My Contribution to the Liberation as a Young Boy

By Dr. William Abur

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"The mobilization of the boys and girls in the community was one of the difficult tasks; however, it was decided that the SPLA as a movement need to reveal good a sign of respect within the community. Therefore, for the SPLA officers to be successful in their mission, they were asked to  go and recruit boys from their own tribes. The officers were asked to start with their own relatives and close friends. This strategy helped the SPLA officers a lot in their mission.  My uncle, General Francis Marial Abur Bol, was one of the senior officers in the SPLA, who went to our village and mobilized the boys to join the SPLA/ school. He came and spoke to the parents and the boys about the importance of education." Dr. Abur

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William Abur, PhD

Photo: Abur's Facebook

This article is a personal testimony of my journey from the village as a young boy to my current work in Australia as a social worker and a researcher, who just completed a Ph.D. in migration and refugee settlement. The aim of this reflexive article is to provide encouragement to young readers, who are facing some challenging issues in different ways. 

I was born and raised in South Sudan (Tonj, Luacjang village) where my earliest memories were of a happy child, who woke up every morning and drank fresh milk of cows. My parents were farmers. They had enough cattle, goats, sheep, chicken and enough land for cultivation. They were also well-respected members of the community because of their positive attitude and the help they provided to the people within the village and in the cattle camp. As a Dinka child, I thought life was very easy for us by then compared to now, although there was no electricity, clinics or hospitals for sick people, banks or money to think of or bills to pay.

The only thing we thought about was how to take the cattle for grazing and how to help other people in the village during farming and harvesting. Along with my 6 other siblings, of whom I was the second youngest, my first job was to look after the cattle, sheep and the goats. Being in such a traditional life or a village life can be described as horrendous in this modern life. However, it is a normal life for many Dinka people as they enjoy looking after their cattle, sheep and goats as a pastoralist society. 

In 1989, I was one of the boys, who joined the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) at the young age of 14 due to the civil war escalation in the then Southern Sudan (now South Sudan). The war in Sudan started between the autonomy-seeking Christian and animist southerners against the successive Islamic governments in the north. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and many lost their lives. Over two million died and many were forced by the situation to depend on food aid in refugee camps and other internally-displaced camps within Southern Sudan.

During the SPLA war, boys were mobilized and taken from their parents to join the SPLA army to fight against the enemy of Southern Sudanese. The SPLA leadership decided to send officers to different villages to conscript boys as school children with an aim of joining the rebel army when they grow up to fight against our common enemy (Arabs) of Southern Sudan. I remember my uncle, who served in the Sudanese Government before he took his gun to fight against Khartoum, used to tell us all bad things the Arabs had done to the people in Southern Sudan.  He had a deep knowledge of Arabism, the people, and the Government of Sudan, which was dominated by Arabs.

The mobilization of the boys and girls in the community was one of the difficult tasks; however, it was decided that the SPLA as a movement need to reveal good a sign of respect within the community. Therefore, for the SPLA officers to be successful in their mission, they were asked to go and recruit boys from their own tribes. The officers were asked to start with their own relatives and close friends. This strategy helped the SPLA officers a lot in their mission.  My uncle, General Francis Marial Abur Bol, was one of the senior officers in the SPLA, who went to our village and mobilized the boys to join the SPLA/ school. He came and spoke to the parents and the boys about the importance of education. There was a great interest that some parents wanted their boys to become like him when they grow up as big men. He was the only educated man in our community, who managed to be in a senior rank of commander in the SPLA. I and my other several cousins accepted this request from my uncle and decided to go with him to the bush where the SPLA was.

The headquarter of the SPLA was in Ethiopia and many Southerners already traveled to Ethiopia on foot. My brother was one of the first young boys, who traveled to Ethiopia on foot with my cousins and uncle. We were told frankly that the journey to Ethiopia would be several months because there was no transport apart from our own feet. We were also advised of some dangers on the way including some of our own people in the villages we were passing by. Some villagers tended to be very violent. Sometimes they didn’t allow us to get water  or ask for food in their areas. My uncle knew all the dangerous areas so he used to make us pass at night instead of the day time to avoid conflicts with some villagers.

On the way to Ethiopia, many people also lost their lives due to starvation, hydration because of water shortage and predators. I personally encountered starvation, shortage of water or hydration and long walking by foot. Our Journey was not that bad in terms of the people, who lost lives compared to the rest of the groups. My uncle was a well-experienced man and he also knew the places that were very dangerous. This helped us in many cases, otherwise, some of us would have not made it to the destination.

In the Ethiopian camps, young men and boys, who were conscripted and trained, were then sent back to Sudan to fight for liberation.  When we were about to arrive in Ethiopia, we received bad news that the Mengistu's government was struggling with rebel groups within Ethiopia, which later led to Mengistu's overthrow. It was a shocking news to all SPLA and their supporters because President Mengistu's regime was a strong supporter of SPLA.

There was no way for us and all the SPLA people were forced to leave Ethiopia by the new government because SPLA was also supporting Mengistu ‘s regime to fight their rebels. This made it hard for all SPLA forces and their refugees to remain in Ethiopia any more under the new regime. This was a big setback for SPLA and it was a great achievement for the Khartoum government because SPLA lost its headquarter and support from Ethiopia.

From 1990 to 1991, some of us were sent to a displaced camp known as Polataka close to Uganda. This camp was described by a UN aid worker, Emma McCann, as a “military camp for young boys” in her book. It was a very complex situation for us as young boys; we had to go under military training and other hardships circumstances. Polataka camp was full of many challenges including shortage of food, diseases, abuse or child-labor as we used to work for senior officers to build their houses. 

There was also some serious discrimination practiced in the camps because some of the officers tended to favor children who came from their own areas. They looked after them better than the children who came from different regions such as Great Bahr el Ghazal and the Nuba Mountains. There were no many children from the Equatoria region or the Nuer area. There was serious capital punishment practiced in Polataka camp by the men in uniform. Some of these men were also teachers, who were commissioned to take care of us as young boys. Some of us used to escape at night to go to Torit town to avoid some of these difficulties. Commander Kuol Manyang (now South Sudan's minister of defense) was in charge of the town and other areas around Torit including Polataka. I remember I once escaped to the town as I wanted to join soldiers who were going to Bor to fight Dr. Riek Machar's group. Commander Kuol Manyang came and removed me with other young boys and ordered his military to return us to Polataka because we were very young. I still have a great respect for Commander Kuol Manyang. He is a man of principles, discipline and very courageous.

Participation in the Liberation of South Sudan

Brief Reflection of the Past

By Pal Chol Nyan

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"As you would recall, the red army consisted of teenagers recruited from Bahr El Ghazal, the Nuba Mountains, Equatoria, and Upper Nile. They had trekked all the way to Ethiopia, a journey of three to four months, arriving there only as skeletons." 

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Photo: UNHCR

I was a member of the red army, who after the fall of the Ethiopia's Derg Regime in 1990, came and settled in Nasir. We were a group of what UNICEF later called "Unaccompanied Minors." We built our tukuls in the swampy areas of Ketbek adjacent to the SPLM/A Nasir Faction Headquarters. On arrival from Ethiopia, we first settled at Torpuot but we later moved to Pananyang before coming to settle finally at Ketbek. We were known as K-Minors (Ketbek Minors). UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) started to open schools for the minors.

I was both a minor and a primary school teacher, the youngest teacher at the time. This spectacularly brought me closer to the UNICEF senior staff, prominent of whom was Prof essor Magne Raudalen, a Norwegian Professor of Psychology whose main task focused on trauma therapy and counselling.

Trauma is a mental condition that begets behavioral changes. It is also a physical harm inflicted with the use of blunt or sharp objects. Prof. Magne made me his interpreter when interviewing the minors about their experiences. It was not easy but it was a task I could not turn down because most of the minors were speaking Arabic and local languages.

As you would recall, the red army consisted of teenagers recruited from Bahr El Ghazal, the Nuba Mountains, Equatoria, and Upper Nile. They had trekked all the way to Ethiopia, a journey of three to four months, arriving there only as skeletons.

These minors were based in Itang, Pinyudo and Dimma. They were trained as soldiers while schooling, though improper because it used to be interrupted for reasons known to all of us. We had teachers. We also had caretakers, who were appointed and assigned by the SPLM/A Leadership. They catered for us. 

During the long trek to Ethiopia, many of these teenagers did not make it to their destinations. They felt prey to the wild beasts, succumbed to death as a result of snakes bites,  drowning while crossing rivers, some were eaten up by crocodiles, some starved to death, some died of thirst and felt into the ambushes of the Murahaleen (Arab nomads in Sudan) and some tribal armed groups. With time, the survivors got traumatized. They would scream in dreams about the worst experiences they had gone through. UNICEF introduced the program of psycho-social trauma therapy to help the minors cope with these experiences and disturbing nightmares. One day, I was hosted by the UNICEF Film Crew where I had to narrate my life experiences, which was also part of trauma therapy.

I hope the SPLM/A commanders wouldn't deny that they picked and dispatched some of us to war. Zal Zal (Earthquake) two consisted mainly of the red army. General Pieng Deng Majok is a living witness to this fact. They have fallen in many battles. Some of our colleagues, who managed to go to Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and Pinyudo Refugee Camp in Ethiopia, immigrated to the USA through the United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees' (UNHCR) initiated program of resettlement.

They are the ones who called themselves the "Lost Boys" of Sudan. The term red army was an SPLM/A jargon and a euphemism for child soldiers. We were picked from our homes under the pretext of going to school in Ethiopia when, in actual fact, it was a conscription because the parents who opposed this forceful removal faced fines in form of cattle. I can state here clearly that most of the red army undertook specialized military training. They became signalists and Combat Intelligence officers( GIS: General Intelligence Services) as it used to be called. The first group of the red army was sent to Cuba for education and military training at Youth Island became professionals in many disciplines.The survivors of the red army  are  now in their late 40s. They can lead and do what others do.

South Sudan has great minds and skilled manpower. However, these are people who have no chance of utilizing these skills due to the SPLM's power war.

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The author is an independent opinion writer and stands where truth is deemed bitter. He's also a medical practitioner based in South Sudan. My email is  palcholnyan@yahoo.com