At
night, swarms of ferocious mosquitoes seek out flesh. There are also
tsetse and razor flies, and a variety of deadly snakes, not to mention
the stifling humidity.
This vast marshland, known as the Sudd, is also home to something else: tens of thousands of desperate civilians who have fled South Sudan’s civil war, the subject of a New York Times virtual reality film about children, resilience and survival.
Geng Keah Deng, 50, was shot and bleeding when he left his village near the city of Leer this summer and waded into the swamp.
“We would swim until we could swim no more,” he said. “We would eat water lilies, if we ate at all.”
The Displaced
War has driven 30 million children from their homes. These are the stories of three of them.
“The
intention of those fighting was not just to go after people with guns,
but to go after civilians,” Mr. Deng said days after reaching the
relative safety of an island in the swamp that, for the moment, was out
of the reach of soldiers. He joined 80,000 others on this island alone.
“They came to kill and they came to look for young girls,” he said of
the fighters who came to his village.
Mr.
Deng has five daughters. He watched as one was carried away by fighters
after he was shot. He does not know what has become of the other four.
“We don’t know whether they were killed or whether they were taken as wives,” he said.
Four
years after South Sudan achieved independence from Sudan to become the
world’s newest nation, the country has been torn apart.
A
power struggle between President Salva Kiir and his vice president,
Riek Machar, quickly devolved into a civil war pitting the nation’s
largest ethnic groups against one another. The conflict ranks among the
most devastating on the planet, with 4.4 million people facing the
threat of starvation and 2.2 million forced from their homes.
A report released last month by a commission formed by the African Union — delayed for months out of fear that it would inflame tensions and complicate efforts to broker a peace — offered further evidence that atrocities have been committed by all sides in the conflict.
“While
conflict is not a new phenomenon to South Sudan, the majority of those
the commission met with said that they have never seen the scale and
nature of violations witnessed during this conflict,” the report says.
“What makes it so much worse for them is the targeting of civilians,
which they claim was never a central part of previous conflict.”
Investigators
found evidence of rape used as a weapon of war, the recruitment of
child soldiers and a level of cruelty that will make stitching this
country back together a daunting task.
This
summer, The Times set out to profile a child caught up in the struggle
as part of a project to document how conflicts around the world
invariably have an impact the most innocent.
A 9-year-old boy named Chuol,
who lived in a village near Leer, told a harrowing story of his father
and grandfather being forced into a hut and burned alive the night the
fighters swept in.
Their
screams could be heard as the rest of the family fled into the swamps.
He lost contact with his mother in the chaos. His grandmother recalled
the terror in vivid detail.
“There
was an old man who could not run,” she said. “The soldiers called to
him by name. They told him to open his mouth. One boy put an AK-47 in
his mouth and killed him.”
As
the surviving members of the family made their way through the swamp,
what little sleep Chuol found as he clung to reeds or a patch of dry
land was warped by nightmares.
Even when the family found temporary sanctuary on a small island, he did not speak for days.
“The
situation of that particular child is unfortunately very typical,” said
Jonathan Veitch, the Unicef representative in South Sudan.
There
are about 850,000 children who have been displaced from their homes. An
untold number of girls have been abducted, Mr. Veitch said, and at
least 16,000 boys have been recruited to serve as soldiers by the two
sides.
A peace deal signed in August
called for child soldiers to be released from service, but Mr. Veitch
said that neither of the sides had taken any steps to make that happen.
“Both sides continue to deny even using child soldiers,” he said.
In
August, when President Obama visited Africa, he made brokering a peace a
central focus of his trip. That pressure helped bring the warring
parties together to reach a tentative cease-fire.
However,
there continue to be reports of violations and fighting. Not far from
where Chuol sought safety, witnesses have reported continuing clashes.
In
recent weeks, witnesses have reported a mass grave in Leer filled with
people killed on Oct. 24. Separately, there are multiple reports of
militias raiding nearby villages and abducting women and girls.
Doctors
Without Borders has once again been forced to suspend operations in
Leer after its facilities were looted and staff members were threatened.
“Violence
against the civilian population is escalating,” said Tara Newell, the
organization’s emergency manager. “The civilian population is being
subjected to repeated and targeted violence.”
As the reports of atrocities mount, there is fear that even the fragile peace process will completely collapse.
“Hard-line
elements on both sides didn’t want a deal, perceiving the war as a
winner-take-all affair,” said John Prendergast, a rights activist who
has worked on issues related to Sudan and South Sudan for three decades.
He said that both sides — through violence and policy — continue to
undermine any hope of a sustainable peace.
Even
as fighting continued in some parts of the country, negotiators said
last week that they had established a security framework that would
allow for a transitional government — with Mr. Kiir remaining as
president and Mr. Machar back in his post as vice president.
While
observers said it was a hopeful sign, the fighting has generated blood
feuds that will be hard to quell, and the battle lines grow more
complicated the longer the war goes on.
The
nation’s two largest ethnic groups — the Dinka, aligned with the
government; and the Nuer, aligned with the rebels — have been at war
since the conflict began. The nation’s third largest group, the Shilluk,
were initially aligned with the government but this spring switched to
join the rebels.
In
the area around Leer, a subset of the Nuer — the Bull Nuer — formed an
alliance with the government when its commanders became disillusioned
with the rebel leadership. By many accounts, Bull Nuer militias have
committed some of the worst atrocities in the region.
Mr. Deng, the man who was shot and whose daughters were abducted, said peace was hard to imagine when all he had known was war.
“When
the last war ended, we had high hopes, but those hopes have turned to a
bloody disaster,” he said. “We have been told about peace, but how can
we believe that when our women and children are missing. When we cannot
eat. For us to live together again? I don’t know how we can forgive our
enemies.”
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