Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan

The trip took her to India for the first time since her family had left in 1966. Hall remembers that it brought back memories of her father and his wild colonial exploits. When Emma and Hall stayed at the Tollygunge Club in Calcutta, the manager told them a story about how Julian had been on a plane flying to Calcutta when the plane got lost. ‘Seems Emma’s father was a bit drunk, and he went up to the cockpit, pushed the pilot away, and flew the plane back to Calcutta,’ Hall remembers the man telling them. Emma celebrated her twenty-first birthday in the foothills of the Himalayas, not far from where her father and grandfather had been stationed during the Raj. The trip settled in her mind the notion that she must have a life outside the bounds of everyday English experience. And it taught her useful things about maps and radios.

Hall and Emma were only friends, but Emma’s mother half hoped the trip might spark a deeper relationship. Hall was kindly and dependable. He was the sort of man who could afford to indulge Emma’s appetite for adventure and yet provide her with the security that Maggie herself had always longed for. But Emma didn’t want to make her forays into other cultures from the safe confines of the West. When they left England, Hall gave Emma a wad of cash to keep in case of emergency. Emma promptly spent all the money in Luxor on clothes. Hall liked to stay in expensive ‘international’ hotels such as the Hilton or the Meridian, where you could count on air-conditioning and clean sheets. Emma preferred to scour the back streets for humble guesthouses frequented by local people. Fortunately she had inherited her father’s gift for appreciating vastly different characters. She and Hall remained fond of each other long after the trip was over. But what she really longed for was a much stronger experience. Even the exciting but essentially Western lives that her friends like Sally and Willy envisaged for themselves in Africa were not what she had in mind.

She had always been attracted to African men, though she can hardly have laid eyes on many Africans in Yorkshire. Her attraction was frankly erotic. She found black men more beautiful than white men, even joking with her girlfriends that the penises of white men reminded her of ‘great slugs’. She loved the warmth of African laughter and the rhythms of African music. She often said that, with all their troubles, Africans enjoyed life more than Westerners. After she came back from her aeroplane journey in 1985, she started waitressing at a trendy Indonesian restaurant on the way to Oxford railway station. The restaurant was a hang-out for some of the university’s more swinging lecturers, particularly those who specialized in Asia and Africa. One night Emma overheard Barbara Harrell-Bond, the American director of the university’s new Refugee Studies Programme, at Queen Elizabeth House, talking with some others about how they needed student volunteers. Among those speaking most animatedly at the table was a tall, thin African man with long fingers. This was Ahmed Karadawi, the Sudanese co-founder of the Refugee Studies Programme and a penetrating critic of Western relief efforts. When Emma brought Karadawi his food, he rewarded her with a smile so broad, it seemed almost too big for his face. Grinning back at him, Emma interrupted Harrell-Bond to volunteer for the programme.

African refugees and famine were in the air that summer, not only in Britain but in Europe and America, too. Ethiopia and Sudan were in the grip of the great 1984-5 famine. In October 1984 Emma and the rest of Britain had watched the film that Michael Buerk brought back for the BBC nightly news from the Korem famine camp in northern Ethiopia. As Bob Geldof later wrote in his autobiography, Is That It?, Buerk’s film showed pictures of people ‘so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet’. As the images appeared on the screen, Buerk spoke in tones of sombre outrage. ‘Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of a night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century. This place, say relief workers, is the closest place to hell on earth.’ Geldof had come home that evening anxious and depressed about the failure of his latest album. Like thousands of television viewers, he found that the broadcast from Ethiopia ‘put my worries in a ghastly new perspective’.

Geldof described the reaction Buerk’s misty images of starving Ethiopians huddled under ragged blankets aroused in him. ‘Right from the first few seconds it was clear that this was a tragedy which the world had somehow contrived not to notice until it reached a scale which constituted an international tragedy. What could I do? I could send some money. Of course I could send some money. But that did not seem enough. Did not the sheer scale of the thing call for something more? Buerk had used the word “biblical”. A famine of biblical proportions. There was something terrible about the idea that 2,000 years after Christ in a world of modern technology something like this could be allowed to happen as if the ability of mankind to influence and control the environment had not altered one jot. A horror like this could not happen today without our consent. We had allowed this to happen, and now we knew that it was happening, to allow it to continue would be tantamount to murder. I would send some money, I would send more money. But that was not enough. To expiate yourself truly of any complicity in this evil you had to give something of yourself. I was stood against the wall. I had to withdraw my consent.’

Geldof helped galvanize Britain, then the Western world, with his moral outrage over the Ethiopian famine. Like millions of young people, Emma bought the Band Aid record ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ that Geldof produced for the charity he founded to help feed the famine victims. Her brother remembers her sitting in front of the television in the summer of 1985, mesmerized by Geldof’s Live Aid concert. Emma herself had always been good at fund-raising. She didn’t mind asking people for money; in a backhanded way, she almost enjoyed it. As a child she had enthusiastically joined in various charitable campaigns sponsored by Blue Peter. She liked the feeling of working together with others, and she liked the way championing a worthy cause forced adults to take her seriously. Geldof touched the conscience of people all over the world - Band Aid and Live Aid ultimately raised more than £70 million, and some 1.5 billion viewers in 152 countries watched the Live Aid concert - but in Britain he struck an especially deep chord. His appeals to help faraway and less fortunate people awakened so many memories of Britain’s crusading past that to this day British journalists call Geldof, now a multimillionaire businessman, ‘Saint Bob’. His heartfelt pleas on behalf of the Ethiopians awakened in Emma, as in many others her age, a sense of possibilities, a feeling that idealism still had a place in the world even in the waning last years of the cold war, when the aged prophets of capitalism, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, seemed to have no larger vision for the future than of getting and spending.

Chapter Four

NOW IN HER last year at the poly, Emma took up with Ahmed Karadawi, the elegant African intellectual with the brilliant smile whom she’d first met at the restaurant. Married and eighteen years older than Emma, Karadawi came from Kordofan, a dry and sandy province in north-western Sudan. He cast a sardonic eye on the self-congratulatory Western excitement over Band Aid and Live Aid. He was touched by the sincere enthusiasm of the young people who thronged his lectures at Oxford, but he argued that, too often, the Western aid agencies they went to work for were more interested in pandering to the prejudices of their donors than in actually helping needy Africans. Karadawi was witty and urbane; he could make you weep with laughter at the ridiculous mistakes the self-important khawajas made in Sudan, and he could be just as withering on the subject of the Sudanese government’s indifference to human suffering. In any event, he always said, no aid programme could fix the civil wars that had caused the hunger in Ethiopia and Sudan. Only the people who lived there could do that. Emma knew nothing about Sudan and its politics. But she was about to learn from a master.

Bilad al-Sudan. How languorously those Arabic words glided off Karadawi’s tongue, like a magic spell in an Arabian wonder tale. But Karadawi did not romanticize his unhappy country. He was the first to tell Emma about the Arab proverb that says, ‘When God made Sudan, He laughed.’ (Some Sudanese say God laughed with pleasure, but far more suspect the diety was laughing at his gigantic creation.) Karadawi knew that Sudan had been the frontier between southern black Africa and the northern cultures of the Near East two millennia before the Arabs named it ‘The Land of the Blacks’. He told her about how ancient Egyptians and Israelites knew the land south of Egypt first as the land of Cush and later as Nubia and as Punt. The Greeks and Romans called it Ethiopia or ‘The Land of the Burnt-Faced Ones’. Not until the Muslim conquest of the Middle Ages was it named ‘the Sudan’, or just ‘Sudan’, as it is commonly called today. From Karadawi, Emma heard about The Aethiopika, the third-century Greek novel about an Ethiopian princess who was mysteriously born with white skin and was raised as a Greek, who had to travel to the ancient Sudanese city-state of Meroë to find true love and her rightful throne. From him Emma learned how the Nile River snakes out from the Sudd, the world’s biggest swamp, all the way through the deserts of Sudan and Egypt to the Mediterranean.

In ancient times, the Sudd marked the limits of the world known to geographers. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs sent expeditions to discover whence came the river that gave birth to Egypt, but the swamp defeated every attempt to find out. The people of the Sudan included hundreds of ethnic groups, each with its own language and customs. The northern two-thirds of the country was mostly dry, while the southern third was wet and tempting, with good grazing, fat cattle, and rivers teeming with fish. With the exception of the Nuba Mountains, the northern people were mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic. Meanwhile the Nuba and the southerners remained ‘noble spiritual believers’, as Karadawi liked to call them, clinging to their African languages and religions. The struggle between the lighter-skinned desert peoples, drawn by the south’s water, slaves, gold and ivory, and the darker-skinned peoples of the swamp, who violently resisted intruders, had marked Sudanese history for thousands of years. Sudan’s contemporary civil war was in some ways a continuation of this antediluvian clash, Karadawi said.

Like most people in Britain, Emma had learned about the existence of huge refugee camps along Sudan’s eastern border with Ethiopia only during the famine of 1984-5. But Karadawi explained that there had been Ethiopian refugees in Sudan long before the famine. Ethiopia’s civil wars (like Sudan’s) had deep roots, and so did the tensions between the two countries. Christian Ethiopia had been at odds with Muslim Sudan since the Middle Ages, and supporting each other’s enemies had always been a feature of the contest. In 1961 the UN gave Ethiopia sovereignty over Eritrea, a partly Muslim former Italian colony that lies between Ethiopia and Sudan. When the Eritreans rebelled against Ethiopia, they set up bases in eastern Sudan with the help of the Sudanese government and its Arab allies. As refugees who had crossed an international border, the Eritreans and their families came under the protection of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which fed them. Meanwhile, Ethiopia gave sanctuary to Sudan’s rebellious southern pagans and Christians. Ethiopia’s patron, Israel, also gave the southern Sudanese rebels military assistance, as a way of weakening the Arab coalition.

Karadawi had been a child when the Sudan gained its independence from Britain and civil war broke out in the south. The war was still dragging on in 1970, when he went to work for UNHCR in the Eritrean camps along the eastern border right after earning his degree from the University of Khartoum. The southern rebels called themselves Anyanya, or ‘poison’, and they often behaved as poisonously to each other as to the northern army. In many ways, the tactics of the northern army resembled those of the nineteenth-century slave-traders. The army operated from inside garrison towns that had been founded on the sites of the old thorn-fence enclosures called zaribas, from which Arab slave-hunters had once armed their local allies and encouraged them to take captives. Now, as then, Arab army officers now handed out weapons to allied southern peoples, urging them to attack their local enemies and loot them of their cattle, women and children. The southerners were easily manipulated, and it seemed as if the fighting might go on forever. Then a series of events suddenly changed the climate. Jafaar Nimeiri, a military officer, took over the Sudanese government in a 1969 coup and began searching for a way out of the war. Then Israel concentrated its flow of arms on a single southern rebel commander, the Equatorian Joseph Lagu, enabling him to gain control of what had been a hopelessly fractured movement.

From his position in the camps, Karadawi watched how Nimeiri used the Eritrean refugees as one card in the political game that finally led to a 1972 peace agreement between northern and southern Sudan. When Nimeiri wanted to pressure Ethiopia, the southern rebels’ patron, he simply made it easier for the Eritreans to get weapons and supplies, including food, from friendly Arab countries. When he wanted to mollify Ethiopia, he squeezed the camps. In 1971 the aged Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie agreed to act as a mediator in Nimeiri’s talks with Lagu and the Anyanya. Largely united under Lagu, the southern rebels leaders were able to seize the opportunity for peace. In 1972 they and the government signed the Addis Ababa agreement that gave the south partial autonomy and ended seventeen years of civil war.

The Addis Ababa agreement ushered in a decade that Karadawi remembered as one of tremendous hope and promise. Sudan was going to be ‘the breadbasket of the Middle East’. Nimeiri agreed to support the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel. The United States rewarded him by making Sudan the next-biggest recipient of American foreign aid after Egypt and Israel. Sudan’s Muslim neighbours across the Red Sea were awash in oil money. Nimeiri’s government was able to borrow more than $12 billion from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and the Arab countries of the Gulf to finance its development schemes. Biggest was the watchword of the day. With a population of only about 26 million, Sudan had a land mass the size of Western Europe. It was the biggest country in Africa, and it was going to have the biggest of everything. International businessmen spent Gulf money to construct the world’s biggest sugar factory south of Khartoum at Kenana. An Anglo-French consortium brought the world’s biggest digger to Sudan and spent $75 million to construct the Jonglei Canal, a massive scheme that was going to use water from the Sudd to irrigate northern Sudan and Egypt. There were many dreams, but by the end of the decade the dreams, as well as the money, had vanished into the hands of Nimeiri’s cronies and the Western expatriates who administered so many of the foreign projects. Meanwhile the Sudanese public was saddled with a debt twice the size of the country’s gross national product.

The old siren song of treasure in the south spelled the beginning of the end. Following the 1973 oil crisis in the West, George Bush, US president Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the UN, visited Khartoum at the invitation of Nimeiri’s foreign minister. Nimeiri had started out as a socialist, and the United States had kept its distance from him during his first few years in power. Now Bush, a former oil man from Texas, advised the Sudanese government that satellite remote-sensing intelligence available to the US government showed that oil might be found in the south-eastern part of the country, especially the triangle of land located in the Sudd region between Bentiu, Nasir and Malakal. Bush named some American companies he said might be willing to undertake such a venture. In 1974 the American oil company Chevron was granted a licence to look for oil in parts of the south and south-west. Chevron also signed a secret agreement to explore the Kafi-Kengi region in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, where uranium deposits that could be refined for use in nuclear weapons had been found near the border with Darfur.

The Middle East was just beginning to churn with what the followers of political Islam call ‘the Islamic awakening’. Disappointed with the failures of independence, young Muslims were turning to Islam in search of a more natural and authentic system of governance than the secular nationalism imported from the West. Political Islam found especially fertile ground in northern Sudan, where the biggest political parties were already associated with religious brotherhoods. After Nimeiri’s communist allies attempted to overthrow him, the president drew closer to these Islamic parties. They had opposed his peace agreement with the south on the grounds that it gave what the agreement called the south’s ‘noble spiritual beliefs’ and Christianity equal place with Islam in Sudan’s constitution. They also thought the agreement gave the south too much autonomy. They had mounted three armed uprisings against Nimeiri, in 1970, 1975 and 1976, the last two with the backing of Libya. The president did not have the strength to resist them forever. In 1977 he invited their leaders to come back from exile.

The Islamic politicians pressed Nimeiri to make Sudanese law - until now a colonial hybrid of customary, Islamic and Western law - conform with classical sharia, or Islamic law. In their view, the purpose of a Muslim government was to enforce sharia. But southerners bitterly resisted any proposals to make sharia the source of all the country’s legislation. Islamic law provides for harsh punishments such as amputation, stoning and flogging. More important, under sharia law, unbelievers may not rule over believers, so that the imposition of sharia law would effectively close off the highest political offices to non-Muslims. Christians and Jews, as ‘Peoples of the Book’, have fewer civil rights under sharia than Muslims; followers of Africa’s traditional religions have virtually none at all. Nevertheless Nimeiri continued his drift to the right. Naming Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of the Muslim brotherhood, as his attorney general, he embarked on a programme of making Sudan’s laws more Islamic. He set aside his safari suit and began appearing at Friday prayers in the mosque in the skullcap and jallabiya of a Muslim scholar.

Then in 1978 Chevron struck oil just north of the town of Bentiu, in a mixed Nuer-Dinka area a little south of the north-south border. The oil well was located on a spot known as Pan Thou, or ‘thorn tree’, in the Nuer language. In a move suspicious southerners saw as a clue to Arab plans to seize the southern oil, Chevron and the government insisted on changing the Dinka name of the spot to Heglig, the Arabic name for the same tree. Extracting Heglig’s oil was to prove thornier than the company ever realized. Chevron had confined most of its dealings to the central government. But under the terms of the Addis Ababa agreement, the southern regional government was to receive the revenues from any minerals or other deposits found on southern land. Rather than see that happen, Nimeiri and his Islamist attorney general in 1980 tried to change the boundaries between north and south so that the land under which the oil and uranium lay would belong to a new northern province that the government named Unity. The south erupted in riots, and the president backed down. But the tension and mutual distrust kept mounting.

In the Bentiu area near the oil fields, angry Nuer men formed themselves into a militia they called Anyanya II; small clashes broke out in various parts of the south. In 1983 a battalion of southern soldiers stationed in the town of Bor mutinied over a pay dispute with their commanders. Colonel John Garang, a taciturn Dinka army officer with a PhD from Iowa State University, was sent to mediate. Instead, Garang fled with the men of the 105th Battalion across the border into Ethiopia. From there he urged the Sudanese to rise up against Nimeiri’s government as part of his newly formed Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). This time, Garang said, the south and its allies would fight not for independence but for a secular, socialist Sudan. A few months later Nimeiri imposed an unusually harsh version of sharia law on all of Sudan. The civil war was on again.

Ethiopia welcomed Garang and his mutineers, just as it had embraced the southern Sudanese rebels of the 1960s. Ethiopia’s wars and famines were a mirror image of those in Sudan; the same whirring cycle of disaster had rekindled that country’s civil war. For a short while after the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement, the Ethiopian government had gained the upper hand in its battles with the Eritrean rebels. Then famine struck northern Ethiopia in 1973. A widely publicized BBC broadcast accused Emperor Haile Selassie of having ignored the famine. The United States and Europe withdrew the aid that had propped up his regime. A Marxist military regime seized power, and Sudan resumed its support for Eritrea. With Sudanese support, a variety of new Eritrean and Tigrean groups opposed to Ethiopia’s government sprang up in the refugee camps on the border.

Like most Africans, Emma’s friend Karadawi took it as obvious that to feed and house people on one side of a conflict was to help that side. He considered the UN agencies’ pretensions to neutrality a laughable bit of Western hypocrisy. In Sudan he had been one of the first to suggest that the government recognize the humanitarian wings of the rebel armies fighting in Eritrea and neighbouring Tigre province, allowing them to raise funds and import materials just like every other foreign relief organization. In Oxford, Karadawi had gained a certain fame for his willingness to criticize all sides involved with aiding Sudan. When he and Emma met in 1985, President Nimeiri was refusing to ask for international assistance even though thousands of people in western Sudan were starving. A BBC journalist asked Karadawi where the fault lay, and he did not hesitate. ‘With the government,’ he replied. At the same time, he was engaged in writing a doctoral dissertation arguing that the West had turned refugee aid into a self-perpetuating industry that often did more harm than good in Sudan. His colleague Barbara Harrell-Bond ultimately incorporated many of his insights in her book, Imposing Aid. Alex de Waal, a fellow student at Oxford with Karadawi, is today Britain’s best-known critic of humanitarian aid. De Waal credits Karadawi with inspiring him. He dedicated his 1997 book Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa to Karadawi.

Karadawi could go on for hours brilliantly analysing the Islamic concept of barakat, or ‘blessings’ - the wealth and power that naturally flow to the pious - always with cigarette in hand. In 1985 a group of army officers overthrew Nimeiri but refused to dismantle the sharia law he had enacted. It was going to be much harder to get rid of Islamic law than it had been to get rid of Nimeiri, Karadawi predicted. Islam, he said, was a genie that would not go back into the lamp. He explained that Islamist politicians would accuse any Muslim who tried to revoke Islamic law of being an apostate, a crime punishable by death under sharia. Meanwhile the abolition of Islamic law remained the key demand of the southern rebels. The officers who had seized power wanted to hold elections, but Garang and his SPLA refused to participate unless a constitutional conference was held to decide the place of religion and ‘nationalities’ in Sudan. The officers, mostly conservative Muslims, refused. When a vote was held in 1986, the Islamic parties were the winners. Karadawi told Emma that this probably spelled the end of any peace talks for a while. ‘Malesh,’ he would exclaim, using the half-amused, half-bitter Arabic expression that means something like ‘What a pity!’ but can also mean ‘So sorry’ and ‘Too bad’.