of their freedom. This long-standing racial/ethnic prejudice has partly prompted the current wave of slavery.
During the first civil war, which took place between the North and the South from 1955 to 1972, the Baggara did not play a significant role. They continued to use Dinka grazing plains and fishing waters. Hostilities between the two groups were occasional. The Baggara even carried on with their traditional barter trade with the Dinka as well as with the southern rebel forces, the Anyanya. There were also extended periods of peace established by the traditional chiefs of the two groups on the basis of mutual interests, especially between the Misseria and the Ngok Dinka. At times, the two groups engaged in social relations that involved interethnic marriages, especially between the Rezeigat and the Malwal Dinka. They also established mechanisms for defusing individual conflicts between subtribes, most notably the truces signed by the leaders of both sides. Many accords were reached during the 1960s and the 1970s, including the 1976 Babanusa accord between chief Deng Majok of the Ngok Dinka of Abyei and Nazir Babu Nimr of the Misseria and the 1976 accord reached in Safaha between the Rezeigat and the Malwal Dinka of Aweil, brokered by the then-commissioner of Bahr el-Ghazal, Isaiha Kulang Mabor, and Sudan’s vice president, Abdel Majid Hamid Khalil. These agreements, although breached on many occasions by the Baggara, brought relative peace to the borderland between the Baggara and the Dinka for many years.
But when the second civil conflict broke out in 1983, the agreements disintegrated and Dinka-Baggara relations turned into almost irreconcilable hostilities. The hostilities were caused in part by the massive influx of Baggara pastoralists into Dinka and Ju-Luo territories to graze their livestock during the drought in Darfur and Kordofan. In addition, these pastoralists became hunters, killing small and big game in the nearby forests, and thereby provoking Dinka attempts to deny the Baggara access to their grazing areas and fishing zones. The Baggara started arriving in Dinka areas prepared to use military force to make their way south of the Kiir River if they met with resistance. Intense conflict ensued.
These hostilities would have remained sporadic and manageable, as they had been for many generations, had the government of Sudan not decided to manipulate them for its political designs as a cheap way to bring the South under control. The government tolerated the illegal acquisition of guns by the Arab pastoralists. The Baggara were often better armed than the Dinka because of their access to guns coming into Sudan from neighboring Chad, which was embroiled in its own civil war in the early 1980s. The war in Chad had serious security implications for western Sudan, but in the government’s view, the benefits of destabilizing the Dinka far outweighed the security problems.2 Some Baggara individuals were also known for enlisting in the army and then deserting with the arms. It was also a matter of common knowledge that many western Sudanese who retired from the armed forces were allowed to keep a number of guns for themselves, which they either sold to others in Darfur and Kordofan or gave to family members. Such arms are locally used for protection against cattle rustlers from other herding societies within the North. By means of these arms, the Arab herders forced their way into the Dinka grazing lands. They also hunted game with impunity, and when the Dinka tried to stop them, the result was often a declaration of war on the Dinka.
These hostilities became more intense when the SPLA deployed forces in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, partly to restore the old colonial borders and partly to protect the Dinka people as well as the environment. The SPLA encountered Baggara Arab raiding forces in 1984–87 on the borders between Bahr el-Ghazal and southern Darfur and southern Kordofan. The SPLA defeated the Baggara Arab pastoralists and drove them away from the southern borders. The SPLA forces then turned to the escalation of the struggle against the Sudan army, following their victory over the Arab pastoralists and hunters. The SPLA forces established their military bases on the borders, extending guerrilla activities to non-Arab ethnic territories of the Nuba Mountains and Ingessana hills in southern Kordofan and southern Blue Nile, respectively.
Like Christian and non-Arab ethnic groups in South Sudan, the Nuba and the Ingessana people had also suffered from the oppressive and unjust rule of the Arabs in Sudan. Although their regions belonged to north Sudan, which was comparatively more developed than South Sudan, they had been as neglected in development as the South. When SPLA forces penetrated the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile for recruitment and spread revolutionary feelings against the Arab and Muslim domination in Sudan, many young men and women from the Nuba and Ingessana joined the ranks of southern guerrilla fighters. Such unity among non-Arabs in Sudan, which had never happened before, sent a wave of fear through the Arab and Muslim rulers in Khartoum. In addition, the Khartoum governments traditionally relied on these non-Arab groups for army recruits under the command of Arab officers. During the second round of the civil war, the government found it difficult to recruit troops from the Nuba and the Ingessana ethnic groups. The Arab governments in Khartoum, therefore, turned to recruit most of their troops from Arab groups.
The Slave-Taking Armies and Their Mission
Two types of forces emerged out of this recruitment policy, and these were meant to be the “final solution”3 to the “Southern Problem.” The first type of force was the tribal militias called Murahileen.4 The Arab rulers in Khartoum resorted to the Baggara in particular to form a militia force to carry out what amounted to ethnic cleansing against the Dinka and the Nuba. The government saw the militias as an opportunity to assert Arab and Muslim domination in Sudan, and the Baggara pastoralists and peasants viewed their militia forces as the only way to gain their economic goals in northern Bahr el-Ghazal, southern Kordofan, and southern Blue Nile. The militias executed a policy of raiding and looting, capturing slaves, and expelling others from their territories, and settling “pacified” Nuba and Ingessana lands by force. The plan of the militia, as the victims explained it, was not only to collect booty and slaves but also to destabilize Dinka areas. The desperate Dinka would then have to move into the North, where they would be subject to economic exploitation and enslavement.
The second and most insidious forces comprised part of the Sudanese army and were the Popular Defense Forces (PDF). These also included paramilitary tribal groups affiliated with the Sudanese army. Their work took many forms. They were primarily a jihadic force that sprang out of the growing politicization of Islam and Islamic militancy most associated with the government of National Islamic Front (NIF), which came to power on June 30, 1989. One writer described the PDF as follows: “They consisted of existing Arab militias, the infamous Murahileen, student and professional ‘volunteers’ who rushed to the call of the jihad and adults dragooned into six weeks of compulsory military training whose curriculum consisted of calisthenics and religious indoctrination.”5 Because of this, these forces have also been called Mujahideen, meaning holy warriors. They were supplied with weapons, some money, and army badges. They were also armed with a complete ideology the Islamists had introduced to indoctrinate, shape, and thereby control the Sudanese in all aspects of life. The force was intended to fight the SPLA on the basis that the latter was the enemy of Islam and the Arabs, and that one way to defeat the SPLA was to hit at its support base among the Dinka. The recruits were constantly instructed that their mission was not only to defend the homeland from the “infidels paid by the U.S. and the Zionist State” but also to extend their faith to unbelievers in the South and beyond.
The NIF’s other mission was to guard the military trains between Babanusa and Wau, which run through Dinka territory. There were usually several trains going one behind the other carrying supplies and reinforcements to government garrison towns along the railway line up to Wau, the regional capital of Bahr el-Ghazal. To prevent the trains from being attacked or taken over by the SPLA, the government instructed the PDF to ride on them until the trains reached Dinka territory, after which they got off and moved on foot, forming a shield along the sides of the train. These trains moved at a walking speed. All three types of forces—the Murahileen, the Mujahideen/PDF, and the government of Sudan regular army—worked together, each assigned a particular role. The Baggara tribal militias “go on horseback forming an outer circle protecting the train, the army, and the other forces from possible SPLA attacks.”6 They move at an outer distance of approximately five miles but sometimes as far as sixteen miles away from the force on foot
