SHR Quarterly

DISPLACEMENT OF 1300 NUBA CHILDREN FROM KORONGO ABDALLAH (NOVEMBER 1994)

From Quarterly, Issue No.1, summer 1995

SHRO-Cairo received information from reliable resources those 1300 children of the Korongo Abdallah and Shat groups had been transferred from their homeland between November 26 and 27, 1994. It was said that the Popular Defense Forces (PDFs) of South Kordofan moved the children to a village in Hamrat Al-Wiz in Northern Kordofan where they were detained in private camps there.

The names of the detained children had been converted from Nuba names to Arabic names. In addition, they were forbidden from using their local language. SHRO-Cairo was also informed that the ruling regime is considering transferring the children further through Maleet to North West Africa across the borders where they would be sold as slaves, each child for US$95.

The information sources assured that PDFs Mohamed Ibrahim and Ahmed Abdel-Aziz were both involved in crimes of kidnapping a great many number of Nuba children. They committed the act by using cars tightly locked throughout December 1994. The mothers of these children were themselves transferred to tents in Al-Rahmaniya area at the eastern part of the Nuba Mountains – an area that is situated between Rashad and Abu-Gibaiha.

Reports of cases of rape of Nuba women are repeatedly circulating over the region. The women were raped to forcibly labor children that would be descendants of Arab ethnic origin, rather than Nuba fathers. By this dehumanizing destruction of the women and their offspring the Nuba culture and ethnic integrity has been systematically affected.

On the other side, the NIF authorities still continue to arrest the women who are leaders of trades unions in Khartoum. The leader women included Buthaina Al-Khurasani, an ex-employee of a distinguished status in the administration of Sudan Public Service Personnel. This woman had been subjected to continuous arrests and harassment.

In July 1994 the Judge of Appeal Nour Al-Huda Hamad Ibrahim was unlawfully dismissed from her position in the Judiciary and detained at the Women'’ Wing of the Omdurman Prison.

November through December 1994, the NIF security forces continued to arrest women at markets and public places in Khartoum, Omdurman, and the other cities of Sudan. The military regime forced women to wear the Iranian national dress in addition to other uniforms adopted by NIF even if the Sudanese women were unwilling to wear these foreign things.

The NIF military regime arrested and transferred to PDFs Camps a number of children known as Al-Ahdath Al-Musharadeen or vagrant children who have been directly victimized by the NIF reincited and escalated civil war in the South, DarFur and Nuba Mountains. The children were kept as military conscripts to fight with government troops in the war zone against their will, or family’s consent, their own ethnic or religious groups in the war areas.

Dr. Ga’sp’ar Biro, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Sudan, repeatedly mentioned in his reports to the Human Rights Commission that were further adopted by the United Nations General Assembly the inhuman ill-treatment that these Sudanese displaced children faced in the government PDFs-controlled camps. Biro also stressed the probability that they might have been arrested in different ways, illegally.