Words and photographs by Ruth Evans.
Independent producer Ruth Evans travelled through southern Sudan with BBC World Affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge to witness first hand the work being carried out by MAG to clear unexploded mines and ordnance that are the legacy of 40 years of civil war.
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| MAG's convoy of Land Cruisers on the road to Lui |
We are a couple of hours late leaving the dusty southern Sudanese capital of Juba. But now the MAG convoy of three Land Cruisers is heading out of town, through the 40 degree heat and dust, gingerly weaving its way round the deep potholes along the only tarmac road in the south – all 2 km of it. Gleaming 4x4 vehicles bearing the logos of various UN agencies are virtually the only other vehicles on the road.
A team of ten Sudanese mine clearance personnel, many of them ex-Sudanese People’s Liberation Army rebels, is led by Jack Frost, a former British Army soldier who has seen service in the Falklands, Kuwait, Afghanistan and other troubled places.
A short distance out of Juba, we pass heavy diggers shifting mounds of red earth to grade the rough dirt road. They are opening up swathes of this vast country that were impassable for decades because of the bitter fighting between government troops and the southern rebels, and at times also between different factions of the rebels themselves. Then, finally, in 2005 an internationally brokered peace agreement was signed that brought stability to southern Sudan for the first time in 21 years.
Our vehicles, heavily laden with camping kit and provisions, throw up thick red dust, making visibility difficult. There are chickens and a goat on the roof of the truck in front, and jerry cans tried to a trailer on its back. "On a trip like this where we are out for about ten days, we have to be completely self reliant," says MAG logistics manager Simon Wooldridge. "We’re probably carrying 400 litres of fuel, plus vehicles spares and everything else we may need."
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| MAG's Technical Field Manager Jack Frost defuses a landmine found in the road |
Getting rid of the mines and unexploded armaments is the starting point for peace and development here, but nobody really knows how many there are after such a long and bitter conflict. This road, heading west from Juba to the little settlement of Lui, is one of 4,000 km that have been surveyed and cleared in the last two years.
As we drive, Simon points out red and white painted stones edging the road, warning people of the risk of unexploded mines along the verges. At one point we smell, long before we see, a dead cow that clearly didn’t heed those warnings.
I’m travelling with BBC World Affairs correspondent Mike Wooldridge – Simon’s father – to make a Radio 4 documentary about the challenges facing southern Sudan half way through the transition period that will determine the south’s future.
Under the peace agreement, elections are due to be held in 2009. followed by a referendum in 2011 that will determine whether the south stays part of a united Sudan or goes it alone. The challenges are immense: almost four decades of conflict killed an estimated two million Sudanese, internally displaced a further four million, and created at least 400,000 refugees. Many of these are now coming home, cautiously optimistic that this time the peace will hold.
One refugee who has returned with hope in her heart is Lucy Iyaya Loki. She’s the same age as independent Sudan but has been three times a refugee – first as a child in Uganda; then Ethiopia and when they were forced to flee again, walking for months through the bush with her baby on her back; finally, she fled to Kenya, where I first met her in a camp in 1994.
Today she’s come back home and is one of the 170 MPs in Juba’s new legislative assembly. "Fear is always in our hearts," she’d told me when we met again in Juba, adding cheerfully, "We never know what tomorrow will bring, although we always live in hope."
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| A MAG mine risk education (MRE) session in Juba |
There’s precious little for people to come back to here. Almost everything has been destroyed by war and education and health services now have to be built from scratch. There are fewer than 100 doctors and a handful of midwives – a staggering statistic for a population of about 10 million people and a country the size of France, Germany and the UK combined.
About three hours west of Juba, the road is fast deteriorating, and we are stiffening from the jolting journey. An hour and one puncture later, by now pitch dark, we eventually arrive at the camp site which has been set up by the rest of the team on the outskirts of the little town of Lui.
Lui has one of the few functioning hospitals in the south, with 100 beds for over a million people. Patients walk or are carried for three or four days to get there. Jack looks perfectly at home already, with white plastic table and chairs in front of his army tent. The cooks have killed a couple of chickens and are preparing dinner under the stars.
By late morning the next day, Jack and his team have gathered 300 live rocket-propelled grenades in a big pit they’ve dug in the bush about 20 km from Lui. They’ve put plastic detonators in the pit and, sweating under their protective gear, are about to destroy the lot in a controlled explosion.
Their firing point is in a cave, 500 metres away, but we have to retire to a safer distance, 2 km along the road, where MAG sentries have been posted to keep passing pedestrians away. A group of three women, carrying firewood on their heads, saunter slowly part, whilst commands crackle over the radio between the sentry points. Then the all clear is given and Jack’s voice starts the count down: five, four, three, two, one… then the radio crackles and falls silent.
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| Unexploded ordnance is placed in a pit and destroyed in a controlled explosion |
We feel the blast before we hear it… an enormous explosion that ripples through the bush, shaking the very ground, and rumbling on interminably even at this distance. Birds squawk with fear, and the women carrying firewood stop dead in their tracks a few hundred metres down the road.
Back in Lui people run for cover, memories of the fierce battles that raged between government and rebel forces up and down this road still frighteningly fresh in their minds.
We return to look at the hole, now a massive crater surrounded by trees without leaves or branches. Jack Frost, living up to his unlikely name for a man in the searing heat of the tropics, still looks cool, but is now covered in dust and debris.
In a clearing nearby, more piles of unexploded ordinance are stacked up neatly, most with live detonators still in them, waiting to be destroyed. Tomorrow the team will fill the now massively enlarged pit again, and blow up more… and again the next day. All week, in fact, until the job is done.
As we head back to camp, Jack and the team are shown a suspected mine that’s just been found in the middle of the road, just outside Lui. It turns out to be an anti-tank mine that’s probably floated to the surface with the recent rains, and is on a fairly heavily used stretch of road that was only recently de-mined.
The MAG team cordons off the road once more as Jack tackles the mine alone. From our vantage point a safe distance away, he looks a very solitary figure as he digs around the mine and checks for booby traps, before pulling the detonator away.
"People have been lucky," says Jack as we rejoin him, sweat now running in rivulets through the dust on his face, belying the coolness of his demeanor. "If this had gone off, people travelling in a soft skin vehicle like our Land Cruiser could have been badly injured or killed."
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| The BBC's Mike Wooldridge interviews MAG Technical Field Manager Jack Frost |
The road to peace in southern Sudan is also littered with metaphorical mines and potholes.
Although much has been achieved in the two and a half years since the peace accord was signed, the fear now is that the crisis in neighbouring Darfur will divert much needed donor money and international political engagement from the south, with catastrophic consequences for its people and its neighbours.
Billions have been pledged, but so far little has percolated down to places like Lui, and little of the oil revenues promised in the 2005 agreement has been forthcoming. If people's expectations of peace are not met, southern Sudan could slide back into war.
"We wouldn’t want that to happen," says Lucy Iyaya Loki after a lifetime as a refugee, but she's resigned to the fact that more war is a possibility if peace doesn’t live up to people’s expectations.
"We were fighting because of the oppression we had and the denial of certain things we did not have... we fought for that. We wanted to enable people to live better lives. We should be able to deliver to them."
Ruth Evans is an independent producer who worked with BBC World Affairs Correspondent Mike Wooldridge on the Radio 4 programme 'Ground Zero: Rebuilding Southern Sudan'.
