Deborah Scroggins - Emma’s War - Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

N OW IN HER last year at the poly, Emma took up with Ahmed Karadawi, the elegant African intellectual with the brilliant smile whom she’d first met at the restaurant. Married and eighteen years older than Emma, Karadawi came from Kordofan, a dry and sandy province in north-western Sudan. He cast a sardonic eye on the self-congratulatory Western excitement over Band Aid and Live Aid. He was touched by the sincere enthusiasm of the young people who thronged his lectures at Oxford, but he argued that, too often, the Western aid agencies they went to work for were more interested in pandering to the prejudices of their donors than in actually helping needy Africans. Karadawi was witty and urbane; he could make you weep with laughter at the ridiculous mistakes the self-important khawajas made in Sudan, and he could be just as withering on the subject of the Sudanese government’s indifference to human suffering. In any event, he always said, no aid programme could fix the civil wars that had caused the hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan. Only the people who lived there could do that. Emma knew nothing about Sudan and its politics. But she was about to learn from a master.

Bilad al-Sudan. How languorously those Arabic words glided off Karadawi’s tongue, like a magic spell in an Arabian wonder tale. But Karadawi did not romanticize his unhappy country. He was the first to tell Emma about the Arab proverb that says, ‘When God made Sudan, He laughed.’ (Some Sudanese say God laughed with pleasure, but far more suspect the diety was laughing at his gigantic creation.) Karadawi knew that Sudan had been the frontier between southern black Africa and the northern cultures of the Near East two millennia before the Arabs named it ‘The Land of the Blacks’. He told her about how ancient Egyptians and Israelites knew the land south of Egypt first as the land of Cush and later as Nubia and as Punt. The Greeks and Romans called it Ethiopia or ‘The Land of the Burnt-Faced Ones’. Not until the Muslim conquest of the Middle Ages was it named ‘the Sudan’, or just ‘Sudan’, as it is commonly called today. From Karadawi, Emma heard about The Aethiopika, the third-century Greek novel about an Ethiopian princess who was mysteriously born with white skin and was raised as a Greek, who had to travel to the ancient Sudanese city-state of Meroë to find true love and her rightful throne. From him Emma learned how the Nile River snakes out from the Sudd, the world’s biggest swamp, all the way through the deserts of Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean.

In ancient times, the Sudd marked the limits of the world known to geographers. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs sent expeditions to discover whence came the river that gave birth to Egypt, but the swamp defeated every attempt to find out. The people of the Sudan included hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs. The northern two-thirds of the country was mostly dry, while the southern third was wet and tempting, with good grazing, fat cattle, and rivers teeming with fish. With the exception of the Nuba Mountains, the northern people were mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic. Meanwhile the Nuba and the southerners remained ‘noble spiritual believers’, as Karadawi liked to call them, clinging to their African languages and religions. The struggle between the lighter-skinned desert peoples, drawn by the south’s water, slaves, gold and ivory, and the darker-skinned peoples of the swamp, who violently resisted intruders, had marked Sudanese history for thousands of years. Sudan’s contemporary civil war was in some ways a continuation of this antediluvian clash, Karadawi said.

Like most people in Britain, Emma had learned about the existence of huge refugee camps along Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia only during the famine of 1984-5. But Karadawi explained that there had been Ethiopian refugees in Sudan long before the famine. Ethiopia’s civil wars (like Sudan’s) had deep roots, and so did the tensions between the two countries. Christian Ethiopia had been at odds with Muslim Sudan since the Middle Ages, and supporting each other’s enemies had always been a feature of the contest. In 1961 the UN gave Ethiopia sovereignty over Eritrea, a partly Muslim former Italian colony that lies between Ethiopia and Sudan. When the Eritreans rebelled against Ethiopia, they set up bases in eastern Sudan with the help of the Sudanese government and its Arab allies. As refugees who had crossed an international border, the Eritreans and their families came under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which fed them. Meanwhile, Ethiopia gave sanctuary to Sudan’s rebellious southern pagans and Christians. Ethiopia’s patron, Israel, also gave the southern Sudanese rebels military assistance, as a way of weakening the Arab coalition.

Karadawi had been a child when the Sudan gained its independence from Britain and civil war broke out in the south. The war was still dragging on in 1970, when he went to work for UNHCR in the Eritrean camps along the eastern border right after earning his degree from the University of Khartoum. The southern rebels called themselves Anyanya, or ‘poison’, and they often behaved as poisonously to each other as to the northern army. In many ways, the tactics of the northern army resembled those of the nineteenth-century slave-traders. The army operated from inside garrison towns that had been founded on the sites of the old thorn-fence enclosures called zaribas, from which Arab slave-hunters had once armed their local allies and encouraged them to take captives. Now, as then, Arab army officers now handed out weapons to allied southern peoples, urging them to attack their local enemies and loot them of their cattle, women and children. The southerners were easily manipulated, and it seemed as if the fighting might go on forever. Then a series of events suddenly changed the climate. Jafaar Nimeiri, a military officer, took over the Sudanese government in a 1969 coup and began searching for a way out of the war. Then Israel concentrated its flow of arms on a single southern rebel commander, the Equatorian Joseph Lagu, enabling him to gain control of what had been a hopelessly fractured movement.

From his position in the camps, Karadawi watched how Nimeiri used the Eritrean refugees as one card in the political game that finally led to a 1972 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan. When Nimeiri wanted to pressure Ethiopia, the southern rebels’ patron, he simply made it easier for the Eritreans to get weapons and supplies, including food, from friendly Arab countries. When he wanted to mollify Ethiopia, he squeezed the camps. In 1971 the aged Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie agreed to act as a mediator in Nimeiri’s talks with Lagu and the Anyanya. Largely united under Lagu, the southern rebels leaders were able to seize the opportunity for peace. In 1972 they and the government signed the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south partial autonomy and ended seventeen years of civil war.

The Addis Ababa agreement ushered in a decade that Karadawi remembered as one of tremendous hope and promise. Sudan was going to be ‘the breadbasket of the Middle East’. Nimeiri agreed to support the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. The United States rewarded him by making Sudan the next-biggest recipient of American foreign aid after Egypt and Israel. Sudan’s Muslim neighbours across the Red Sea were awash in oil money. Nimeiri’s government was able to borrow more than $12 billion from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the Arab countries of the Gulf to finance its development schemes. Biggest was the watchword of the day. With a population of only about 26 million, Sudan had a land mass the size of Western Europe. It was the biggest country in Africa, and it was going to have the biggest of everything. International businessmen spent Gulf money to construct the world’s biggest sugar factory south of Khartoum at Kenana. An Anglo-French consortium brought the world’s biggest digger to Sudan and spent $75 million to construct the Jonglei Canal, a massive scheme that was going to use water from the Sudd to irrigate northern Sudan and Egypt. There were many dreams, but by the end of the decade the dreams, as well as the money, had vanished into the hands of Nimeiri’s cronies and the Western expatriates who administered so many of the foreign projects. Meanwhile the Sudanese public was saddled with a debt twice the size of the country’s gross national product.