Activist to talk about Sudan genocide

By Natalie Storey The New Mexican |
November 8, 2005

John Heffernan remembers one of his Sudanese friends well: 76-year-old Nuraine was tall, gaunt and skinny from starvation. He still carried himself with dignity despite the fact that he had lost nearly everything in the Darfur genocide, including two of his sons.

Heffernan, an activist who has worked for nongovernmental aid organizations for most of his career, visited Darfur , Sudan, twice for his work with Physicians for Human Rights. Tonight at Temple Beth Shalom he will present a film and discuss his experiences .

The situation in Sudan is not much better now than it was a year ago. “It is still very, very insecure ,” Heffernan said. “The largescale attacks on villages, that has subsided because there are no longer any villages to attack. Humanitarian aid is being obstructed. People can’t go home. There is very little change.”

In September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell called the conflict in Sudan genocide, saying Arab militias sponsored by the government were responsible for rapes, killings and other atrocities in Sudan that left 1.2 million Sudanese dead.

There has long been a conflict in Sudan between the Muslims in the north, who control the government in Khartoum, the country’s capital, and the blacks of southern Sudan. The country has been ravaged by civil war on and off since the late 1950s. Heffernan’s group estimates the current government in Khartoum has presided over at least four instances of genocide .

What Heffernan says he saw during his visits to the largest country in Africa was horrendous . What he found were men and women with stories like Nuraine.

Nuraine is part of the Zaghawa ethnic group — a large kinship group of black Sudanese farmers and livestock herders. Arab militias called Janjaweed, who Heffernan said are paid by the government, were trying to exterminate Nuraine’s ethnic group along with other blacks in Sudan. Nuraine and his family stood helplessly by as their mud hut was looted and burned, their crops burned, their livestock stolen. Nuraine, his wife and some of his children escaped with their last possession —- a donkey —and fled into the desert . The militias killed two of their sons.

Eventually they made it to Oure Cassone, a spot right at the foot of the Sahara desert where winds whip up sandstorms day and night. They had no food, no water, no shelter.

This was the first place Heffernan visited in May 2004. At the time a refugee camp had not yet been set up. Many people were dying.

“They fled into terrain that was impossible to live in without assistance,” he said. “They were living in a death trap.”

He met Nuraine when he returned to Sudan in January 2005. By that time a refugee camp had been set up, but crucial aid supplies were still scarce. Nuraine told Heffernan that he would like to go back to his home. But this presented two problems. Nuraine and his family had no home to go back to, and they were still terrified for their safety. Now Heffernan is trying to raise awareness that the situation in Darfur remains desperate.

“A whole way of life has been destroyed,” he said. “The people need to be able to go home, and they need to be compensated for what they lost. Many of them lost everything.”

Contact Natalie Storey

at 986-3026 or

nstorey@sfnewmexican .com.


source: new mexican