Terror in Sudan

Overview

As George Clooney campaigns against the atrocities being committed in Sudan, Unreported World has filmed extensive documentary footage from the war zone. Aidan Hartley and Daniel Bogado gained rare access to the Nuba Mountains to film the heroic doctors who are saving children in a largely hidden war being perpetrated on civilians by one of the world's most brutal dictatorships. The Nuba Mountains region, in the South Kordofan oil fields upriver from Khartoum, is a troubled part of Sudan where a civil war has continued since the 1980s. Nuba always fought alongside its southern black African Christian neighbours against the Arab Islamic regime in Khartoum, but the region was left behind in the peace accord that led to the independence of South Sudan in mid-2011. In June 2011, President Omar al-Bashir's forces launched fresh attacks against opposition supporters in Nuba, many of them Christians and black Africans. The Unreported World team highlights how government forces are carrying out almost constant aerial bombardment of civilian settlements, driving them from their fields so they cannot grow crops, while banning relief deliveries by international agencies. As soon as they arrive in Nuba, Hartley and Bogado are caught in an air raid by Sukhoi ground attack jets firing rockets as terrified families dive into foxholes while explosions rumble in the surrounding villages. In another incident soon after, the team films traumatised children running into caves to hide from Antonov bombers. The impact of Khartoum's refusal to allow medicines into Nuba is clear as doctors are forced to carry out operations on shrapnel-wounded children without anaesthetics and almost no medicines apart from traditional herbs. Hartley and Bogado visit the Catholic Mother of Mercy hospital, the only functioning hospital for a million civilians trapped by the war. Made for 80 beds, it has 500 patients. The situation is so dire that even the medical staff are not eating as they tend the wounded and sick. Teenage mother Alawiya tells Hartley how her new-born baby was killed in her arms by a blast that also claimed the lives of her mother and sister and tore off her right arm. One doctor claims that 80 per cent of all victims are civilians: the result of deliberate targeting. An estimated 350,000 civilians have been driven from their homes by fighting and many have fled to live in the caves. The team travels with a local doctor to caves in the mountain of Tungule, where thousands have been forced to live. In one clinic hidden among the rocks, Dr Alamin examines a seven-month-old baby, who he says has severe pneumonia and will die as Khartoum has banned the delivery of vaccines for children as well as supplementary foods for starving babies, and the United Nations, which evacuated in 2011, has delivered no supplies for a year. The team stays with Mansur and his family in one cave overnight to shelter from aerial attacks, and as the sun goes down he cooks what food he has been able to buy that day with the last of his money: a few handfuls of sorghum grain that went cheap because it was contaminated by petrol. The next morning the team films at a school the cave dwellers have set up under the canopy of tall trees. As the children attend their morning assembly, a bomber circles overhead and hundreds of children run screaming in fear to take cover in the nearby caves. Their teachers tell Hartley that the schools have no pens, no books, nothing with which to learn, due to Khartoum's attacks. As he unleashed terror last year, Bashir declared: 'There will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity... Islam [will be] the official religion and Arabic the official language... we will force them back into the mountains and starve them.' As Unreported World shows, this is exactly what he has done, and unless action is taken, the horn of Africa faces another terrible man-made famine.