Image - www.buzzfeed.com-

Image – www.buzzfeed.com-

By age 21 I will want my sons Shakil and Rahul to have experienced life in a country that does not persecute its residents. And if I continue to live in Australia there is a fair chance that they will not experience hardship that others may. Despite this, there is one thing that I do want them to understand – that they are very fortunate to be living in relative peace and harmony.

What reminded me of this? On Friday last week I met with two boys who told me their story. To say that the story was harrowing was probably understating the extent to which I was moved. Let me relay that story to you in as much of their words as possible.

Yang and William are 21 and 26 respectively. They are from the Nuer tribe of South Sudan. The Nuer’s and the Dinka’s have historically been hostile to each other. Concerns about the resistance to the British have seen that hostility develop. (For example, some sections of the Dinka were more accommodating to British rule than were the Nuer. The Dinka treated the resisting Nuer as hostile, and hostility developed between the two groups as a result of their differing relationships to the British).

Yang was a student at high school in Uganda. He had come home to Juba (Capital of South Sudan) for his holidays. On Saturday 15th December 2013 whilst at his house with other family members he heard talk of a fire in the nearby army barracks and some infighting occurring there. On Sunday morning the family woke to hear of more fighting and news that the Dinka army members had suppressed the Nuer’s. Now the news was that the Dinka were moving from house to house and addressing people in the Nuer language. In the event that you responded in Nuer the Dinka would open fire and kill you.

There were 13 members of the family that were in the house. On that morning they were rounded up and marched to a local Police station. According to Yang and his cousin William there were around 400 men in that building. Then commenced a period of indiscriminate killing as the Dinkas surrounded the building and started firing. The people inside were unable to exit as all the doors were locked as were the windows. Each day the Dinka army people would come to the building and continue their indiscriminate firing. Over the next few days this continued unabated. Those who survived the shooting would die from hunger and starvation. The only option for Yang and William (and any other survivors was to lie down and pull the dead bodies of others across them and hide under the bodies. The only sustenance they were able to partake of was their own urine. This was drunk so as to remain alive.

All around William and Yang people were suffocating and dying. Yang recalls some of his “brothers” assist him in staying alive. Of the 400+ people in the building, 12 survived. William and Yang were joined by another “brother” Nyak. Eventually a few days later the security troops arrived and broke down the doors of the building. The survivors were taken outside and asked to identify themselves. They were then taken to the local hospital where they were placed on drips and lay down on the floor to get some rest and sleep. Their wounds were checked and dressed. After three days in the Hospital they were let out to commence their journey to freedom. They worked their way first to the UN compound in Juba. They were met by Ivan Simonovic, the top UN human rights official. Simonovic has published articles on the massacre that these boys have endured. That massacre is now known as the Gudele Massacre. (See details here:)

In this article he is quoted as follows:

“He quoted directly the account of a survivor of the massacre, which occurred at a police station in Gudele on the night of 16 December. The killings there took place after police and soldiers rounded up Nuer men and forced them into one crowded room.”

Further in the article he is also quoted as follows:

Simonovic, in an opinion article published by the online daily Sudan Tribune, quoted a survivor of the Gudele killings as recounting, “We were picked up at checkpoints or during house searches. They recognized us by our accents, or by the traditional marks on our faces.”

The survivor continued, “200-400 of us were brought to a room of a police station, so small that we were suffocating. Suddenly they opened fire on us from two windows.”

“I fell to the ground, and was protected by the bodies of dead and injured lying on top of me. Some of the wounded were moaning, and they opened fire twice again during the night,” said the survivor, as quoted by Simonovic in the Sudan Tribune article dated 23 January.

The UN Assistant Secretary-General explained the incident as one of several “credible reports of mass and extrajudicial killings” which occurred in South Sudan since the start of the violence in the country in mid December.”

Ethnicized truth,’ ‘different realities’

In remarks to the BBC as well as his article in Sudan Tribune, the human rights official has described a situation of ‘ethnicized truth’ in South Sudan, in which observers of different ethnicities generally have different accounts of what has happened in the country, downplaying crimes committed by their own side and exaggerating those committed by the other side.  

“Who started this conflict? And who is targeting civilians? The ‘truth’ depends on what ethnic background you have. When I talked to displaced people, victims and their families in camps in Juba, Bentiu and Bor, I found their perception of the conflict so influenced by their ethnic affiliation that it was as if they lived in different realities,” he explained in his Sudan Tribune piece.

South Sudanese officials have not publically commended on the killings in Gudele, but they have established a five-member committee under the police inspector-general to investigate killings of civilians in Juba including the Gudele incident.

Human Rights Watch was the first to report on the killings, saying in an earlier report that 200-300 Nuer men were killed at the Gudele police building by “gunmen alleged to be government forces.”

The independent rights group talked to neighbors of various ethnicities who described with great distress the huge number of bodies they saw at the site on 17 December and their removal in large trucks on 18 December.

For his part, Simonovic has vowed to make a “comprehensive” report addressing crimes committed in Juba and some other places, according to remarks recorded by BBC on 17 January. He says this report will be ready within a few weeks.

All of the above corroborates the version of events as communicated to me by William and Yang. Eventually the UN gave the boys an option of Congo, Kenya or Uganda as their final destination. The boys chose Uganda and worked their way towards Nimule on the border of South Sudan and Uganda. The border is governed by troops from the South Sudanese side.

So it was 8 months after having made their way to the UN compound, the three boys got to Uganda. This was a place of familiarity for Yang who as indicated earlier was a student at high school there. In Uganda they were in a refugee camp for a brief period and ultimately were given an option of country to move to. They chose Australia. On 15th October 2014 Yang and Nyak arrived here. On 15th January 2015 William arrived in Perth. None of them know anyone here. They have no relatives here. They have absolutely no idea of who is left in their countries of origin. They are completely without support of any kind from any family members.

The community of Nuer people in WA have welcomed the boys and are trying to assist them in so many ways.

My purpose in writing this article is not to take sides in the local conflict. None of us who have not lived in the country will ever understand the issues involved. The complexity of some of those issues is beyond our comprehension. What I want to concentrate on is to bring to the attention of those of our readers who have an interest in the area, some of the sheer hardship that these kids have had to endure to have a peaceful life. These are things that hopefully our children will not ever have to endure. But it is also a daily reality for some of these kids.

What impact these events have on people is not an area of my expertise. Intuitively, it would be fair to assume that these events could be far reaching in their impact on the psyche of the children. Time will tell what the outcomes will be.

When next I sit down to discuss with my children the efficacy of the Wii platform over the X-Box in undertaking their games of choice, my thoughts will go back to William, Yang and Nyak and the image of them huddled in a room, with a dead body dragged over them so as to conceal their whereabouts will always be uppermost in my mind. What they have undergone is far from unique. A whole host of these kids coming to our shores will have gone through such violence.

Of the total Sudanese born population of Australia (19369), approximately 2722 were in WA. Of these the South Sudanese account for around 489 in WA.

The Republic of South Sudan is a landlocked country in north-eastern Africa that gained its independence from Sudan in 2011.[9] Its current capital is Juba, which is also its largest city. It is planned that the capital city will be changed to the more centrally located Ramciel in the future. South Sudan is bordered by the Republic of the Sudan to the north, Ethiopia to the east, Kenya to the southeast, Uganda to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the southwest, and the Central African Republic to the west.