The scene was chilling --- amateur footage shot of a bombing that killed 19 Holy Cross Catholic School children and their teacher in Nuba, Sudan on Feb. 8, 2000.
During his presentation at the Religious Education Congress on April 2 to a full room at the Anaheim Convention Center, David Tlapek used the clip as well as other excerpts from the 2000 documentary he directed and produced called "The Hidden Gift: War and Faith in Sudan."
Narrated and written by Gabriel Meyer, the documentary went beyond the startling introduction to show a series of visits to the region by their bishop, Macram Max Gassis, of El Obeid Diocese, who travels by a small plane to bring supplies, medicine, tools, hope and love to his mountain flock in their pain and tragedy.
Meyer, an award-winning foreign correspondent, also introduced his recently released book, "War and Faith in Sudan," with 36 photos by Jim Nicholls.
Meyer and Nicholls made six trips to the Nuba Mountains and northern Bahr El Ghazal from 1998 to 2001. Their time was capped by a return trip to the region in Dec. 2004 as the government in Sudan and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement Army in February, 2005 was signing the last touches to the peace agreement, according to Meyer.
"I wrote the book both as an elegy and as a tribute to the people," he said. "I did not want the book to be just about war, and about the plight of war and the horrors of war, but about the faith of these people."
The book contains "many stories of that quiet determination and generosity" of the Nuba people and their plight.
A history of conflict
Sudan is Africa's largest country and is a quarter of the size of the United States.
The opposition began in 1983, when Sudanese President Nimeiri imposed Islamic law on the country. According to Meyer, during the time of war, northern Sudan worked to "crush opposition to its cultural, religious and economic control" over the ethnic African populations of the center and south. The Nuba are not southerners, but northerners that have resisted Khartoum's policies.
"After the mid 1980s, what happened was a lot of them were suffering from famine, but also Nuba were beginning to ask themselves a fundamental question: 'Am I an Arab?'" Meyer said. "They said, 'No, I am not an Arab. I am an African. I am a Nuba' This becomes one of the central components of the whole Sudanese conflict, this sense of identity."
Meyer said the questioning led the Nuba and the southern Darfuris to reject the assimilation.
Khartoum responded by killing schoolteachers, lay catechists and began to really put pressure on the Nuba mountains. Tens of thousands of people died in 1988 as a result. The situation was similar in Darfur, according to Meyer.
He also said that the attacks have resulted in the deaths of at least 2.5 million people and the displacement of more half the entire 8.9 million people of southern Sudan, from 1983 to 2005; 50,000 soldiers died over the course of the war.
In 1992, the Sudan regime considered the Nuba mountains off limits to all international aid organizations, journalists and foreigners and all outsiders. It is now known that the government was conducting an expansive extermination campaign there. The Nuba alone lost 300,000 people, said Meyer.
"The Nuba death count was the same as the entire death count in the whole Balkan war --- for the Nuba alone," Meyer said. "And the ongoing death and displacement in Darfur involves similarly catastrophic figures."
Bishop Gassis had testified before congress in 1988 about abuses in Sudan and according to Meyer found himself unwelcome in his own country, though he was born in Khartoum. The bishop set up operations in Nairobi, Kenya and cared for his people from there.
Bishop Gassis along with an indigenous organization called the Nuba Relief and Development Society was the only source of help that the Nuba had for many years at the worst period of the war beginning in 1995.
Meyer met the bishop when he interviewed him in the United States in 1997.
"He was a unique source not only of medicines and personnel," Meyer said of Bishop Gassis to the Nuba. "He brought his own personnel to be exposed to the same dangers that the Nuba were facing everyday."
Bishop Gassis continued his extraordinary work in the Nuba mountains and northern Bahr el Ghazal despite adversity. In Northern Bahr El Ghazal the bishop set up a school and a training center for women who were abducted and taken into slavery.
"There were really some major works he mounted right in the middle of the war," Meyer said.
Meyer said that there is not much known history of Nuba origins, but that they are probably the indigenous people of Northern Sudan who were pushed into these mountains by persecutions over the centuries and by Arab raiders. Now, there are 55 Nuba tribes and 38 languages.
"If I wrote 'War and Faith in Sudan' as an elegy, I especially wrote it as an elegy to children," he said. The central chapter in the book is called "Songs on the death of children."
The cover of his book features a black and white photo of a young girl, one of the survivors of the February 2000 bombing, that had her arm amputated because of shrapnel.
"Modern wars always turn out to be wars against children," he said. "My wars (coverage) have taught me that."
He said that in addition to the 19 dead, dozens of children were wounded in the hail of metal from the bombing. Meyer said that the day after the bombing, the students were at the school, waiting for classes, the schoolmaster told him. He explained that it was not safe to attend school and that they weren't sure when they would reopen. But the students, who had never had a real education until the Catholic Church came with schools, did not leave.
"He said that one of the students came up to him and said, 'Professor, let us continue. If it is God's will, we won't die,'" Meyer said.
Meyer said he went with a group to the village two weeks after the bombing on a fact-finding mission and to see if they could bring some of the wounded children to a hospital in Kenya. He spoke with some of the students who had been in the bombing about what they had experienced and seen.
"I said to them, 'What are you going to do now?' One of the boys said me, (the Nuba word for) 'we will persevere until death,'" Meyer said. "I said, 'What can I do for you?' Another student looked at me right in the eye and said 'You can make the bombers go away.'"
"I also wrote 'War and Faith in Sudan' as a tribute to a people's spirit," he said. "That is the main reason of why I wrote the book."
Quoting from the introduction of his book, Meyer said, "The regime that persecuted the Nuba relied on the hope that the disappearance of these remote and isolated people would go unnoticed. This account in its own small way, seeks to honor the dead by defying that hope." |