region lines of kinship frequently follow and strengthen lines of feeding. Social ties . . . were, and still are, the main way in which the Nilotic people survive and recover from the natural catastrophes which are endemic to their region.31

In times of shortage, they drew on each other's reserves, even if there was only a surplus in relative terms.32 One tactic they employed was to raid both cattle and grain, especially during the nineteenth century, when raiding was more common than in the current century. Trade in cattle and ivory was yet another link betweenthe Dinka and Nuer. Intermarriage was another: by the time of the great floods of 1916, the southern Dinka were used to marrying their daughters to the Nuer in times of need, in spite of intermittent periods of conflict, and there were already a number of Dinka women living among the Nuer in marriages mutually recognized by both peoples.33

The SPLA split of 1991, while not tribally motivated, drove a military and political divide between these groups in Upper Nile. In addition, the places of greatest SPLA factional fighting of 1991-93 were in the Duk Ridge and Kongor,34 which in the past produced food surpluses but because of the fighting could no longer be a bridge in the hunger gap.

One of the main problems coinciding with the war in the 1980s was environmental: rainfall declined, followed by floods in 1988 and later in Upper Nile. For instance, the area of Waat (Lou Nuer) suffered particularly from drought during the planting seasons of the late 1980s. The area around Duk Faiwil and Pok Tap (Nyareweng Dinka) was relatively flood- and drought-free. The Lou Nuer therefore came in large numbers of family groups in 1988-90 to the Nyareweng Dinka, many of them seeking out the same Dinka individuals to whom the Lou Nuer had provided shelter during the floods of the 1960s.

In 1991, when Lou crops were destroyed by floods and Lou herds devastated by disease, they would have again turned to the Nyareweng for assistance, but for the SPLA faction fighting. By then the SPLA-Nasir and Anya-Nya II of Ayod had attacked the Duks and Kongor and wrecked the area, forcing many Nyareweng Dinka to flee with nothing. The Lou Nuer therefore were not ableto seek refuge with their Nyareweng Dinka contacts because Nyareweng Dinka were destitute and simultaneously seeking assistance for themselves.

Thus the brutal conflict in the Hunger Triangle tore open the customary safety nets and exposed hundreds of thousands to hunger, disease and death.

The Sudan government has engaged in widespread violations of the rules of war during the period of 1992 to early 1994, indiscriminately killing southern civilians, burning their villages, and indiscriminately bombing and shelling their population centers. Its forces also tortured and killed detainees in southern garrison towns. In Juba alone those disappeared after government arrest in 1992 number over 100; they are all presumed dead.

The 1992 government dry season offensive was characterized by serious violations of the rules of war that usually accompanied government military campaigns: killing civilians, burning villages, and indiscriminate aerial bombardments and shelling.

The Khartoum regime's offensives on several fronts in 1992 dealt the SPLA its heaviest military losses in years. The SPLA-Torit lost many population centers it had controlled in Equatoria and Upper Nile provinces, including Torit, Kapoeta, Pochalla, Pibor Post, Yirol, and Bor. The government's gains were made possible because in August 1991 the SPLA had split into two factions--known as SPLA-Torit and SPLA-Nasir--and engaged in faction fighting (see Chapter IV).

Following the split, the government did not attack areas controlled by the SPLA-Nasir faction, nor did the SPLA-Nasir faction undertake any offensives against the government, with the possible exception of the attack on Malakal in October 1992.1

In summary, there were four prongs to the 1992 government offensive.2 The first crossed from Ethiopia to the Sudanese border town of Pochalla, captured it on March 9, 1992, and went on to take Pibor Post on April 23. The second was an advance south from Malakal to capture Bor on the White Nile on April 4. The third prong started in Wau, Bahr El Ghazal, in the direction of Tonj, and capturedYirol on April 11 and Shambe on April 14;3 Tali Post was captured by the government-supported Mandari militia in May. Another column from Wau proceeded north to open the rail routes closed between Wau and Aweil since 1986. A fourth government contingent came out of Juba, the regional capital of several hundred thousand people, heading south to relieve the besieged garrison of Yei, one of the only garrison towns in Equatoria in government hands.4 These troops, instead of going to Yei, crossed the Nile in an effort to take Torit, and were bogged down in fighting at Ngangala. They took that outpost in mid-April and Lirya in mid-May, Kapoeta on May 28 and Torit, until then the headquarters of the SPLA-Torit, on July 13.5

The SPLA-Torit kept Juba under heavy siege and made two serious incursions into Juba proper in June and July 1992, although it did not succeed in taking Juba. In the course of defending against the SPLA-Torit, the government forces committed many abuses, including torture, summary executions, and forced displacement of the civilian population of Juba.

As part of its strategy, the government frequently denied access to U.N. and international relief agencies seeking to alleviate the hardship caused by the conflict. Starting in March 1992, the government ordered relief personnel to leave many southern locations, refused permission to airlift supplies to starving civilians, staged attacks by Toposa militia on relief convoys around Kapoeta, and for months denied permission to truck food and non-food items into most of the south.

In March 1992, the government expelled the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which had sustained about 100,000 recent repatriatees6 in Pochalla. Beginning in April 1992, coinciding with its dry season offensive, the government also revoked permission for OLS relief flights to areas under SPLA-Torit control. After a delay, permission was given on April 21, 1992, to the OLSto deliver food to Akobo, Waat, and Nasir, all towns under SPLA-Nasir's control.7 On May 19, 1992, the government announced that all relief flights to all destinations in the south could be resumed, ending a six-week ban on flights to the war zone.

Despite what the government said about resumption of relief flights, however, the OLS remained frustrated in its attempts to deliver food to all the needy populations. The OLS was cut off again, then permitted to resume flights to Nasir and Waat in August 1992, but not to any other locations because either the SPLA or the government of Sudan did not approve these other locations as flight destinations.

Government Offensive from Ethiopia into Eastern Upper Nile in 1992

The Sudan government took Pochalla on March 9, 1992, after several unsuccessful attempts which included indiscriminately bombing a camp for repatriatees. After moving from Pochalla to Pibor Post, the government troops killed civilians, burned huts, and looted cattle in outlying villages.

The SPLA had held Pochalla, in Anuak territory, since 1986.8 Within a few weeks after the fall of Mengistu, Pochalla had grown from a small border town to the overnight home of about 100,000 Sudanese who fled their Ethiopian refugee camps. Most of this population fled from Fugnido. The SPLA moved its military base from Ethiopia to Pochalla, locating it one and a half hours east of the repatriatees' camp, on the road that led from the border. The repatriatees were assisted by the ICRC.9 When they had been there several months, early one morning the Sudan government and Ethiopian forces started shelling from the direction of Ethiopia. A woman repatriatee told HRW/Africa she believed that the shells were aimed at the repatriatees' camp, over the heads of the SPLA. The SPLA shelled back. At the first shelling, the civilians scattered to the bush. The shelling lasted until noon, and then the Sudan government and Ethiopian forces pulled back.

The second attack, which occurred about a month later, started with an artillery barrage, with shells landing in the center of the repatriatees' camp. At 10 a.m., a plane dropped bombs, appearing to be targeting the smoke from burning cattle dung near the camp. Six bombs killed people and cattle. Others were wounded. The civilians stayed outside Pochalla until midnight. After a week, a plane returned to bomb again, prompting the civilians to begin to leave the area entirely.

Many repatriatees walked to Kapoeta with an SPLA escort. They stayed together in large groups, afraid of being killed if they traveled alone. The journey was terribly long and difficult; the road was flooded and there were attacks by Toposa militia. Many repatriatees went hungry and others drowned or were killed by animals. A woman repatriatee told HRW/Africa that it took months for her group of about 12,000 former refugees to reach Kapoeta, which they accomplished in about January 1992.

By the time of the successful government attack on Pochalla in March 1992, the 100,000 repatriatees from 1991 had been reduced in number by several such evacuations, some well publicized. When it expelled the ICRC in March 1992, the government accused it of helping to recruit children into the SPLA and of giving logistical support to the rebels. The accusation, which was not true, arose from the humanitarian assistance given by the ICRC to repatriatees fleeing Pochalla. Among them were several thousand unaccompanied minors, at whom, some believed, the government attacks were especially aimed. (See Chapter IV.)

Advancing from Pochalla, government forces on April 23, 1992 captured Pibor Post, held by the SPLA since March 1987. A Murle man in his early twenties was in his home village of Kondago outside of Pibor Post when government forces entered the village after the capture of Pibor Post.10 He was planting in his garden, away from the house, when the army entered at 4 p.m., shooting "indiscriminately." He and others fled two hours into the forest as soon as they heard the shooting. The next day, they sneaked back, but returned to the forest when they saw the army wasstill there. They returned the next day to find that the army had left, after burning down the huts and killing many villagers. Among the dead were thirty-two children who were burned inside a hut, apparently gathered there by the army in order to burn them along with the hut. Four of this man's children, ages five, six, seven, and eight, and his brother's children were killed.11 Other villagers were shot.

The army looted most of the cattle, either looting or shooting one hundred of the witness's 113 cows. "Everything but the trees was burned," he said, including a large African Inland church, also used as the school, and a Catholic church. Because the army burned and looted all their food, this man and others left the village that same day and walked west into SPLA-controlled territory.

Government Offensive from Malakal South in March/April 1992

In a separate prong of the government offensive on SPLA population centers, motorized army troops advanced south from Malakal and passed through Duk Fadiat in Upper Nile, wreaking havoc on Dinka (but not Nuer) villages as they proceeded.12 Tens of thousands of southern civilians were displaced between March and May 1992 during this offensive.

A Dinka religious leader who lived in the Duk Fadiat area said that a government convoy passed through that outpost in March 1992. The army burned the houses on the road but did not sweep beyond the road. The civilians fled to the toic, the river-flooded grassland. The army did not search out cattle, but they took the cattle they found and kept advancing south. The witness went to the toic because there he could find food, fish and roots, to eat. "There was no food in Duk because of the fighting in 1991," he said. They all eventually went to Ayod.

By March 1992, Kongor had been nearly deserted for several months, but the government in March 1992 nevertheless destroyed the few civilian structures left standing after the devastating SPLA-Nasir raids of a few months earlier. According to a Dinka chief from Kongor, a government army truck convoy from Malakal to Bor passed alongside the Jonglei canal, made a short detour through Kongor, stayed in Kongor only a few hours, then returned back to the canal. During that time the government troops destroyed the cement buildings, including a dispensary, schools, the rural council office, and others. There were only a few people living in Kongor at the time. "Here was a no-man's land, only hunger," the chief said. A married couple, Dau Deng and his second wife, Achol Ajak, were killed by an army tank during this incursion into Kongor: the tank pursued them between Kongor and Panyakur.

Bor, which is strategically located on the White Nile, frequently was subjected to government aerial bombardment. It was captured by the government on April 4, 1992. A twenty-eight-year-old Bor civilian man who was wounded in the attack on Bor said that the day before Bor fell, at about noon, a government Antonov plane circled and bombed.13 He and many others ran to the bank of the White Nile for shelter. Some people were bleeding, he said.

The next morning, at about 11 a.m., an artillery attack on Bor commenced from the Malakal road. The residents of Bor "were surprised the enemy was soclose," he said. As he was running away from the artillery, out of Bor to the south, he heard the sounds of fighting between the SPLA and the government. The SPLA had apparently advanced into Bor from its base outside Bor to engage the government troops.

On his way out of Bor, the witness was hit by government artillery fire. There were no SPLA troops in the vicinity. The shell that wounded him killed his older sister, his six-year-old brother, and another man. Three other women were wounded as well by the same shell. The fifty cows he had managed to save from the 1991 SPLA-Nasir attack were looted by the army.

A combined relief operation directed by the U.N. delivered substantial food relief within the first six weeks following the SPLA-Nasir 1991 raids on Bor and Kongor, but the situation degenerated quickly, with feeding centers reported to be "not coping at all" with the 58 percent of children said to be severely malnourished. International relief staff left Bor on March 18, 1992, following the advice of the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association (SRRA)14 in view of the impending government attack; the feeding program for 6,000 children was abandoned. Other international staffers similarly left Malek on March 31 and arrived in Jemeiza, seventy-five kilometers south of Bor, where they reestablished a supplementary feeding program for 5,000 malnourished children in three centers and 7,000 others in villages in the area and started distributing dry rations to the displaced.15

After the government occupied Bor, it burned the villages of Baidit, Mathiang, Moreng, Molek, and Anyidi in April and May 1992; the villagers fled the government.

The further battering of Dinka civilians pushed tens of thousands of them west to neighboring Dinka tribes in Bahr El Ghazal. In July 1992 groups of Bor and Twic (Kongor) Dinka were arriving daily in Aguran, after a 150-kilometer journey of ten to twenty days; many reported the death of infants en route.16

An assessment of the Bor area in late 1992 revealed that it was almost deserted although it had once been heavily populated. Many civilians from surrounding areas arrived daily in Bor in late 1992 seeking food and other assistance. The Sudan government, in control of the town, permitted their free movement. However, no agreement could be reached between the government and rebels to permit relief agencies to cross the lines around Bor to deliver food to the needy where they lived.17

Government and SPLA-Nasir Attacks in Bahr El Ghazal in 1992

Bahr El Ghazal was formerly the most densely populated area of all southern Sudan, with the population of the floodplain area of Aweil and Gogrial in 1976 estimated at 1.5 million.18 The area was, however, suffering from widespread destruction of crops by flooding in 1992 and a poor harvest in 1991, also due to flooding. Flight permission to the area was suspended by thegovernment of Sudan in early 1990 and was only reinstated in December 1992, leaving the area, far from international borders, also far from international purview.

Government abuses during an offensive in Bahr El Ghazal in 1992 included burning villages, looting, and killing civilians. During the campaign, the government won back control of several strategic towns from the SPLA-Torit and disrupted the relative calm that had prevailed in Bahr El Ghazal for a few years.

Government troops and Popular Defence Force (PDF) militia proceeded from the government garrison town of Wau in March 1992, and destroyed a string of villages across Bahr El Ghazal province, reaching Rumbek garrison in early April.19 The SPLA-Torit engaged government troops at the Na'am River Bridge on the Rumbek-Yirol road and at Allau cattle camp. The government forces withdrew to the north, burning many more Dinka villages, including Luel, Paloc, Pandit, Kap, Mageir, Markur, Yali, Mangar and Aromniel. The government finally captured Yirol on April 11 after bombing it. Shambe, a Nile port for southern Bahr El Ghazal and an important crossroads for the SPLA's supply system, fell on April 14, also after bombing.20

A thirty-year-old Dinka woman then living in Yirol town said that government forces bombed Yirol one week before they attacked. When they entered the town in the early hours of the morning, she was in her hut, or tukl. She heard firing and ran outside, where she saw random shooting. "Anyone was shot--men, women, children," she said. "Some of the soldiers burned houses with people in them." The soldiers captured many people; some were taken away, others were executed.

Three of this witness's daughters and two sons were killed in the attack. Two of her children survived, but a young daughter later died when running from another attack near Mundri in Western Equatoria. Her family's cattle were all raided from a nearby cattle camp.

From Yirol, the Sudan Army set out, with tanks and troop carriers, to round up cattle and set fire to villages in a radius of twenty kilometers from Yirol. A relief worker noted that previously government troops had not systematically setfire to villages in this area. This time, however, the destruction was systematic. At least fifteen villages were affected.21

The Dinka woman and her relatives escaped Yirol to hide in the forest around Aguran. They saw smoke from the burning villages, from which people escaped and joined her group in the forest.

U.N. and NGO presence in Bahr El Ghazal and thus information on these attacks was quite limited because of the flight ban on destinations in that region and its inaccessibility by road during the rainy season. What began to emerge, however, was that the government's scorched earth campaign was again producing vast numbers of displaced.

The 1992 dry season campaign occurred at a time when many civilians had returned to the villages from the grazing grounds to prepare the land for cultivation. Although part of the motivation for the scorched earth campaign may have been to prevent the SPLA-Torit from having any cover under which to sneak up on Yirol, the extent of the burning greatly exceeded that need. It also drastically weakened the capacity of the civilian population to survive, forcing many of them to move south.

About 90,000 Dinka who lived north and northeast of Rumbek were displaced by tribal clashes, and about 50,000 living in Yirol were displaced by the intensive fighting preceding the government's recapture of the town on April 12. Many were gathering around Aluakluak between Rumbek and Yirol, as were others displaced from the Bor/Kongor area. At that time, relief agencies estimated that Aluakluak had a population of 150,000.22

Indiscriminate Government Bombing and the Capture of Kapoeta and Torit in 1992

Prior to the capture of Kapoeta and Torit in Eastern Equatoria, the government engaged in indiscriminate bombardment of the two towns. In the course of the government capture of Kapoeta and afterwards, the army and militia killed civilians; many were targeted deliberately because they were Dinka.

Kapoeta, captured by the SPLA on February 25, 1988, was retaken by the government on May 28, 1992, in a surprise attack in which the Toposa militia played a key role because of their knowledge of the terrain. The government hadprovided guns and ammunition to the Toposa so they could fight the SPLA and the Lotuko tribe, a longstanding Toposa rival. The SPLA then armed the Boya against the Toposa.23 In early 1991, the SPLA reached an agreement with local Toposa, but the move was not entirely successful.24 A witness told HRW/Africa that the Toposa militia in 1992 "frequently raided the town, taking goats and cattle. They would kill to get livestock."

Indiscriminate Bombing of Kapoeta

The government indiscriminately bombed Kapoeta on March 13, 1992, killing several civilians. The fact that Kapoeta was a seat of local administration for the SPLA-Torit did not convert the entire town into a legitimate military target. Nor was the relief warehouse, described below, a legitimate military target.25

A man who witnessed the bombing said the attackers used an Antonov plane. He was working in a hut next to a relief food warehouse by the river at 11:30 a.m. when he heard the plane approaching. People scattered, and several were killed. He saw the body of a thirty-year-old man and later attended his burial.

Twelve shells were dropped near the relief warehouse, which he thinks was deliberately targeted. The twelve craters left by the bombs were deep enough for him, a Dinka man about six feet six inches tall, to stand in; the craters were "in a line" outside the warehouse, a large brick building with a zinc roof, which was damaged. Also damaged was a nearby one-story hotel.

The same plane circled around and made a second run on Kapoeta. It dropped bombs on the airstrip and wounded three people, one a driver whom he knew personally.26

An elderly woman in Kapoeta also saw two bombing runs that day; in one, three bombs fell in one place killing five women, and in the other, three men, forty cows, and twenty goats were killed. The dead were Toposa civilians. She saw thebodies--one of the women had her head blown off, and one of the men was cut almost in two at the waist.

The government bombed irregularly. There would be two or three months or one week off, then it would start again. There was no pattern. "They would let people forget then bomb randomly," she said.

Targeted Killings of Dinkas

Because the May 28 attack on Kapoeta surprised the SPLA-Torit, it could not properly organize an evacuation. In the hasty flight, some of those left behind when the government and militia entered were tortured and killed.

Government soldiers differentiated in their treatment of various tribes: the Toposa-speaking civilians were kept alive, as were the Nuer and those from Equatorian tribes, such as the Boya, Lotuko, and Acholi. The Dinka were singled out for punishment.27 Many were captured, tied, shot, and thrown inside houses which were set on fire. The aunt and uncle of a nineteen-year-old Dinka boy were killed this way, as well as their four children.

Elijah Dau, a Dinka and financial comptroller of Kapoeta for the SPLA, had remained behind with two of his four wives. He was killed, allegedly shot by the Toposa militia at about 4 or 5 p.m. on May 28 while trying to surrender. Kir Monychol, a graduate of the University of Cairo, was killed with his wife Chuti Deng, chair of the Kapoeta Women's Affairs Committee, and three others who were intercepted by the Toposa militia outside of Kapoeta, according to one who survived this attack.

The nineteen-year-old Dinka above, who did not flee fast enough, was hidden by his Toposa schoolmate friends. The attack on Kapoeta seemed to him to last about five hours. After the government shelling stopped, from hiding he saw the Toposa militia entering, followed by the army in military vehicles and tanks. The Toposa shot people "indiscriminately," he said, and the army shot mainly at men. Both government troops and militia looted. Only the houses at the outskirts of town were burned, leaving the houses in town standing for Toposa militia use. This boy remained in hiding ten days, then escaped.

The government raided villages around Kapoeta after seizing the town, including Bunao village, the Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) mission, two hours from Kapoeta, and Khor Mashi village, a displaced center one and a half hours from Kapoeta where many took refuge after Kapoeta fell. Inhabitants of bothvillages were accused of harboring the SPLA, and government soldiers reportedly killed civilians in both places, and burned all the houses in Khor Mashi and Bunao.

People fled Kapoeta in two directions: on the road south to Kenya, or west to Torit. A woman witness told HRW/Africa that she and her children fled at 4 a.m. and arrived three hours later in Khor Mashi, then traveled farther. Her strength began to give out, however; her feet were badly blistered and she fell down as she escaped, wounding her left upper arm, where she bears an ugly scar. She was hot and exhausted. She said that her skin peeled off, "on my arms, buttocks; my tongue split, too." She saw many lying on the ground, dead, because they had no water and they had to pass through a desert area outside Kapoeta, where there was "no river and no water, just small trees without leaves." A car picked her up and took her and her children to Torit Hospital. She was there for two days and then was evacuated to Aswa Hospital, where her recuperation took two and a half months.

Indiscriminate Bombing of Fleeing Civilians

Even after Kapoeta was retaken, the government air force chased the fleeing civilians, bombing them on the road south to Kenya. Although most of the Kapoeta evacuees reached Narus to the south on May 28, the SPLA advised them not to stay because they feared the government troops would reach Narus. The civilians and SPLA evacuated Narus about 7 p.m. The next day, May 29, the column of refugees started reaching Lokichokio, Kenya at 9 a.m. It was so long that its end was not visible from Lokichokio. The end of the column was bombed that day at a Toposa village where some of the slower people were resting; reportedly one was killed and three injured. Between 20,000 and 22,000 Sudanese left Narus to seek refuge in Kenya, including 12,500 unaccompanied minors.

To the west of Kapoeta, Torit, which was captured by the SPLA on February 27, 198928 and became its capital thereafter, was recaptured by the government on July 13, 1992. The SPLA did not put up any resistance to the recapture because at the time the SPLA-Torit was concentrating all its military efforts on the larger city of Juba, which it entered on June 7 and July 6, 1992.

En route to Torit, the government first recaptured the town of Lirya on the road from Juba to Torit on May 12; by that date, the SPLA had begun the evacuation of Torit.29

Not all the civilians left that month. According to a Pari civilian still there at the time, a week or more before they took Torit government troops shelled the town from a distance of several miles while repairing a bridge. The shelling went on every day that week, usually for two hours at a time, he said. When those left in Torit heard the shelling begin, everyone "hit the ground" to avoid shrapnel.

During one incident, three boys and their two fathers, relatives of this Pari man, died when they were hit by a shell that landed five meters away from him.

Juba, the former capital of and largest city (estimated population 287,000)30 in the southern region, has been under siege by the SPLA-Torit since 1986.31 Located in Eastern Equatoria on the West Bank of the White Nile, its population, which before the second civil war in 1983 was about 150,000, has since been augmented mostly by displaced Equatorians from outside Juba who fled to Juba when their resistance to the SPLA-Torit failed.32

This section focuses on abuses committed by the government in Juba in 1991-92. The information is supplemental to the considerably detailed work already done by Amnesty International on the government's repression of the population of Juba and on the population's civic resistance.33 Abuses committed bythe SPLA-Torit before, during, and after the battle for Juba are included in Chapter IV, below.

Abuses During the 1991-92 School Strike and Civic Struggle

In the course of suppressing civic resistance to its policies of forced Arabization and Islamization, the government arrested and brutally treated student demonstrators and leaders.

The struggle began in May 1991, when the government announced proposed new laws to change the language of instruction in the south from English to Arabic and to make compulsory the study of Islam.34 The students in Juba organized themselves and held workshops and seminars in protest. The Young Christian Student Movement passed resolutions against the change in language of instruction, which, they protested, would have an adverse effect on their academic careers.

In August 1991, the laws were passed, and on September 9, 1991, a school boycott of primary, intermediate, and secondary schools took effect in Juba. A peaceful student march to the office of the minister of education in Juba was stopped by the police, who ordered the students to disperse. The students tried to negotiate with the police, who after an hour started to use tear gas and electric prods to disperse the crowd. Some students were arrested. The next day the students attacked the office of Dawa Islamia, the Islamic missionary organization supporting the curriculum changes. Arrests of students continued.

Five days later, a new state governor was appointed who ordered the release of the students; they were videotaped before release. He issued an orderestablishing a governing student body as an alternative means of registering student complaints.

On September 22, 1992, while the school boycott continued, the secondary school students assembled at Juba Commercial Secondary School and elected representatives, who drew up a list of demands and made an appointment to meet the governor and the Council of Ministers the next morning. At the meeting, the students presented their demands and the governor responded that he would make the changes that fell within his jurisdiction but that other matters would have to be referred to the central government, including stationing armed Popular Defence Forces in schools35 and on Juba university grounds.36

The main student demands related to a regional curriculum, the language of instruction, and the teaching of religion. The students objected that textbooks contained information about the north that was not "practical or useful to the south." They thought it highly unfair that mid-year exams would be held in Arabic, not in English as before.

The students called off the boycott, with the ultimatum that it would be resumed on October 10 if matters were not resolved.37 On October 14, a committee of three persons appointed by the governor to resolve the crisis in Khartoum informed the student representatives that their complaints had been accepted and that there was no further need to boycott classes. The students asked for the commitments in writing. When they received nothing, the boycott resumed.

Students Arrested and Beaten

At the end of October 1991, as the boycott held fast, the minister of education announced the dissolution of the governing student body. At midnight, three student leaders were arrested; they were interrogated by security authorities and released three days later. Other arrests followed.

At least one student was arrested at home during this period with an arrest warrant issued by the governor; his house was searched, although the authorities had no search warrant. They took him to state security headquarters, made him takeoff his shirt, and beat him on the back with a leather whip, to make him "give in." He was beaten during interrogation and also in his cell, where he was held in isolation. After two days of interrogation concerning church and political leaders allegedly behind the movement, he was released; he was kept under close surveillance.

From time to time during November 1991, security authorities would force some students to announce on the radio that they had dropped their complaints and were ordering the other students to go back to classes.

Escaping Students Tortured by Military Intelligence

In November 1991, the government announced that the schools in southern Sudan were to use Arabic rather than English as the language of instruction.38 By the end of that month, seeing the intransigence of both sides, some students started to leave the country on foot. Those who were intercepted by the army were taken to military intelligence headquarters and tortured.

A BBC broadcast on December 25, 1991 of interviews with students who had fled Juba and reached Uganda on foot inspired more to try to escape, including a group of about twenty-eight students who left for Uganda on January 8, 1992. They found a guide to assist them in traveling through the military posts and the land mines outside Juba. He recommended that they break into two groups; one group, waiting in the bush eight kilometers south of Juba near an army headquarters, was left behind in the confusion.

Because some in the group had already attempted three or four unsuccessful escapes, they proceeded without a guide. After moving five more kilometers, they were surrounded by the army and ordered to stop. Although they were unarmed and complied with the order, the army shot at them, and they fell down, most escaping injuries. A boy and a girl in the group, however, disappeared at that point and have not been seen since. The other twelve were captured; three were young women. All were taken to the military intelligence headquarters in Juba. The nine boys were packed into one room with twenty-one male students arrested earlier, four of whom, unbeknownst to the others, were informers.

The next morning the male captives were ordered by the soldiers to get in the "Hindi" position, which involved putting one's head on the floor with straight legs and lifting the hands, arms locked, behind and over the back. From this position they were kicked in their hands and neck by the soldiers, who referred to this as their "breakfast."

Three boys were called to the office and told to bring their documents. All were beaten and had their documents taken. One was questioned about why he wanted to go to Uganda and why he did not use legal means. He explained that he had secured a visa but that transport from Juba was difficult.39 He had applied to fly on a relief plane to Nairobi, but while waiting for that permission, his visa expired and the authorities would not renew it.

During questioning, an interrogator lashed this student and banged his head against the wall, asking him about the role of the U.N. in helping the students flee to Uganda. The interrogator claimed that the U.N. kept vehicles near Kajo Kaji to take the students to Roman Catholic Bishop Taban, who would take them to Uganda. The student detainee denied this. The interrogators made him lie on the floor on his back, already wounded from lashing, and lashed him several minutes more.

The next day, everyone in the cell received minor beatings from the various soldiers who passed by. The numbers of male detainees in the cell increased gradually to sixty-five. On the following day, Sunday, twenty students were removed from the overcrowded cell and put in a makeshift cell, a trench with logs covering the top. Since it was Sunday, the students asked for and received permission to pray. The guards gave them back one of the Bibles they had confiscated and allowed a Mexican nun to enter the army base to pray with them. Priests brought food for the students and the soldiers.

On Monday, a second lieutenant, Ibrahim Salam, became annoyed when he heard a student detainee singing a hymn. According to this twenty-three-year-old student, this lieutenant called him into an office, alone. The lieutenant took out a display of torture tools (pin, pliers, whip, cocked pistol, red peppers in a bag) and placed them on a table, and told the student to remove his jacket, saying, "We're in a state of emergency. If I kill you now like a dog, no one will question me. Which of all these things do you want me to use?" The student refused to select any torture instruments. The officer, in an effort to force the detainee to admit that he was a student leader and SPLA-Torit agent and that the U.N. was behind the student movement to Uganda, made the detainee lie on his face on the floor, and beat him. He also tightly tied each of the boy's fingers and punctured his fingertips with the needle, making blood spurt out. He also made him stand an arm's length from the wall, leaning against the wall; and he beat the detainee's outstretched arms and head.

The student passed out. When he opened his eyes he saw by a wall clock that he had been unconscious for three hours. He was ordered to leave the office but was unable to move. Then he was told to put on his jacket, but he could not. The officer nevertheless forced the jacket on him; it became bloody.

The student crawled to the veranda, sat down, and moved slowly down the steps to the trench. He lay face down without talking to the other prisoners. It was hard for him to eat and when the guards came to count the prisoners at 6 p.m. he could not stand up. He asked for permission to sleep outside the trench, and a soldier agreed and gave him two blankets and a pillow.

The next day, his jacket was stuck to his wounds. The same officer who had tortured him tore the jacket off his back, reopening the wounds. A nurse at the base took pity on the victim and surreptitiously gave him antibiotics. An informer saw him take a pill and informed that the prisoner intended to commit suicide. The wounded student was again interrogated, although he was in a weak state, and forced to turn over the medicine.

One night, he was taken in a car to the bank of the White Nile. His hands were tied behind him and he was ordered to get out of the car and kneel facing the river. The soldiers cocked a gun behind his ear and told him "This is the last moment you have. Do you want to change your statement?" He had already decided they were going to kill him so he did not change anything. They kicked and threatened him some more but did not shoot him.

On the night of January 19, 1992, the student was driven to the White House, a notorious torture center and death row. The captors showed him around the building with a flashlight. "Have you seen the fate of the others? You will face the same thing if you stick to your statement," they said. They tied his legs and arms behind him with a rope around his chest. They attached a metal hook to the rope in front of his body and pulled him up to hang from the ceiling. His head was thrown back. For two minutes, "things became very difficult," he said, then they lowered him down and finally took him back to the base.

The next day he was shown an "order of execution" for himself. He was taken to kneel on an outcropping of rock over a valley with a small stream. "Say your last prayers," the soldiers told him and hit him with a rifle butt. Three soldiers cocked their rifles. "All will open up with their rifles. That is how we kill people. Have you finished your prayers?" After a little more of this, they took him back to his cell.

The church put pressure on the army because of the reports of torture that were leaking out of the base. Military intelligence then ordered the beatings to stop, about fourteen days after the arrest of the student whose torture is described above. The student overheard a military intelligence officer tell the torturer, "Theinvestigation is finished and I do not want to see any unnecessary beatings." The interrogation of all but a few had already been completed by then.

Thereafter, they were not beaten. The student group, by then six girls and fifty-nine boys, was transferred to police jurisdiction on January 22, 1992, where they had "fine treatment, no harassment." The boys were kept in two big dormitories and even given games to play. All the students were released on February 6, 1992, on condition that a relative be a guarantor. The relative was to be photographed, and if the student "went missing," the relative would be responsible. The student was told by security authorities upon his release that they could not allow him to leave Juba because he was "dangerous." The authorities also tried to recruit him after he returned home.

Arrest of Priests Followed by Police Shooting at Demonstrators, Killing One

Following these events, the government targeted for arrest Catholic clergy. When demonstrations were held to protest the arrests, the police used excessive force in countering the demonstration, shooting into the crowd and killing one student.

In March 1992, the head of the Catholic schools and another priest were summoned by the police to explain why the Catholic schools had not been reopened; the student school boycott of government schools was still in effect. Two priests, Father Constantino Pitia and Father Nicholas Abdallah, were arrested on March 10 and flown, without any notification to church authorities, to Khartoum on March 15.40

Juba civilians demonstrated on March 15, 16, and 17, to protest the arrests of the priests. On March 17, teargas was used to disperse the crowds. A fourteen-year-old boy, Francis, who was at the head of the crowd, died when the soldiers shot into the crowd. His body was carried to the church by the demonstrators. For his funeral the next day, the funeral route, seven kilometers from the church to the school, was lined with tanks and heavily armed soldiers. The government also deployed prison warders, wildlife police, intelligence agents, and police. Marchers were ordered to disperse in ones and twos; they were warned that larger groups would be shot at. The priests who were present agreed to obey the order, and the crowd dispersed.

The two detained priests were released in April 1992 after twenty-six days in custody. They returned from Khartoum to Juba in early May and were met by a large group of supporters at the Juba airport.41

During the summer of 1992, SPLA-Torit made two military incursions into Juba, on June 7 and then again on July 6, and nearly captured the city. Each incursion was followed by a wave of retaliatory killings, disappearances, andarrests of civilians, soldiers, police, army, wildlife, and prison forces, according to a wildlife warden and others.

The SPLA-Torit, calling its incursion "Operation Jungle Storm," entered Juba from the south at 5 a.m. on June 7. It claimed to have occupied the headquarters of the Southern Military Command for three hours and captured the BN116 Artillery Unit before it withdrew the same day.42

There was heavy shelling by both sides and attacks on residential areas. The fighting produced at least 198 war wounded, who were taken over the border by land to the ICRC hospital in Lokichokio, Kenya. In Juba, local ICRC staff and the Sudanese Red Crescent assisted the victims and transported hundreds of wounded to hospital and distributed medical supplies sent in by the ICRC.43

During those days, the Juba government could not tightly control the movement of the civilian population, and it was estimated that some 50,000 people left Juba for the safety of Mundri, Kaya, Kajo Kaji, and Aluakluak.44

The SPLA-Torit launched a second surprise attack on July 6, 1992, re-entering Juba using the streams and inlets of the White Nile and remaining a few days, according to a wildlife warden who was there. The SPLA-Torit occupied key military areas and was forced to withdraw only after ten days of heavy fighting.

The government claimed that the attack followed an infiltration by SPLA-Torit elements in civilian clothes. A government source said the infiltrators killed a large number of government troops and innocent civilians, but that eventually the garrison regained the initiative and drove out the infiltrators.45 Relief agencies received reports of about 500 civilian casualties from the July 1992 fighting, which were largely the result of shortages of food and medicine.46

Summary Executions, Disappearances, Arrests, and Mass Displacement

These two thwarted SPLA-Torit attacks were followed by crackdowns by Juba government forces, including killings, disappearances, and arrests.

According to Amnesty International, the day after the June SPLA-Torit assault, forty soldiers providing air defense at Juba Airport were extrajudicially executed by the government.47 In the next days, security authorities reportedly arrested over eighty southern Sudanese soldiers, policemen, prison guards, and paramilitary guards in the Department of Wildlife, suspected of being SPLA-Torit collaborators or sympathizers.48 It was reported that, following the attacks, security authorities also arrested people in responsible positions, such as customs officials, technicians, church workers, youth leaders--in short "anyone who may be suspected of being sympathetic to the SPLA-Torit or opposed to the Islamic government."49

The highest level arrest was that of Retired Maj. Gen. Peter Cirillo, former governor of Equatoria, taken from his house in Juba at gunpoint to Khartoum because his younger brother, Maj. Thomas Cirillo, defected to the SPLA-Torit during the attack with some of his troops.50 Maj. Gen. Cirillo was released in Khartoum several months later, in February 1993.

On the night of June 23, 1992, seven southern Sudanese soldiers reportedly were extrajudicially executed.51

The SPLA-Torit entered Juba for a second attack on July 6, 1992, through the suburbs, including Lalogo. Over the next ten days, heavy fighting took place in and around the suburbs of Lalogo, Kator, and Rejaf West. The army regainedcontrol, although the SPLA-Torit continued to shell targets inside the city.52 The army ordered the evacuation of Lalogo and Kator on July 11 and the next day burned down these and other areas, leaving 100,000 civilians squatting without shelter in the old center of Juba, at the height of the rainy season.

On July 16, a group of forty southern Sudanese soldiers serving in the government army reportedly were extrajudicially executed, accused of collaborating with the SPLA.53

In the course of regaining control, the army made a large sweep through the town. Soldiers forced their way into private homes, searching for SPLA-Torit combatants. During the searches, many civilians were beaten and many possessions looted. An unknown number were arrested, including some who were later released. Amnesty International was informed that at least 200 civilians were killing during these operations.54 After the army sweep, relatives were too frightened to remove the bodies and "many were left unburied for several days."55

Amnesty International documented 230 men arrested by the government in Juba between June and August 1992 but never accounted for; many of them were prominent Juba civilians.56 In April, 1993, Amnesty International confirmed the death of Camillo Odongi Loyuk, a retired southern Sudanese army officer who was arrested in Khartoum in June in retaliation for the attack on Juba. He was tied spread-eagled to the window bars of a room, where a rope with a sliding noose was tied around his testicles and tightened if he moved. He was beaten to death. The government denied responsibility and maintained that Loyuk was free.57

Government Execution and Disappearance of International Aid Employees

Among the many who were executed and disappeared by the government in the aftermath of the SPLA-Torit July 1992 attack were several relief workers. U.S. AID employees Andrew Tombe and Baudoin Tally were arrested and later executed. Two other U.S. AlD employees, Dominic Morris and Chaplain Lako, were arrested in August 1992 and have disappeared.58 Two U.N. employees, one Michael Muto Alia, the highest-ranking United Nations Development Program (UNDP) representative in Juba, were arrested and disappeared. One European Economic Community (EEC) employee, Mark Laboke Jenner, admittedly was tried and executed.

After the June attack, U.S.AID handed over the care of its Juba compound to Tombe and Tally, two U.S.AID southern Sudanese employees. During the attack the following month, government forces entered the compound and commandeered all the vehicles. When Tombe and Tally tried to stop them, they were arrested. The U.S. Embassy inquired about the arrests and was first told that the Khartoum government had no information. The U.S. request to travel to Juba to investigate was stalled on security grounds.

The Sudan government later claimed that Tally had disappeared and that Tombe had been arrested and he confessed. It said the case had been investigated and that Tombe was tried on August 15, 1992,59 "by a competent court of law which convicted and sentenced him to death. It was proved that he used the communication equipment available to him to direct the artillery of the SPLA-Torit in bombarding the city and was justly punished for his treachery."60 The government claimed that the defendant's actions had led to hundreds of casualties and that his execution was unjustly characterized as an extra-judicial killing "ignoring the fact that there is a constitutional government authority in a city which was then under siege by an enemy, and an act of treachery can only be dealt with by court martial, and in accordance with the rule of law."61

The government has never established, however, what rule of law it applied and whether any trial was held, much less one that comported withelementary notions of due process. The record of this trial has never been produced. The government referred to unspecified evidence from unnamed witnesses and a confession that was never released. It failed to specify the venue of the trial, the participants, or the judicial procedures applied.62

The Sudan government orally informed the U.S. that Tally was also executed, but did not provide any further information. No oral or written information whatsoever has been provided to the U.S. government regarding its two other disappeared employees, Lako and Morris, last seen in Sudan army custody in Juba.63 Sudan, responding to U.S. diplomatic protests, "ordered a judicial enquiry into that incident. The commission of inquiry is headed by a judge of the High Court who is yet to submit his report," wrote the Sudan government in November 1993, a year and three months after the event. "Delay is due to the continuous requests for information of persons alleged to have disappeared after the incident. That report would be distributed to interested governments and organizations on completion."64

HRW/Africa awaits the report, but we must assume after such a lengthy delay that it will never be produced. It appears to us that it was never the intention of the government to produce such a report, but simply to engage in delaying tactics.65

Two Sudanese employees of the UNDP were arrested in Juba during the period after the July 1992 attack and disappeared. It is suspected that they also were executed. Despite repeated requests, the government did not provide any information about them until November 1992, when the Juba authorities told the U.N. that one of the men, Michael Muto Atia, was arrested on July 31, 1992, and was awaiting trial in Khartoum. The authorities in Khartoum, however, said he had "disappeared."66 The fate of the other man, an unnamed driver, is unknown.

Mark Laboke Jenner, a Sudanese employee of the EEC in Juba, was executed in mid-August 1992. Sudanese officials say that he was sentenced to death by a military court for treason, but there has been no independent confirmation that he had received any trial, let alone a fair one.67

Government Accountability for Killings and Disappearances

Following the two SPLA-Torit attacks, the government received so many complaints of summary executions that it bowed to pressure and established a committee in November 1992 to "investigate the incidents in Juba town in June and July."68 This committee has proved useless.

When the U.N. special rapporteur inquired about the results, the committee revealed that it had not visited Juba until April 1993, ten months after the events in question, and only for four days. The committee felt another visit was required, which would not take place "soon" due to a "shortage of fuel for air transport." The committee did not have any answer regarding the sentences pronounced by the special military courts reportedly set up in Juba after June 1992.69

The U.N. special rapporteur in September 1993 asked for an accounting of 230 persons allegedly arrested in Juba between June and August 1992.70 In its November 1993 written reply to the special rapporteur, the government repeated that it had arrested and tried "some" infiltrators, did not mention the fate of the 230 persons, and referred only to the trial and execution of one person, Tombe who had been an employee of U.S.AID.71

The government continues to ignore requests for an accounting of the arrests and disappearances of persons last seen in custody following the battle for Juba. In the vast majority of the 230 cases of disappeared following arrests in Juba in this period compiled by Amnesty International, the authorities have failed to provide any information at all. The disappeared remain missing72 and are presumed dead.

Detention and Deportation of Clergy

On July 31, 1992, the Catholic archbishop of Juba, Paolino Lukudu, and Fathers Immanuel Jada, James Oyet, and David Tombe were summoned to a meeting with Mohammed al-Mahdi, chief of security, for the purpose of interrogating Father David Tombe. On August 2, Father Tombe was taken to the main barracks, where he was mistreated, then to Khartoum, where he was held incommunicado until February 1993.73

On August 16, 1992, an order was given to all Catholic and Protestant expatriate missionaries to leave Juba for Khartoum within twenty-four hours, later extended to fifteen days. The archbishop met with security authorities to avoid the deportation but had no success. On September 4, four Protestant missionaries left for Nairobi.74 Five Comboni sisters and six Comboni fathers were escorted to the airport by security authorities and flown to Khartoum following a written order that they be removed for their own protection.75 All remaining foreign missionaries were deported from Juba on September 5, 1992. Expulsion of foreign missionaries hit hard because there were never enough Sudanese priests and nuns to minister to the Catholic population of Juba, and because of the role they played in relief and in reporting on government abuses.76

Forcible Displacement of Civilians into Inadequate Conditions

After the July 1992 attack, the Juba government forcibly displaced over 100,000 civilians living there,77 herding them from their homes to the city center and crowding them into unsanitary and inadequate locations, or leaving them exposed to the elements in open spaces. It also burned the homes and crops left behind by the civilians, all in violation of the rules of war. Furthermore, it refused to allow the civilians, who were in desperate conditions and entirely dependent on erratic international relief, to leave Juba.78

On July 11, the army ordered the evacuation of Lalogo (the displaced persons camp and the village) and Kator neighborhoods and burned them and other areas the next day, forcing their inhabitants to squat without shelter in the city center.79 Most displaced from Kator, Lalogo, Jebel Kujui, and Tong piny camps lost their shacks.80

The destruction of housing appeared to be in retaliation for alleged support for the SPLA-Torit in those areas (which the rebels had passed through) as well as an effort on the part of the army to create "free fire" zones in which to attack SPLA-Torit guerrillas attempting to enter Juba. Crops were also destroyed.A witness noted that "the maize crop, at a milky stage, and the dura [sorghum], at the flowering stage, were all cut down by the army on July 14 and the fields were mined."81

This massive displacement of up to three-quarters of the Juba population82 occurred while the army prevented civilians from leaving Juba. "Afterward there was no freedom of movement in Juba. People would be killed if they tried to move," one civilian said. The army reportedly mined routes out of Juba to prevent people from leaving.

The displaced were forced to live in completely inadequate conditions as squatters in and around the concrete buildings comprising the old commercial and administrative center of the city.83 They were squeezed into an area of about twenty-five square kilometers, about one-quarter of the whole urban area.84 Conditions were reportedly sub-human: hunger, thirst, disease, lack of shelter, and fear were daily battles, according to the foreign missionaries who witnessed this before their expulsion:

[T]housands of people are living as squatters under makeshift plastic coverings, each family in a space no bigger than 8 x 5 feet. Thousands of others have fled to the banks of the Nile River or sought some protection behind walls of buildings. Others are jammed into one- or two-room houses of relatives. Every church and school compound and other public properties are crowded with these squa