Speakers illuminate genocide, bring personal views

by Elizabeth Henderson

Wednesday February 22, 2006

"The war in southern Sudan has been going on almost forever," Thiep Angui began last Thursday’s talk to raise awareness about the ongoing genocide in Sudan.

The event was organized by STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur) and sponsored by Student Senate, The Joseph Campbell Chair in Humanities and the Office of Diversity and Campus Engagement and Hillel.

Angui and fellow speaker Kur Anyieth Kur are both members of the "Lost Boys," a group of boys that were orphaned by civil war in the 1980s in Southern Sudan and forced to flee the country on foot. According to Angui, the conflict was between "Arabs and Muslims from the North and the Southerners who worshipped family gods." The Northern Arab armies wanted the Southerners to convert–they refused.

Though they have not witnessed the current genocide in Darfur first-hand, the violence and hate that they endured in the 1980s is similar to the current conflict. In every village that the Northern Arabs conquered the homes were razed, the livestock slaughtered and well water contaminated, rendering the villages uninhabitable. The girls and women were enslaved and the men and boys–if they managed to survive–were forced to serve in the Arab army.

The Lost Boy’s journey was a harrowing one, with only 16,000 of the 30,000 boys surviving. The threats to survival were paramount: thirst, hunger, disease, ravenous wild animals and the unmerciful Northern Arab army stood between the boys and their final destination of refugee camps in Ethiopia.

Upon arriving in Ethiopia in 1987 and realizing that the government there was supporting the southern Sudanese in their fight against the Arabs, Angui was prepared to return to his village and fight.

However, Angui had to wait until 1993 to get his chance to return to Sudan–at the tender age of ten he was sent to a refugee camp in Kenya instead of the battlefield.

The American government remained oblivious to the boys’ plight until 1998, when they decided to bring the remaining 4,000 boys to live in the United States.

Anyieth Kur was quick to remind the audience that the current genocide in western Darfur, along with the conflict in southern Sudan, "is a very, very complex history. We cannot tell it to you in an hour."

The current genocide waged against the non-Arab population by the government-backed Arab Janjaweed militia has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over two and a half million people. Five hundred people die every day.

Angui, however, refuses to allow the Arabs to win. "It has made me stronger and it has made me look at life in a positive way. The people of the North, the Arabs or the Muslims, come to the South to kill them because they don’t like us [non-Arabs]," he said. They have a hatred. For me, to hate them back, to hate them and do bad things to them, I feel that it’s helping them. I don’t want to do that. I do not want to help them with their mission of hatred."

STAND meets every Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in MacCracken Meeting Room.