Читать книгу Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan - Deborah Scroggins - Страница 15

THIS IS A NILOTIC MYTH. Once there was a rope from heaven to earth. Anyone who became old climbed up the rope to heaven to be made young again, then climbed back down to earth. One day a hyena and a durra bird climbed up the rope. Knowing the nature of these two guests, God gave instructions that they were to be closely watched and not allowed to return to earth, where they would surely make trouble. Nevertheless, they escaped one night and climbed down the rope. When they were near the earth, the hyena cut the rope. The connection between heaven and earth was thereby severed, and forever after those who grew old had to die, for what had happened could not be made not to have happened.

What has happened cannot be made not to have happened, and often in Sudan I have felt that what has happened cannot be made to stop happening. The British-Sudanese writer Jamal al-Mahjoub once said that to understand the Sudan you need a layered map like one of those cellophane diagrams of the human body that used to be in encyclopedias. As you peeled away the top piece of cellophane labelled ‘Sudan’, you would find a succession of maps lying underneath. A map of languages, for example, and under that a map of ethnic groups, and under that a map of ancient kingdoms, until, as Mahjoub wrote, ‘it becomes clear the country is not really a country at all, but many. A composite of layers, like a genetic fingerprint of memories that were once fluid, but have since crystallized out from the crucible of possibility, encouraged by the catalyst of the European colonial adventure.’ I have often thought that you need a similar kind of layered map to understand Sudan’s civil war. A surface map of political conflict, for example - the northern government versus the southern rebels; and under that a layer of religious conflict - Muslim versus Christian and pagan; and under that a map of all the sectarian divisions within those categories; and under that a layer of ethnic divisions - Arab and Arabized versus Nilotic and Equatorian - all of them containing a multitude of clan and tribal subdivisions; and under that a layer of linguistic conflicts; and under that a layer of economic divisions - the more developed north with fewer natural resources versus the poorer south with its rich mineral and fossil fuel deposits; and under that a layer of colonial divisions; and under that a layer of racial divisions related to slavery. And so on and so on until it would become clear that the war, like the country, was not one but many: a violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shedding any of the old ones.

Not that I had any idea of all this when I first arrived in Sudan in 1988, clutching a plastic shopping bag full of newspaper articles about the war in Sudan, the war in Ethiopia and the war in northern Somalia - the whole mess that was the Horn of Africa. It was February, the month the Nuer call ‘Fire’. ‘Welcome to the seventh circle of hell,’ a morose and sweaty Iranian at the UN press office told me by way of greeting. I was twenty-six years old. It was my first foreign assignment for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The newspaper had embarked on a long-term project looking at famine in the Horn of Africa. I was in the country to write about the mass starvation that the US State Department claimed was about to cause tens of thousands of people in nearby Soviet-backed Ethiopia to seek refuge in Sudan.

I knew that Sudan itself had suffered a few years earlier from the same famine that struck Ethiopia in 1984-5. My Khartoum hotel, the Acropole, had been the nerve centre of the relief effort. So many aid workers had stayed there in 1985 that journalists dubbed it the ‘Emergency Palace’. On the wall of the hotel office was a letter from Bob Geldof teasing the three Greek brothers who owned the Acropole about their ‘empire’. But I did not think much was happening in the Sudan now. Sudan in early 1988 had fallen out of the news. Two years earlier, in 1986, the United Nations had warned that another famine was developing in the south. The Mahdi’s great-grandson, the democratically elected Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, responded by expelling the UN secretary-general’s special representative to Sudan and closing much of the south to foreigners. Meanwhile the southern rebels threatened to shoot down any aeroplanes, including those carrying relief, that flew into the south. Since then the international press seemed to have forgotten Sudan’s wars and famines.

So the Sudan Times came as a surprise to me. Written in English by southern Sudanese and printed on cheap brown paper, it came each morning at the Acropole along with fruit, eggs and cereal. Its lurid black headlines reported such apocalyptic goings-on that I used to cast a covert eye around the dining hall to see how my fellow guests were taking their morning news.

TWO MILLION IN DANGER OF STARVATION IN BAHR EL-GHAZAL

ARMY ACCUSED OF TORTURING CIVILIANS IN KURMUK AND GISSEN

FOUR RELIEF AGENCIES EXPELLED FROM THE SOUTH

125,000 IN DANGER OF STARVATION AS MALAKAL RUNS OUT OF FOOD

No one ever looked alarmed. Two ancient Sudanese waiters in turbans and long blue robes padded across the black-and-white parquet floor, silently pouring coffee. The ceiling fans creaked, and the dozen or so guests murmured to one another. They were mostly European and American relief workers, although later I met a few more exotic characters, like the ancient Pole who once stepped out of his room into the atrium and fell down face forward, stark naked and reeking of illegal vodka, or the squat coal-black Ugandan with the bloodshot eyes who told me over spaghetti and meatballs that he was in Khartoum shopping for surface-to-air missiles. Shocking reports of torture and starvation, polite requests to please pass the butter: Breakfast at the Acropole gave me my first inkling of the weirdly seductive contrast between Sudan’s hot and sleepy silence and the murderous events rippling underneath it.

I wanted to go straight to the Ethiopian border, but journalists needed permission from the government to travel outside the capital. Each morning after breakfast, I presented myself at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a shabby reinforced-concrete building with outdoor walkways that looked like a spectacularly dilapidated American motel. I usually made it over to the Ministry of Information at least once a day, too. Sadiq al-Mahdi’s government was threatening to expel all the Ethiopian refugees from Sudan if UNHCR did not pay the Sudanese government more to administer their camps. Before they would approve my trip to the east, the Sudanese insisted that I listen to a long series of background interviews about the alleged stinginess of UNCHR.

They were a handsome breed, these Sudanese officials sipping their hot, spice-scented tea behind battered metal desks while their gorgeous secretaries sat outside examining the henna designs on their hands and winding and rewinding long white Sudanese veils called taubs. Most of them were northerners, coppery Muslims with high cheekbones and long, elegant fingers who spoke a mellifluous Arabic. Few bore the tribal marks or scarification so common in the south and the west. I spent so much time waiting around in their offices and I became so tired of hearing about their currency-exchange disputes with UNHCR that I started asking them about the stories in the Sudan Times. I noticed they had a way of brushing off questions about the war in the south with a flick of their scarves. ‘Malesh,’ they would say. ‘It is a very sad and complicated problem. It goes on.’

But then the Sudanese seemed to take everything with the same slightly melancholy, slightly self-mocking good humour. I could see why they were famous for their charm. They punctuated every statement of action with the caveat ‘Inshallah’, or ‘God willing’; when the electricity flickered off, as it did at least once every day, they ignored it. Telephones almost never worked. I rattled around in a taxi, leaving notes for officials, making appointments to make appointments, but mostly I wasted my time. Government offices opened at eight a.m., but not long after that everyone took a break for morning prayers. Then around ten o’clock they went off for a breakfast of ful, or bean stew. At one p.m. it was time for lunch and siesta. In theory employees returned after four p.m. for another three hours of work. In practice I usually found myself back at the Acropole in the early afternoon, the official day over.

The hotel was located in the centre of the old British town that had been laid out in spacious avenues by Lord Kitchener after the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1898. Sometimes I took a walk after lunch past the old British railway and the great brown mosque, with the men standing out front in tattered jallabiyas and skullcaps, selling melons and tooth-cleaning sticks. At the railway station, a line of empty cattle cars stood on the track, their open doors gaping stupidly at the Sudanese women tripping through the midday heat like so many birds-of-paradise in their sandals and diaphanous rainbow-coloured veils. Washing hung out the windows of the sandstone British hospital across the street, and cats yowled from the roof. The main building of the Acropole had originally been part of a commercial arcade. Across the street, a hotel annex was located in an office building built around the time Sudan gained its independence. An abandoned shopping plaza at the end of the same street was littered with empty plastic bags. Clearly someone had once anticipated lots of Western visitors with hard currency in this part of town. But whoever it was had long gone.

The dirty windows of the little tourist shops in the arcade were piled high with unsold ivory carvings. When a dust storm blew up, the sandy streets seemed to swirl up into the sky, and the buildings merged into one another like the shapes in a brown dream. The whole colonial city seemed half abandoned, faded and crumbling and going back to sand, like the ancient pyramids in the deserts farther north that I had read about. Government offices, the foreign embassies and foreign clubs were still located on the south bank of the Blue Nile along with Gordon’s reconstructed palace. But the crowds, the construction, and the life of the Sudanese metropolis had moved across the river to Omdurman, the mud-walled stronghold of the Mahdi, and to Khartoum North, the new suburb where the aid agencies and wealthy Sudanese were building houses behind walls edged with jagged glass. Khartoum proper was quiet, so quiet that in the afternoon you could stand in the shimmering heat and hear nothing but the rustling of litter in the streets.

I would go back to the Acropole and sit under the fans in the atrium reading back issues of the Sudan Times, smoking cigarettes and drinking the tangy red hibiscus tea the Sudanese call karkaday. After a while, one of the relief workers might come over and start talking in a hushed voice, and in this way I began to learn a bit more about the war in the south. The SPLA leader John Garang was a Dinka, and the Dinka, the single largest people in the south, formed the mainstay of the rebellion. The Khartoum élite supplied southern and western tribes hostile to the Dinka with machine guns and encouraged them to form militias to raid the Dinka for cattle and, some whispered, even for women and children. The reward for the militias was the booty they captured and, in the case of Muslims, the promise of paradise. There was an Arabic saying that summed up the strategy of the northern élite: ‘Use a slave to catch a slave.’ The south and its borderlands were divided among many tribes, many militias. Baggara, Toposa, Murle, Fertit, Didinga, Ruf’aa, Nuer, Latuka, Acholi - it was hard to keep them straight. The region was also home to smaller, weaker peoples who had no weapons at all, peoples like the Uduk, the Berti, the Bongo and the Moru. They were everyone’s victims. For the Sudan People’s Liberation Army did its share of raiding, too, in the areas it controlled, and those areas were growing.

There were more modern things to fight about: oil, water and uranium, as well as education and the elusive development often promised and never delivered. The war had started about many grievances, and the longer it went on, the more it collected. It was an ugly business of robbery and revenge, and the army presided over it, disavowing the deeds of the militias in public and working with them in private. Some officers were making a fortune, colluding with merchants in the closed garrison towns of the south to jack up the price of grain and to smuggle out ebony, ivory, rare animals and anything else of value.

Southern refugees were pouring into the capital by the hundreds every day. No one knew exactly how many there were altogether, but the UN guessed it to be around 700,000. The Nilotes, who made up most of the refugees, were visibly different: aubergine black, taller than most northerners - quite a few Nilotic men as well as some women stand well over six feet five inches tall - and with shorter and crinklier hair, extraordinarily high cheekbones, and facial scars. The Nilotic men wore on their foreheads the distinctive Shilluk raised dots or the parallel marks of the Nuer and some Dinka. Their lower incisors were removed; many decorated other parts of their bodies with cicatrices. They walked with the loping gait of rural people accustomed to travelling by foot. I was told that in the south they might have worn little besides beads and perhaps a pair of shorts, but here in the Arab capital they dressed in ragged Western cast-offs. Their sullen demeanour set them apart as much as their clothing. The Arabic-language newspapers called them ‘traitors’ and accused them of bringing disease, alcohol and prostitution to the city. Since the southerners had not crossed an international boundary, they had no legal right to protection from international agencies such as the UNHCR. Regarding them as a potential fifth column for the SPLA, the government discouraged private relief groups from working in their camps, although some groups did anyway. Once I learned how to recognize the southerners, I saw them everywhere: dusty little boys selling cigarettes outside the Acropole, broad-shouldered women washing clothes in buckets outside Arab houses, statuesque Dinka doormen at the Hilton Hotel.

The government and the SPLA were engaged in a dance of negotiation at the time over Sadiq al-Mahdi’s campaign promise to repeal sharia law. At the same time, the Arabic-language newspapers were full of gossip about al-Mahdi’s desire to form a coalition government with his brother-in-law Hassan al-Turabi’s hard-line party, the National Islamic Front (NIF). Al-Mahdi’s flirtation with the NIF, whose entire programme centred on creating an Islamic state, cast doubt on the sincerity of his promises to rescind sharia. But the first southern refugees I ever asked about the war said little about Islam or Christianity. Instead they told me they had been driven off their land because the northerners wanted the oil underneath it. An American named Bob who worked for Save the Children had invited me to come with him on a visit to one of the southern squatter camps outside Khartoum. Right after breakfast we climbed into his Land Cruiser and drove over the bridge across the White Nile to a big camp on the other side of Omdurman called Hillat Shook. From the bridge, I could see Omdurman’s minarets and the shining gold dome of the Mahdi’s tomb. We passed residential districts surrounded by high walls studded with broken glass, industrial areas, a camel market, desert strewn with rubbish. On the outskirts of the city, the road petered out, and we bumped onto a dirty expanse of sand. Finally we reached a vast refuse dump over which hung a whitish, chemical-smelling fog of smoke. In the midst of the rubbish, people milled around hundreds of low, round igloo-like huts made from scraps of cardboard and plastic sheeting and burlap. This was Hillat Shook.

Bob and I got out and started picking our way through broken glass and twisted metal towards the huts. Some tall, bony men came out, waving their arms and shouting at us. Bob said they were speaking Dinka. ‘I hope they aren’t drunk,’ he said under his breath. The men pulled us by the arms towards one of the huts. They did smell of merissa, the local beer, and I wondered about that, because alcohol was illegal in Sudan under Islamic law. But they seemed sober enough. Outside the hut a woman appeared to be cooking something over a burning tyre. Despite the awful smell and industrial debris, the scene was recognizably African. To my citified mind, it looked as if an avant-garde artist had been given the task of creating an African village out of toxic waste materials. I crouched down and crawled inside the hut behind one of the men. It stank of shit and sweat and burning rubber. A naked old man lay on the dirt floor. His eyes were open but covered with a thick whitish film. A woman squatting next to him in a faded floral cotton dress spoke imploringly to me, wringing her wrinkled hands. I couldn’t understand a word she said.

Outside I could hear Bob talking to a man who knew some English. Bob seemed to be explaining that we were not doctors.

A gurgling sound came from the old man’s throat. His foot jerked, then lay still.

The woman, who had been looking at me expectantly, began to wail. People crowded into the hut. They jabbered angrily. I backed out, making apologetic signs.

I’ve told them you are a journalist, Bob said when I emerged. This man is ready to talk to you.

I took out my notebook with relief. Taking notes I knew how to do. A gaunt old fellow dressed in what appeared to be a dirty white nightshirt came forward. He carried a large stick. The men who had dragged me and Bob over to the hut set down some wooden crates for the three of us to sit on. Surrounded by a noisy and ever-growing crowd of Dinka, the old man began to tell us his story. Another man attempted to translate. The old man spoke with passion and vigour, often thumping the ground with his stick for emphasis. The listening crowd shouted added details at key points in his story. All the while the woman inside the hut kept up her monotonous wailing. The smoke from the tyre burned my nostrils and made my head ache. All I could make out through the translation was that the man and the others who lived in this section of Hillat Shook came from a village called Pariang in Upper Nile province, near the Heglig oil field. They were Dinka. They had owned many cows. Then twice, the year before and the year before that, the Baggara Arabs had come to Pariang with guns. The Baggara rode on horses and donkeys. The government had given them the guns. The Dinka had no guns. The Baggara shot some people and captured others, particularly children. The people who survived the second raid on Pariang came here. The children of Pariang had never been found.

A man in the crowd shouted ‘Chevron’, and angry babble erupted. Wiping the sweat off my face, I asked the translator what the man had said.

‘They say the jallaba are stealing their land for Chevron. Chevron has found oil on their land, and the jallaba want it.’

I looked at Bob.

He nodded. Pariang was near Bentiu. Chevron, which held the oil concession in that part of Sudan, had first discovered oil in commercial quantities in Bentiu in 1978. But the company had suspended its operations after southern rebels killed four of its workers in 1984. A lot of southerners claimed the government was arming the Arab militias to attack southern villages in that area and clearing the land so Chevron could resume work. But there was no way to confirm such reports, since the oil fields were located in the war zone and the government seldom gave foreign journalists permission to visit them.

I asked about conditions in the camp.

Everyone began to shout. They had no medicine, not enough food. They pointed to their bellies and turned their palms up in supplication. Children were dying of diarrhoea. Children got hungry and ate the rubbish. A man pulled me up from the crate, past a blur of cardboard shanties. There! he exclaimed, pointing at some children who were poking through a field of garbage with sticks. The rest of the crowd caught up with us. Someone else pointed to a lone Arab riding through the camp on a donkey loaded with a tank of water. They had no water except what they could buy from jallaba like him. People were dying from malaria, diarrhoea, measles, tuberculosis, meningitis.

Bowls of merissa appeared. The voices became slurred, angrier. A man pushed his way forward, yelling and jabbing his finger at me and Bob.

‘He wants to know why people are hearing this in Britannia and Europa and are not helping us. You have lots of money, but you do not help us.’

I had no answer.

THE NEXT MORNING I went to the big brown Chevron office building in the centre of town. I wanted to ask about the attacks the camp dwellers said had driven them out of Pariang. But the Sudanese watchman said the office was closed. I went to see a Canadian journalist I’d met at the Acropole. Carol Berger knew as much as anyone about Chevron’s dealings in Sudan. She’d spent three years there as a stringer for the BBC before being deported for breaking the news of the rebel attack on the oil company’s Rub Kona base camp. (She returned a year later after Nimeiri was overthrown.) She was tall and slim, with short brown hair, blue eyes and a slight limp. She loved the insanity of Sudan, and she had seen a lot of it, having covered the last famine as well as the waning days of Nimeiri’s regime. She laughed when I told her how shocked I was by Hillat Shook. What would I think, she asked, if I knew that in addition to everything else, Hillat Shook was actually the site of a hazardous waste dump? When Carol arrived in Khartoum in 1981, the Chevron building had been a hive of activity. In those days, the oil company expected to annually produce oil worth £180 million by 1986. But after Nuer rebels killed four Chevron workers, the oil company shut down its operations. At Chevron’s request, Carol said, Nimeiri began supplying the Baggara tribes of southern Kordofan in early 1984 with automatic weapons to secure the oil fields. But this only intensified the fighting between the local Nuer and Dinka people and the Baggara. Finally Chevron told the Sudanese president that ‘some kind of political settlement in Upper Nile’ would have to be a precondition for oil exploration to resume.

Nimeiri had pinned all his hopes on the oil. He entered into a secret deal with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. In return for equipping and training a southern militia that could keep the SPLA out of Bentiu, Khashoggi was to get half the proceeds of any oil revenues that would accrue to the Sudan government. Khashoggi was to draw his militia from the Nuer people who made up most of the population in the Bentiu area and were traditional rivals of the Dinka. But the Khashoggi deal failed when the Nuer kidnapped the team Nimeiri sent to negotiate with them. (Carol was particularly amused by this twist.) Nimeiri then tried to open negotiations with the SPLA, relaying an offer to make John Garang, the SPLA leader, vice president of Sudan and economic administrator of the south, and to give six of his colleagues cabinet posts. But Garang turned down the offer, and a few months later Nimeiri was overthrown by his generals while on a visit to Washington. (The United States, aware of Nimeiri’s increasing unpopularity and fed up with his corruption, did nothing to stop the coup.)

When Sadiq took power after the 1986 elections, he stepped up arms deliveries to the Baggara militias known as the murahaleen. The Baggara had been the backbone of the Mahdi’s rebellion, and they retained their loyalty to his great-grandson. They traditionally pastured their cattle and horses along the Bahr el-Arab’and Bahr el-Ghazal rivers, which ran through the oil fields. In 1984 and 1985 the Baggara Arabs cleared the land around Bentiu of its inhabitants. The Nuer who lived closer to Bentiu were told to move south of the river. The Dinka were driven off towards the north, the people I met from Pariang probably among them. The following year the SPLA led an assault on the oil fields that gave control of the area to the rebels. As Carol and I sat talking in Khartoum, the murahaleen were fighting all along the Bahr el-Arab to take control of the pastureland and the oil beneath it.

Sadiq’s government was even more desperate than Nimeiri’s to get the oil flowing. In the early 1980s, foreign aid had paid for almost three-quarters of Sudan’s annual budget. But with the cold war waning, the United States and other rich countries were losing interest in the Horn of Africa. US aid to Sudan had shrunk from $350 million in 1985 to about $72 million, and the embassy expected it to fall further. After all the excesses of the 1970s, Sudan owed more money to the International Monetary Fund than any other country in the world. Carol was frustrated with the Western diplomats who believed Sadiq’s high-flown protestations about his plans to develop Sudan. They thought he was like them because he’d gone to Oxford, she said. To her, he seemed more like the feudal leader of a Muslim clan that spent much of its time bickering over how to divide up the country’s wealth.

Sadiq’s cousin, Mubarak al-Mahdi, had argued violently not long before with some Chevron executives. Mubarak was Sadiq’s closest confidant. He was also close to Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, the president of Libya and a patron of Sadiq’s who had given him the backing to stage several armed rebellions against Nimeiri. Reportedly Mubarak had been entrusted with the funds Qaddafi gave Sadiq to win the 1986 elections. After his victory, Sadiq had given his cousin a vital new task: to get Chevron to resume drilling. But the Americans refused, citing the danger the rebels presented to their personnel. Oil prices were at a low of $16 per barrel. As the US ambassador to Sudan, Norman Anderson, later wrote, Mubarak accused the Americans of using Sudan’s civil war as an excuse to wait for the price of oil to go up. Mubarak warned the Americans that if Chevron didn’t want to drill in the south, the Sudanese would find another company that did. The French company Total, for example, already owned large concessions in the far south, near the towns of Bor, Kapoeta and Pibor. Total might be willing to drill where Chevron was not. Chevron held its ground. The company had invested more than $1 billion in Sudan, but as Anderson wrote, it did not want to ‘make itself again a target’ or ‘incur large new expenses in uncertain political and economic conditions without reasonable prospects of a return on investment’. The al-Mahdis fumed, but the oil remained underground.

I KNEW OF ONLY one person who had visited the Sudan for pleasure. She was a friend from London who’d gone to visit Patta Scott-Villiers, an old schoolmate who also happened to be a friend of Emma McCune. When I called my friend to say I was going to Khartoum, she suggested I look up Patta and her husband, Alastair, who was Band Aid’s representative there. By coincidence I had spent my first night in Sudan in a room at the Acropole that Band Aid kept as an office. The walls were decorated with posters of Bob Geldof and Princess Diana. The floor was stacked with yellowing telegrams addressed to the Scott-Villierses about famines past. Clearly, they had seen all of this before. I left a message for Alastair and Patta, and a few days later they invited me to dinner. When Alastair came to pick me up at the Acropole, I was in high spirits. I had just received my permit to travel to the Ethiopian refugee camps.

What do I remember about that night? A flat a little less empty than most - wooden furniture mostly has to be imported in Sudan, and foreigners who don’t plan to stay long seldom bother to buy more than a few chairs and a bed - the smell of curry, a couple of British aid workers sprawled out on a couch smoking a joint, the Police playing on the cassette deck, and Patta’s kind smile as she came out of the small kitchen wiping her hands on a dish towel. How Alastair and the others laughed indulgently when I told them I had come to check out the US reports of starvation in Ethiopia. How Alastair later took me aside to say that the famine I was looking for wasn’t in Ethiopia but more than 2,000 miles in the other direction, in the far western province of Darfur, on the Bahr al-Arab River in the land of the Baggara Arabs - and that this was a famine the United States wasn’t talking about.

Safaha. It was a whisper, a word on a report, a squiggly half inch of italic writing on a map over Alastair’s desk, and yet I swear I felt a chill when I first saw the name. Alastair and I had been discussing an article in the Sudan Times that said thousands of people were starving in the town of Wau. The last foreign aid worker, a Dutch doctor, had been evacuated from the town a month earlier. I was saying that I believed the stories, but unless I could see and describe the starving people myself, nothing I wrote would have any impact. Or something like that. Alastair gave me an appraising look. Now that I understand what he knew then about the slaughter going on in Wau, I can only imagine what he was thinking. But he didn’t say anything. Instead he took me into another room. You might want to read this, he said, handing me a folder. It’s an Oxfam report from southern Darfur that was handed out at an aid meeting this week.

I read quickly. A large influx of destitute southerners has been moving into south Darfur since December. Their arrival is connected with the collapse of security in and around Wau… Confidential: Two thirds of the children in the feeding centre have MUAC ratios of 60 per cent and less….MUAC means ‘muscle - upper arm circumference’. I knew from my reading that MUAC ratios of 60 per cent was aidspeak for saying that two-thirds of the children had lost almost half their body weight.

How do you say that again - Safaha? I asked.

Yes, said Alastair, and he turned on the light so that I could see the map of Sudan on the wall. There it is, he said, pointing to a tiny strip of letters in the empty lower left of the map next to the crooked line of a river. Safaha. It’s on the Bahr el-Arab River, he said, the boundary between north and south. Bahr el-Arab means ‘The River of the Arabs’, but Dinka call the river the Kiir. The Dinka and the Arabs both used to water their cattle at Safaha, but for the last year or so there have been reports of fighting there. His finger moved up the map to a town called Ed Da’ein. About a year ago there was a massacre of Dinka here, he said. Thousands were killed. A bloodbath really. A couple of lecturers at the University of Khartoum wrote quite a good report about it. They said that some of the surviving Dinka were sold into slavery. You could probably get a copy from one of them.

Alastair put the Oxfam report back in its folder and reached to turn off the light.

Safaha lies above the northern boundary, he said. Technically, it’s outside the war zone. Oxfam and the Belgian branch of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are working there. Maybe you could get permission to visit one of them.

We went back to the living room.

Just remember, you didn’t get it from me, he added.

Patta called everyone to dinner.