People in Sudan Are Hiding in Caves Because the Government Is Bombing Them

Internally displaced Nuba who have been forced to live in caves to avoid the government bombs.

In 1955, a civil war broke out between northern and southern Sudan. What followed was 17 years of bloodshed as the predominately Muslim north and mostly animist or Christian south shot, burned and stabbed each other over being born in different parts of the country. In 1972, in terms with the Addis Ababa Agreement, the fighting stopped and everyone got on relatively well for ten years. Then, in 1983, then President Gafaar Nimeiry decided to try to instate Sharia law as well as a logic of Islamisation throughout the country and make the increasingly autonomous south a federal state of Sudan.

Obviously the southerners didn't like that, to them religion should not be mixed with politics, so back to war they went – for 22 years, until a peace agreement was signed in 2005. Eventually, after over half a decade of fighting, a referendum was held to vote over whether the two regions should just cut their losses, part ways, become their own countries and stop killing each other. A 98.9 percent majority in the south voted that they should, so on the 9th of July, 2011, South Sudan became independent from the Republic of Sudan.

However, a couple of months before that happened, Ahmed Haroun was elected governor of South Kordofan, a Sudanese region bordering Southern Sudan and whose civilians fought along with the South Sudanese rebels. As you might expect from an election involving Haroun – a man accused of multiple crimes against humanity and a long-standing member of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's government – the results were controversial.

The majority of the local population and the man Haroun was running against, Abdel Aziz al-Hilu – a commander of the SPLA, the rebel group that fought against Khartoum during the previous wars – claimed that they had been cheated.

No one likes being cheated – not in poker, not while buying second-hand sporting equipment and certainly not in politics. So following the independence of South Sudan, and the SPLA becoming the national army of the new state, al-Hilu helped to form the Sudanese People Liberation Army North (SPLA-N), a rebel army set up with former members of the SPLA who remained in Sudan following South Sudan's independence. He then sent them to fight Haroun's men in the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the military of the Republic of Sudan.

Al-Hilu's rebel army in South Kordofan is mostly comprised of Nuba people, a group made up of both Muslims and Christians who live in the region of the Nuba mountains. Unfortunately for the rest of the Nuba, that small detail meant that they were the first to feel the SAF's backlash, which came in the form of an intensive bombing campaign targeting their homes.

By July of 2012, an estimated half a million people had been displaced from within South Kordofan. Reports started to emerge of families being forced to eat leaves to survive and of Haroun ordering his troops to kill absolutely anyone they came across. I also learned through the Enough Project – a group of activists fighting genocide in Sudan – that thousands of innocent civilians had resorted to living in caves in the Nuba Mountains to keep safe from the SAF bombs.

In October, 2012, I went to the Yida refugee camp in South Sudan, 20 miles away from where the Sudanese government is attempting to eradicate the Nuba people. At the time of my arrival, over 65,000 people had fled to the camp from South Kordofan.

After spending some time in the refugee camp, I crossed the border into South Kordofan. I didn't hear any bombs for the first few days, and the area actually began to look like a relatively picturesque place. At times, it reminded me a bit of the south of France; 900 miles away from any water, yes, but also the kind of place you could see Philip Green building a modest getaway palace. In fact, the only signs of war were a few holes in the ground that my guide Charles had pointed out. But everyone knows that holes can mean absolutely anything, and I was glad to see that the area appeared peaceful.

However, early one morning as Charles and I were driving through the bush, we spotted five or six children walking along the side of a mountain. Pulling over, we made our way up the rocks and were met by another 10 to 15 children all covered in dirt. They were apparently waiting for their elders to come back and, although they were initially pretty animated, you could tell by the way they moved (very slowly) that they were exhausted.

“I don’t know why we’re here. I don’t understand why there's an aeroplane dropping bombs on us," Narsa, an eight-year-old girl, told me.

"Why don’t you go to the Yida refugee camp instead of staying in a cave?" I asked her.

"My mother doesn’t want to go there. She doesn’t know what’s there, and we don’t want to give up.”

Narsa told me that three families, including her own, had moved there – close to the SPLA-N's base, an obvious target for the Sudanese government's forces – because it was safer than staying in their huts. The cave she took us to was no taller than 70cm and maybe two or three metres in length, yet 20 people somehow managed to share it every night.

Maria's camp within the cave. Her husband carries a rifle with him everywhere he goes, "just in case".

In another cave – close to Meitan, the northern frontline of the region held by the SPLA-N – I met Maria, a mother of five. “They [the SAF] burned down our houses, so we have no other choice but to stay in caves, like animals,” she explained. Maria was quick to tell me about the daily flyover of Antonov aircraft, the Ukrainian-built bombers that the Sudanese government use to sporadically lay waste to the local population.

“We couldn’t stay where we were. The Antonov were coming all the time," she told me. "And when it wasn't the Antonov, they fired rockets at us instead." Next to Maria was a bed, a jerry can, a plastic stool, a few sacks of grains and an iron basin. This was all her family took when they fled their home. “We left everything behind, but I won’t leave my land; I won’t let the SAF take it. We will stay until the end. The only food we have left is almost gone already and we have to wait ten months before the next crop. We can’t go to the field to grow food because the Antonov could come and kill us.”

At first, the SAF targeted the surrounding villages, destroying almost every house in the region, but soon moved on to targeting the mountains. “We stay here all day, we can only go down to get muddy water from the stream,” Narsa’s younger brother Uhana told me. “I hate living here; there are snakes and scorpions everywhere.” Explaining the conundrum they've found themselves in, Maria added, "Our elders and our children are here with us. They are already struggling to survive in the caves and we can't make them walk four or five days to go to a refugee camp – they would die. So we stay.”

A week later, I drove to the southern region of South Kordofan, near Kadugli. There, I got speaking to an SPLA-N commander and told him I was planning on heading to the military frontline, before he insisted that two of his soldiers escort me. An hour later, the three of us were driving through the bush in an old pick-up for one of their routine patrols. Their sole armament consisted of a few AK-47s they'd recovered from the war in Darfur.

Narsa and her siblings lying in their cave.

After hours of driving along bumpy roads, we finally made a stop at one of the caves. From where we stood, we could see one of the frontlines and a number of SAF soldiers patrolling the area with guns in hand. The younger of the two soldiers – Nader, a 19-year-old Nuba – joined the SPLA-N in early 2012.

"Before joining the rebels, I lived in one of the caves near Kadugli with my brothers and sisters, like all those who didn’t leave or surrender,” he told me, taking an impressively long drag on his cigarette. I asked about his family. “I think they’re OK, but I haven’t seen them in months. The way we live is worse than anything. We get sick all the time from eating leaves and drinking horrible water because the SAF targets boreholes and now they’re all broken. They let us rot in caves like rats. At least rats have water – we don't."

I asked Michael, the other soldier, why they continue to fight. “This is our land and we fight for it," he told me. "We are legitimate; they are not. The only thing they want is to kill us. But they won’t. We’ll survive everything they make us go through."

Some of the children living in caves along the mountain range.

The Nuba have been left alone to face a government that wants them dead, and it seems that the realisation of that is only just beginning to set in on an international scale, two years after the conflict began. In December 2012, Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated that the government’s attacks against civilians in South Kordofan may amount to war crimes. Considering the ridiculously under-equipped SPLA-N rebels are dealing with old, malfunctioning artillery and living in caves while their opponents in the SAF bombard them with aircraft and tanks, it seems that HRW might be on to something.

Those accusations may explain why, in April 2013, President al-Bashir claimed to be open to negotiations with the SPLM-N. Yet, he has already cancelled two meetings with rebel spokesmen that were scheduled for May. When I left in November, the Sudanese government's Antonovs were still dropping bombs on the innocent people of South Kordofan.

And it seems to me that, as is often the case with al-Bashir, the Sudanese president is merely playing nice in the media while continuing to murder his own citizens for his own selfish ends. In this case: ridding the most southerly part of his country of anyone getting his way.

This article was previously published under the same title but included significant errors resulting from the editing process that were entirely separate from the author's original copy. These errors have now been corrected.

More on Sudan and South Sudan:

Darfur’s Tribes are Killing Each Other Over Gold and Water

In the Red Zone with Sudan's Blue Nile Rebels

Watch - Sudan's Forgotten Warriors