Dinka and Baggara Rivalry in Bahr El Ghazal

The Dinka/Baggara rivalry has escalated from tribal animosity to a government counterinsurgency strategy whereby the Baggara have become government proxies against the Dinka, perceived as the backbone of the SPLA. This role for the Baggara was forged under the government of President Nimeiri (1969-85) and applied by the Umma Party when it was in power in a series of coalition governments from 1986-89. Although the Umma Party coalition was an elected government, the elections were not entirely satisfactory because the civil war that restarted in 1983 prevented most living in the south from participating.

The armed horsemen of the Baggara militia, known as the muraheleen, played a crucial role in the generation of the famines of 1988 and 1998. Their government-sanctioned raids transferred Dinka cattle wealth to the Baggara, enslaved Dinka women and children, and played a major role in causing the Bahr El Ghazal famine of 1988, as has been abundantly illustrated in numerous studies.⁷¹ Muraheleen raids of the 1990s contributed to the 1998 famine through the same process.⁷²

The Baggara MilitiaCthe Muraheleen

The Baggara are Arabized cattle nomads (bagara is the Arabic word for cow) living in the southern parts of Kordofan and Darfur, in western Sudan. The Baggara include subgroups such as the Rizeigat of Darfur and the Misseriya of Kordofan. Most Baggara today still belong to the Ansar Sunni Muslim religious sect and the Umma Party.

Misseriya militias were active as early as 1983. Under the government of President Nimeiri they and the Anyanya II, a mostly Nuer militia, coordinated raids with the army.⁷³ The government may have turned to arming the Baggara as a militia in part because conscription was unpopular in Sudan; it was canvassed as an option by President Nimeiri in 1984 and was apparently so unpopular that Nimeiri dropped the idea and armed tribal militias to increase the forces at his disposal to fight the war.⁷⁴

After electoral democracy was restored, the Umma Party, partly out of fear that the Islamist NIF was making inroads into its traditional Baggara base, armed its Baggara supporters to raid the southerners and take war booty, and granted the Baggara impunity for these crimes.⁷⁵

Mechanisms used to exist for settling conflicts between the Baggara and the Dinka, mostly by inter-tribal conferences backed up by the power of the state. Since the beginning of the second civil war in 1983, however Athe government has not intervened to try to settle disputes between the Baggara and the Dinka.@⁷⁶ The national government has intervened to mediate disputes between other tribes since that date, however.⁷⁷

Agreements between the two sides have produced truces from time to time. During the first civil war (1955-72), the Baggara entered into grazing agreements with local commanders of the Anyanya southern separatist guerrilla movement, whereby the Baggara paid taxes in currency and bulls in order to graze and water their livestock in Bahr El Ghazal during the dry season. These were not renewed at the outset of the second civil war, however, and the Baggara began to make annual armed incursions into Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile, taking advantage of local unarmed populations.⁷⁸

The Baggara tribes suffered economically from desertification and drought, encroachment on grazing lands by mechanized farming, and other factors in the 1980s.⁷⁹ They were a persistent threat of rebellion to all central governments. In 1977 the Ansar (including the Baggara) came close to overthrowing President Nimeiri in an armed insurrection from bases in Libya. The government militia strategy would appease the Baggara with war booty and channel their economic frustrations against other sources of rebellion: the Dinka and the Nuer.⁸⁰

AMuraheleen@ is the Misseriya word for Atravelers,@ referring to groups of young Misseriya Baggara men who accompanied herds of cattle ahead of the rest of the tribe in the seasonal movements of the herds. The muraheleen travel on horseback, and were traditionally armed with firearms to protect themselves and their herds against wild animals and cattle raiders. The families followed behind. The equivalent among the Rizeigat Baggara tribe of southern Darfur are called "fursan," Arabic for "cavaliers or horsemen." The muraheleen tribal militias were formed in the mid-1980s. They were incorporated into the army after the 1989 coup that brought the NIF to power. After that, the term muraheleen came to cover not only Misseriya but also Rizeigat and other Baggara, and to denote tribal militias who raid villages in the south operating under the authority of the army.

One important muraheleen function since 1989 has been to accompany the military supply train that descends on Bahr El Ghazal along the sole rail line that goes to the south, ending at Wau. They put their horses on the train. When they reach Bahr El Ghazal they bring out the horses to use in raids on Dinka villages along the railway and beyond; with the horses, they can reach a greater number of villages. Armed by the government with modern weapons, the muraheleen and other government forces periodically devastated the Dinka communities along the rail line as they traveled with the military train, looting food stocks, rustling cattle, burning villages, and abducting women and children into slavery⁸¹Cand contributing to the preconditions of famine. The Dinka, who do not have horses, also lacked modern weapons and protection, as the northern Bahr El Ghazal area was not an area of strategic military importance to the SPLA.

The muraheleen have not settled in Wau, but usually are seen there when the train arrives. They have been seen selling looted cattle and other goods in the Wau market, usually transported there by the military train. (See Appendix C for more details of the historical role of the train in human rights abuses.)

Their role in the looting and killing civilians and causing famine is known, even in Khartoum. Dr. Toby Maduot, a leader of a political party registered with the government, the Sudan African National Union (SANU), called for the disbanding of all the militias, be they private or belonging to the government. He specifically blamed the muraheleen for marauding in southern Sudan.⁸²

Those Dinka Displaced from Abyei County, Kordofan

The border between Darfur and Bahr El Ghazal was set by the British in 1924 some twelve miles south of the Bahr al Arab River (Kir River)⁸³ and has been a source of Baggara/Dinka conflict ever since.⁸⁴ The border between Kordofan and Bahr El Ghazal was also set south of that river.

The Ngok Dinka lived in the Bahr El Ghazal-Kordofan area north and south of the Bahr al Arab River, with their center at Abyei. In 1951 their chief agreed to the demarcation whereby the Abyei area remained part of Kordofan, north of Bahr El Ghazal, and technically not in the south, and at independence in 1956 it remained part of Kordofan.⁸⁵

This demarcation of Abyei is important now because Ngok Dinka lands have been in the jurisdiction of Kordofan (now Western Kordofan) for decades, and peace negotiations have foundered, among other things, on whether the Abyei area should be included in the southern region for purposes of voting on self-determination.⁸⁶

Many Ngok Dinka have been displaced from their homes in Kordofan by muraheleen raiding; some moved south to Bahr El Ghazal and suffered famines there in 1988 and 1998. Human Rights Watch interviewed community leaders from Abyei County in Wunrok (Twic County, Bahr El Ghazal) in May 1998; they said they had been displaced Aby the Arabs@ from their land in 1977. One Ngok Dinka civilian leader said that their troubles with Athe Arabs@ started in 1964 over cattle; the fight was settled by the chiefs but in 1977 it flared up again, this time with the muraheleen armed by the Nimeiri government (1969-85). Since then, the muraheleen have had their own garrison in Abyei. Their motivation for attacks on the Dinka, this man believed, was to expel them from the area and take over Dinka land. This is a widely-held belief among the Dinka. After the Ngok Dinka moved south to Twic County to get away from muraheleen raiding they could no longer take their cattle to water on the Kir River (Bahr al Arab).⁸⁷

A white-haired elder of the Ngok Dinka from Dung Ap village, one hour on foot (four miles) north of the Bahr al Arab River, said that he and many others left Dung Ap years ago, after the Arabs raided it three times and killed people. The family split up; two wives and four children went to Khartoum, and he and his other wives and children went to Mayen Abun in Twic County, Bahr El Ghazal. When asked why they left Dung Ap, he replied, ABecause the enemy destroyed the area and there was no food. Dung Ap is now a no man=s land.@ The enemy burned all the houses and killed people. The AArab@ was the enemy. AThey want to occupy our land and take our property. They live on my land during the rainy season. Our area is very fertile.@ He grew groundnuts (peanuts), simsim (sesame), okra, and sorghum, and harvested honey in the forest. He had cattle. AWe fought them. We defended ourselves for two years. After that they joined with the government, in 1977, and defeated us. They became stronger. They had rifles (many) and we had only spears, no guns. This happened before the SPLA.@⁸⁸

Even after he and his community moved south into the Dinka area of Mayen Abun, and lived there many years, they were not safe from the Aenemy,@ the Misseriya Arabs, who raided Mayen Abun and their cattle camp at Akwach in 1988. AThey had uniforms which they had from Khartoum. We had no rifles so we escaped and left our cows for them. The SPLA was far away.@ After the cattle raid, he lived around the Lol River to fish for food for his children. When the muraheleen left he returned to Mayen Abun. His herd was replenished by the marriage of one daughter (twelve cows), but ten were taken by the raiders in 1997.

We have not returned to Abyei since we left. We sent our women to Abyei to buy food, durra [sorghum]. They sold butter for durra. Last year [1997] was the last time they did this. This year, we have no cows [they were taken by muraheleen] and therefore no butter. We did not go to Aweil or Gogrial. They are very far from here. We do not know those towns.

His family lived in Mayen Abun for many years, and was there during the Atime of the war between SPLA and Kerubino [1994-97]. All the houses and goats were looted by Kerubino=s forces. Kerubino was looting because he had joined with Khartoum and we refused him. We refused to join the Arabs because they destroyed our things, looted, took slaves, and other things.@ The same source described the seesaw battle for control of the area:

Kerubino went to the Arabs. We do not know the reason he was angry [with us]. He went there. Kerubino captured our children to arm them as his soldiers. Even the older men. I escaped and hid. Kerubino did not get any of my children. None joined him. . . .

The SPLA was not allowed in Mayen Abun; Kerubino=s forces were in Mayen Abun. The SPLA attacked Kerubino in Mayen Abun three times. During those attacks, Kerubino=s men were killed by the SPLA. Then Kerubino withdrew to Gogrial with some goats, about three years ago [1995]. Then he returned to Wunrok again and destroyed the area, burned houses and moved with the muraheleen and took the rest of the goats. The SPLA stayed in Mayen Abun, in the outlying villages. They did not take cows or goats or capture people. Kerubino chased the SPLA away. The SPLA returned in 1997, in an attack on Wunrok. I escaped. Kerubino withdrew to Gogrial and Abyei. This happened twice.

Ten cows were taken from me in 1997 in Mayen Abun. The muraheleen came by surprise and took the cows. Usually when we heard they were coming, we hid with the cattle but this time they reached us by surprise. This was May last year [1997].

Wunrok was not a permanent settlement for them, only one of a series of refuges from continued raiding. Wunrok was raided by the muraheleen a few days after this interview, and those who survived were uprooted again.

Those Dinka Displaced from Twic County, Bahr El Ghazal

A Widow=s Story: Famine and Child Slavery

One Dinka woman, Alet, born in Wunrok, Twic County, Bahr El Ghazal, had a typical story of family devastation and displacement by raiders. Alet gave birth to twenty children, of whom ten died when they were young. Her children died in the first famine and in the second famine; she did not know the years. Five children were abducted, in different years, by the muraheleen. When asked her age, she said, Aone hundred years,@ laughing. Like most rural Dinka women, she is illiterate.

She lived in Wunrok and Panthou, on the other side of the Lol River, while her husband was alive. The land was fertile and she and her husband cultivated many crops, including sorghum, groundnuts, maize, okra, and sesame. AI worked very hard,@ Alet said. Nevertheless, ten children died in the first famine (perhaps 1973) and the second famine (1988).

They were raided by the muraheleen on a frequent basis. The first three children were captured by the muraheleen from Wunrok Abefore the second famine.@ Three were taken at the same time: two boys (Piol age four and Ajal age six) and one girl (Abuk age seven). The family moved to Panthou. After the second famine, the other two, both girls, were taken (Aker age nine and Aluel age eleven), Aduring the time of Omar Bashir, when Kerubino was still in the SPLA.@⁸⁹

One son, Bui Ngor, went to Ethiopia to study in the refugee camps there after the abduction of his siblings. He was eight years old. He left with many boys from this area. He has not returned and his mother knows nothing of him. (In Ethiopia he was almost certainly conscripted into the SPLA as a child soldier).⁹⁰

The muraheleen came with horses and on foot. When they came, the children scattered and she ran also. AOther children from Wunrok were taken also, not mine alone.@ When they were captured, the SPLA was far away. When the SPLA arrived, the muraheleen left, taking cows, goats, and sorghum they had looted.

After loosing five children to the muraheleen raids, her husband went to look for them Ain the land of the Arabs, north of the Bahr al Arab (Kir).@ He was angry when he left. He told his wife, AI will go and look for the children. If I cannot find them I will kill myself.@ He went alone, and spent two years there, in alien territory. He could not find the kidnapped children. He was worn out by the search, and returned to Panthou, where he fell ill because of the Ashock@and heartbreak, and died. She was left a widow with four young daughters.

Raiding continued after his death. During one raid she and others crossed the Lol River and escaped to Paliet. When they returned home to Wunrok they found that everything had been burned by the muraheleen. There was raiding on Panthou when they lived there, also; they escaped to Paliet with their cattle. The muraheleen followed them, took the cattle, and left. Many Dinka were killed: Athey could not be counted.@ In all she remembers four raids on Panthou, by the muraheleen, the Nuer, and Kerubino, when he was based in Wunrok.

Alet is a widow who has not remarried. She is angry that her children were abducted and her husband died. But this was not the end of the abduction of her children: a few years ago, after her husband died, the muraheleen raided again and took her four remaining children, all girls.

Alet pursued the raiders for three days, on foot. She found them when they were still on the road. The muraheleen were many, and were riding on horses. Her four daughters and other captives were on foot, tied by their hands together, with one rope. She pleaded with the muraheleen.

AI went and cried in front of them, >Give me my children, if you refuse, I will go with them, and if you won=t let me, you should kill me here.= I told them they already took five children, and I wanted my last four children back.@ They relented and gave her the four girls.

When her oldest girl married one year ago, the dowry (bridewealth) to be paid by the bridegroom=s family to her family was forty cattle. In cases where the bride=s father is dead, the cattle are divided among the bride=s relatives, but her widowed mother has no right to keep cattle under Dinka customary law, according to this widow. Most of the bridewealth cattle went to the bride=s father=s brothers and uncles. Alet, the widow, received only two cows and they went to her father and brothers. This underlines the great social disadvantage widows suffer, as pointed out in the Joint Task Force Report.

AOur area is totally destroyed and we=re very hungry. The other areas are the same. The people cannot survive this year. We have no beds, no mosquito nets. There are lots of mosquitos here. Now the muraheleen are in this area so many people have fled and most are now in the bush.

AI am thin from hunger, not disease. Our problem now is hunger, not abduction,@ she concluded.⁹¹

Another Dinka Family, Torn Apart

Ajak is a Dinka mother whose oldest child is a twenty-five year old girl. Ajak does not know her age. She was born in Ayen village and moved to Mayen Abun when she married. They were displaced from Mayen Abun by two muraheleen raids. The muraheleen destroyed all their property, looting and burning houses and killing people. During the two raids they took all one hundred cattle her husband had, and one hundred goats. Everything else was broken and burned. The muraheleen came early in the morning during these raids, on foot, and accompanied by soldiers.

During the second raid, the muraheleen killed about 200 people after surrounding the Dinka village. They abducted about fifteen children, who have not returned. After the second raid, her husband took the two oldest boys and went north. Ajak moved to Ayen where she lived with a sister and a brother.

Kerubino and the SPLA fought in Ayen. Kerubino then devastated the area and took what little sorghum they had cultivated. After that her family went to Mading, to safety. There was, however, no food distribution there, and they ate wild leaves of the lalob and other trees. They were not in good health, and Ajak ended the interview with heavy coughing.⁹²

71 Keen, The Benefits of Famine; OLS Review; African Rights, Food and Power in Sudan; Burr and Collins, Requiem for the Sudan.

72 Muraheleen also raided Nuer civilians in Upper Nile, but those raids do not appear to have figured centrally in the 1998 famine in Western Upper Nile.

73 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 79; Anyanya II is discussed below in the chapter on Western Upper Nile. See Africa Watch, Denying the Honor of Living, pp. 81-92, regarding the muraheleen militias.

74 African Rights, Food and Power in Sudan, p. 19; Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 94.

75 Human Rights Watch, Behind the Red Line, pp. 307-314; Human Rights Watch/Africa and Human Rights Watch Children=s Rights Project, Children of Sudan: Slaves, Street Children and Child Soldiers (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1995), pp. 31-53.

76 DeWaal, AMilitias,@ p. 74. Although tribal leaders of the Humr Baggara and Ngok Dinka agreed in February 1986 to pay compensation for raids, it was never forthcoming, and the raiding continued. In January 1988 the Rizeigat Baggara and the Malwal Dinka chiefs met, but the Rizeigat chiefs were unable to control the raiders. The growth of the Baggara militias contributed to a longer-term decline in the traditional leaders= authority. Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 107.

77 DeWaal, AMilitias,@ p. 74.

78 Abel Alier, Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonored (Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 1991), pp. 276-77. Abel Alier helped negotiate the Addis Ababa agreement, which ended the first civil war (1955-72). He served as vice president of Sudan until 1981, and in the 1990s he has played a leading role in the unarmed civic opposition in Khartoum.

79 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, pp. 53-69. Parts of Darfur suffered a famine in 1983-85. Alexander de Waal, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

80 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 94.

81 Human Rights Watch/Africa, Children of Sudan: Slaves, Child Soldier and Street Children, pp. 31-53; Ushari Ahmad Mahmud and Suleyman Ali Baldo, Human Rights Violations in the Sudan 1987: Al Diein Massacre: Slavery in the Sudan (Khartoum: July 1987) (available from Human Rights Watch).

82 "Southern Sudanese party advocates disbanding of militia forces,@ DPA, Khartoum, February 1, 1999. SANU is one of the few pre-1989 political parties to have registered under the government=s controversial 1999 law governing political associations.

83 Keen, The Benefits of Famine, p. 33. River in Arabic is bahr, in Dinka kir.

84 DeWaal, AMilitias,@ p. 73.

85 Francis M. Deng, War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution,1995), pp. 227-80.

86 The final statement of the IGAD peace negotiations held in Addis Ababa in August 1998 said that the SPLA agreed to exclude the provinces of Southern Kordofan and Southern Blue Nile from the definition of South Sudan, but insisted that the South include the Abyei region. The government refused to include Abyei within the boundaries of South Sudan for purposes of the referendum. ASudan peace talks end in disagreement,@ Reuters, Addis Ababa, August 7, 1998.

The position of the Riek Machar forces is that there will first be a vote on self-determination for the 1956 south, and if this area votes for separation, there will then be a vote by the people of Abyei on self-determination. Human Rights Watch interview, Biel Torkech Rambang, December 14, 1998.

87 Human Rights Watch interview, Abyei official, Wunrok, Bahr El Ghazal, May 7, 1998.

88 Human Rights Watch interview, Abyei elder, Wunrok, Bahr El Ghazal, May 8, 1998.

89 This refers to the time before Kerubino began his pro-government military activities in Bahr El Ghazal, in 1994. Kerubino was in SPLA prisons from 1987 until 1992. AThe time of Omar Bashir,@ leader of the military coup and then president of Sudan, refers to June 30, 1989 to the present.

90 Human Rights Watch/Africa, Civilian Devastation, pp 195-223.

91 Human Rights Watch interview, Dinka widow, Wunrok, Bahr El Ghazal, Sudan, May 8, 1998.

92 Human Rights Watch interview, Dinka woman, Wunrok, Bahr El Ghazal, Sudan, May 8,1998.