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Passion
for Peace
Elizabeth Palmberg, Sojourners Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 9,
pp. 32, Features, September 2004
Even as atrocities in western Sudan have drawn the world's focus in
recent months, there are signs of hope elsewhere in the nation, which
has been ravaged by civil war for three or four decades.
Awut Deng Acuil’s eyes have the haunted look common to people
from Sudan’s war-ravaged south, but it is clear at once that
neither national upheaval nor personal trauma can slow her down. The
grassroots peace activist and women’s advocate—who once
embarked on a speaking tour with her 40-day-old baby in tow, while
in deep grief for the death of her husband—is not an easy person
to stop.
When Deng talked with Sojourners earlier this year at the World Social
Forum in India, she looked bone-tired from five days of speaking and
conference-going. No matter how weary she is, though, Deng looks you
in the eye and tells you the truth—whether about Sudanese women’s
struggle for empowerment, the peacemaking process that has healed
bloody conflicts within southern Sudan, or Deng’s own pain at
her husband’s death. Simply dressed, with short hair and a direct
gaze, Deng speaks with weight and quiet determination.
Deng is passionate about the need for women to play an active role
in guiding Sudan’s future. She was one of six women delegates
from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in its negotiations
with the northern government in 2002—but later each of the six
was taken off the official list, one by one, with no explanation.
Deng herself was the last to go. As she describes female struggles
to participate in the peace process—"a step forward, a
step backward"—her face shows a patience that is anything
but passive.
After being excluded from the north-south talks, women met to issue
their own statements and organize demonstrations. Sudanese women have
suffered profoundly from the rape, abduction, and economic devastation
that accompany war—and, because of the ravages of war, women
now make up the majority in southern Sudan.
Deng, who helped found the Nairobi-based Sudanese Women Voice for
Peace and the Sudanese Women Association of Nairobi, has dialogued
with women from northern Sudan around the issues they share in common,
such as having their children taken away to fight: "The war is
being fought, and there are no benefits," she says.
WHILE THEY HAVE often been excluded from the north-south negotiations,
women, including Deng, have played a key role in a crucial peacemaking
effort within southern Sudan: the "people-to-people peace process"
that, over the last six years, has healed devastating conflicts between
and within southern ethnic groups. A 1991 ethnic split within the
main rebel group, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, had led
to a civilian border war. Such conflicts, often encouraged by the
northern government, had devastated communities and hamstrung the
south’s ability to negotiate for peace with the government in
Khartoum. The New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC), which represents
southern Sudanese Christian churches from pentecostal to Catholic,
had been asked to mediate, but peacemaking attempts that were focused
on the SPLA’s military leaders went nowhere.
So, recounts Deng, the NSCC "went to the people," organizing
a grassroots peacemaking process focused on people outside the SPLA
factions: tribal chiefs, traditional religious leaders, and women.
The first fruit of the new strategy was a peace gathering in the small
town of Wunlit in 1999. Aimed at healing violence between the Nuer
and Dinka ethnic groups west of the Nile, the conference gathered
more than 300 delegates—four-fifths of them traditional tribal
and religious leaders, and one-fifth women.
Deng’s face shows quiet satisfaction when she recounts the involvement
of women in the conference itself and in the local peace council that
the conference set up, which was mandated to be one-third female.
The first sign that the conference would work, says Deng, "was
that the women from the Nuer and Dinka [in their opening remarks]
said that, at the end, everybody must unite. It was a very moving
moment."
One of those women was Deng, who is Dinka. After the initial male
speakers, she and a Nuer female delegate addressed the meeting, emphasizing
that "we must go out as brothers and sisters from this conference."
Shaking hands and hugging, they began to sing the Dinka song "Door,"
which means "reconciliation." "It is a very popular
song," Deng recounts, and "very powerful."
The conference began with a time for each side to air its grievances
uninterrupted, and then moved on to working groups drafting a detailed
peace agreement. It drew on traditional observances, such as storytelling
and the ritual slaughter of a white bull, and also incorporated Christian
prayer and exhortation. International donors helped fund transit for
the delegates, the construction of the peace village where the conferees
met, and equipment such as radios for the border security stations
set up by the conference.
Although the military factions of the SPLA would not reunite for nearly
three years, the Wunlit conference brought immediate results, and
much-needed peace, to civilians in the area. Abductees were returned,
an amnesty was declared on past raids, a peace council was set up
to prosecute new violations, and trading routes and grazing areas
were open once more. A few months later, when fighting with the government
displaced thousands of Nuer, they were able to find refuge in Dinka
territory thanks to the bonds forged at Wunlit.
Deng attributes this marked success, which contrasts starkly with
the infighting among military factions, to the grassroots nature of
the NSCC-sponsored peace process: "The people own it, and they
respond to it because it is theirs." They become owners through
painstaking and tireless grassroots dialogue and community organizing
by people such as Deng, who spends three-quarters of her time traveling
within Sudan to do the endless hard work of relationship-building
that makes the process work.
Deng, who works for the NSCC, describes the Christian church’s
central role in grassroots peacemaking as indicative of its central
role in southern Sudan. "[The churches] are there for the people,"
she says. "They became the voice of the people." The war-torn
region has seen rapid church growth, Deng reports, with thousands
of baptisms. The NSCC has also spoken up about the north-south conflict,
advocating for southern Sudan’s right to self-determination
and fostering dialogue with Muslim leaders in Khartoum and Kenya.
Sudan's war has taken a personal toll on Deng, perhaps most deeply
with the death of her husband in exile four years ago. "For him
to [be exiled and] die in a foreign country was a big burden to him
and a challenge to me," she says. In the 1980s, he had been detained
for a year by the government for opposing the imposition of Islam-based
sharia law, and he had later fought for the SPLA; she attributes his
fatal stroke in 2000 to his sufferings during the war.
A widow with seven children, the youngest an infant, Deng found strength
in the support of the Sudanese community in Nairobi, in the visits
of women friends who came to pray with her, and in the cards and prayers
from the Sudanese diaspora around the world. Her faith was deepened.
"When I lost my husband, I had to take the Bible to guide my
life. That has helped me a lot, has given me strength," she says.
She has also found strength in her drive to help her homeland. "For
me to survive, I had to work, to console my children. I felt I had
to play the role of father, I had to play the role of mother, I had
to make a contribution to my people." She managed to take her
husband’s body back to Sudan, and then traveled to Rome with
her infant and other children to begin a year of speaking engagements
and grassroots work for the NSCC. Today Deng and her children, who
range in age from 4 to 22, make their home in Nairobi, but her work
for her homeland often calls her away.
In recent months southern Sudan has seen many signs of hope, but Deng’s
work, and that of her country, is far from over. At press time, the
government and the SPLA were close to signing the final piece of a
wide-ranging peace agreement that would allow the south to have non-Islamic
law, to share oil profits and government jobs, and after six years
to hold a referendum to decide whether to become autonomous. (This
accord does not affect the separate and horrific situation in Sudan’s
western province of Darfur.)
Deng urges friends in the international community to contribute to
the hard work that lies ahead: "It’s not enough to sign
[a] peace [agreement]; you have to monitor it, you have to follow
it up." In particular, she urges continued pressure to make sure
that the autonomy referendum actually takes place. For the referendum
to work, she emphasizes, it’s also vital to build up civil society
so that it can inform and educate people in the vast, mostly rural
south.
Deng’s years of experience resound in her qualified optimism
about the new accord with the north: "The population has to own
it," she says. "It is the people who make the government."
*****
40 Years of Conflict
Civil war between the Islamist north and the mainly Christian and
animist south has raged since 1962, with a cessation in fighting from
1972 to 1983. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA)
is the primary, but by no means only, rebel group; the government
in the north often encouraged and funded divisions among its southern
adversaries.
In 1991, the SPLA split, largely along ethnic lines between the Dinka
and Nuer peoples. Civilians in both groups were caught up in a border
war with widespread casualties, looting, and abduction of women and
children.
In 1999, the New Sudan Council of Churches brokered the Wunlit peace
gathering, effectively ending Dinka-Nuer conflict west of the Nile.
The Wunlit conference served as a model for later people-to-people
peace conferences in other areas of south Sudan, including the Liliir
conference for six different ethnic groups in the region east of the
Nile, the Waat Lou Nuer conference to resolve intra-Nuer fighting,
and numerous mini-conferences.
This year, in ethnically based, Muslim-on-Muslim violence in Sudan’s
western province of Darfur, government-backed militias have raped
and killed tens of thousands, and more than a million refugees are
threatened with starvation. —EP
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