Energy Wars and Lost Boys in Sudan

Tomgram: David Morse on Energy Wars and Lost Boys in Sudan

By Tom Engelhardt

Created Oct 15 2007 - 9:14am

- from TomDispatch [1]

If Somalia, occupied by U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops and in the midst of a

chaotic, growing insurgency that has hardly been noted here, could well be

our new Afghanistan, then what might Sudan be? Perhaps the starting point

for the next disastrous oil war on this planet? Right now, in the American

mind, Sudan is essentially Darfur, where a genocidal ethnic-cum-energy war

run out of Islamist Khartoum is already underway -- a subject which

independent journalist David Morse took up at this site in 2005 [2] and 2006

[3].

Now, thanks to the support of the Nation Institute [4] (which also supports

Tomdispatch.com) and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Morse takes us

along on a two-part journey he made with three young refugees, three "Lost

Boys," returning to the homes they fled years ago in the midst of a bitter

civil war in southern Sudan. Though this region is largely ignored in the

U.S. at the moment, that is unlikely to last for reasons Morse describes in

his dramatic first-person account of traveling through the southern part of

a Sudan poised at the edge of the abyss.

-- Tom

With the Lost Boys in Southern Sudan: "Starting from Zero" (Part 1)

By David Morse

To the extent that the media spotlight is ever directed at Africa, it has

focused on Darfur, in western Sudan, where several hundred thousand people

have died in ethnic violence since 2003. Just next door, beyond the glare of

the spotlight, however, is South Sudan, where an estimated 2.2 million

people were killed in two decades of bitter internecine fighting. There, a

fragile, three-year-old peace agreement is rapidly coming apart. A new

conflagration in South Sudan would engulf Darfur, dwarf the carnage that has

taken place so far in the region, and launch sub-Saharan Africa into the age

of energy wars.

Both the danger -- and its ethnic character -- were brought home to me very

personally in a single moment on a recent trip to South Sudan as I tried to

tell myself that the two-year-old Dinka boy pointing a pistol at my chest

meant no harm. But the pearl-handled automatic looked real enough.

"Khawaja," he said. (Dinka for "white person.")

I was relieved when the man who was perhaps the toddler's father, a

big-bellied lieutenant colonel in the Sudan People's Liberation Army,

grinned and held the bullet clip aloft to show he'd removed it from the gun.

He was visibly a little drunk.

"He's very intelligent boy," he said proudly, "You see, he points the gun at

you because he thinks you are Arab."

We were sitting on makeshift stools in a dark, narrow, crowded bar in

Kuajok, a state capital in South Sudan -- the only bar in town. Kuajok is

under construction. Three years ago it was just a village. Since it was

designated the capital of the newly formed state of Warrap, one of the ten

states that make up South Sudan, its population has mushroomed. The few

masonry buildings that survived two decades of civil war in Kuajok are

undersized and shabby. Everything else has been cobbled together from poles

and mats of woven rushes. The bar, where I was trying to find something to

eat, is attached to a guest lodge -- a compound containing half a dozen

thatched huts with padlocks and no latrines, just shallow holes dug in the

ground. A sign, lettered on a cotton sheet announcing the Warrap State

Safari Guest House, is ripped right down the middle and readable only when

the breeze is blowing just so.

Kuajok is a boomtown. All that's missing is the money.

One of the few visible public works in progress is the main road through

town, now being rebuilt. Dump trucks rumble back and forth carrying the red,

gritty, compactable soil used here for building the all-weather roads so

desperately needed throughout southern Sudan, where the rainy season brings

ground transport to a near standstill. A school for girls also nears

completion, privately funded through UNICEF; but there is no hospital at

all, just a pathetically under-equipped clinic. In separate interviews, the

state ministers of education and health used the same phrase: "We are

starting from zero." Warrap -- the most populous of South Sudan's states, as

well as the newest -- has a hard time just meeting its modest payroll.

The same is true, I discovered, throughout South Sudan. Everywhere, a

shortage of cash, everywhere a backlog of unmet human needs. The rainy

season means sorghum can be planted; it brings subsistence farmers to their

knees, slashing the earth with straight-bladed hoes. But because of poor

sanitation and lack of clean water, the rain also brings cholera,

guinea-worm, and dysentery. It means children will die.

Six hundred miles to the north, Khartoum's Arab elite are awash in oil

money. From near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s, Sudan has tripled its gross

national product in the past seven years. Consumers buy giant flat-screen

plasma TVs, expensive new cars. The capital city, Khartoum, has new roads,

an elevated expressway, weapons factories constructed by the Chinese, and

Malaysian-built refineries that pipe oil to tanker terminals on the Red Sea.

Sudan's proven oil reserves are estimated at a fairly hefty 5-6.5 million

barrels, giving it the fifth largest reserves in Africa.

But South Sudan, where most of that oil actually comes from, remains one of

the poorest regions on the planet. Historically marginalized by Khartoum --

first under the Ottoman Turks, then under the British, and now under Arab

Islamists who control the central government -- the South, black African and

religiously diverse, has zero manufacturing capacity. Everything from

building supplies to salt has to be trucked in from neighboring Uganda or

Kenya.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (commonly referred to as the CPA), signed

in January of 2005, was supposed to address these inequities. Brokered by

the U.S. and Kenya in painstaking, seemingly endless negotiations, the CPA

was an acknowledgment by the warring parties -- the National Islamic Front,

representing the government in Khartoum, and the Sudan Peoples Liberation

Movement (SPLM), representing the rebels in the South -- that neither side

could win the bloody civil war that had staggered on for 21 years. The

agreement was not truly comprehensive: It did not include the three western

Sudanese states known as Darfur, which were just then erupting into

violence; nor did it address the needs of other marginalized regions and

constituencies suffering under Khartoum's yoke. Nevertheless, the agreement

was hailed as a triumph by the Bush administration and by an international

community eager to see the conflict resolved.

Whatever its limitations, the CPA did, at least, address the only partly

ideological root causes of the conflict in the South. Khartoum had, indeed,

wanted to impose fundamentalist Islamic law on all of Sudan; but, from the

beginning, the conflict was largely over wealth-sharing. Increasingly this

civil war also became a "resource war."

Under the CPA, South Sudan was to have the status of a semi-autonomous

state, with control over its internal affairs. Revenues from the southern

oilfields were to be divided 50-50 between Khartoum and the newly formed

Government of South Sudan. The CPA also provided for a plebiscite, scheduled

for 2011, in which the South could vote to secede. This future vote was

meant to placate southerners who feared Khartoum would not keep its word.

So now, three years into the CPA, southerners are asking with increasing

agitation: Where is the promised oil money?

The sight of that toddler pointing a pistol at me was unsettling, but not

nearly as disturbing as the explanation the Colonel offered: because he

thinks you are an Arab. A gregarious bully who seemed to be part of the

security detail assigned to the group I was with, the colonel, perhaps

reading my expression, retrieved his pistol and tucked it into the fanny

pack under his belly. But if the pistol was out of sight, the words hung

there, a reminder of the larger danger that lay just beyond the bar's

jury-rigged walls. Subsequent events have confirmed my assessment -- that

this sprawling, dysfunctional country is again slipping into the racial

polarization of "Arab" versus "Black" that has prevented it from becoming a

coherent nation. Sudan is again poised at a precipice.

The enmity between slave-taking Arabs and black Africans goes back

centuries, long predating Sudan's existence as a nation. "The Sudan," as

many people still call it, is in fact a comparatively recent amalgamation:

North and South were thrown together for the convenience of a hastily

departing British colonial government in 1956. The British left the Arabs

"in charge," much as the Belgians did with the Hutu in Rwanda. Even so, the

ethnic tensions might now be transcended, were it not for the way Khartoum

manipulates them to its own immediate advantage, here as in Darfur. Now, the

whole country -- including the three western states that comprise Darfur,

where two million displaced people already live at the edge of disaster,

dependent on outside aid -- appears ready to plunge into a bloody ethnic

war.

Following the "Lost Boys"

I was in southern Sudan as a journalist, along with filmmaker Jen Marlowe,

sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting [5] and the Nation

Institute's Investigative Fund [6]. Marlowe had traveled to Darfur in 2004,

helping to make the documentary film Darfur Diaries [7]; I had been to South

Sudan previously, thanks to my interest in events in Darfur. We both wanted

to better understand the relationship between Darfur and the South, and to

see whether the CPA was working -- and if not, why not?

We were accompanying three Dinka men in their mid- to late twenties --

Samuel Garang Mayuol, Chris Koor Garang, and Gabriel Bol Deng -- who were

visiting their villages of origin for the first time in 20 years. Their

odysseys had begun in the mid-1980s when their villages were attacked by

militiamen on horseback. These Arab militias, known variously as murahaleen

or mujahideen, had been acting as proxies for the Khartoum government, which

was intent on depriving the southern rebel movement of its support among its

own people, while clearing the energy-rich region for oil exploration.

Young boys at the time, the three had fled for their lives along with

thousands of others, trekking for months, across rivers and desert, to

Ethiopia. There they stayed for several years until the Ethiopian government

fell to rebels allied with Khartoum who bombed the UN-supported refugee camp

and drove them out again. This time, they fled south into Kenya, where they

spent nine years in Kakuma refugee camp (whose population swelled, at one

point, to 85,000).

Finally, in 2001, under the sponsorship of American church groups, these

three -- all Catholic -- were among 3,800 young southern Sudanese refugees

resettled in the United States, where they became known as the "Lost Boys,"

[8] a whimsical reference to Peter Pan. There are a few "Lost Girls" as

well, but boys were especially targeted by the murahaleen out of fear they

would join the rebels, and so made up the bulk of the exodus.

Our three Lost Boys, who had shared a hut at the camp in Kakuma, were

settled in different American cities. They got jobs. One worked in a

hospital; another in a factory handling freight; the third tutored fellow

refugees. They worked hard, adjusted to their strange, new surroundings.

Saved money. Remitted some to relatives and friends in Kakuma. Started

college. Became U.S. citizens.

Two of the "Boys" had no idea whether their parents were alive or dead.

Gabriel Bol Deng, the oldest, thinks he was nine or ten when his village was

attacked. While tending his father's cattle several miles away, he heard

shots and saw militiamen on horseback in the midst of his herd, firing guns

and swinging their swords, driving the cattle north. He hid in the tall

grass and, when they were out of sight, ran toward his village to warn the

others, but black smoke was already rising from the round thatched huts

known as tukuls.

Two fleeing villagers prevented him from going any closer, but one was

quickly shot dead. Once again, Deng escaped into the grass. He later

returned to the burning village and found bodies, but no sign of his family;

then he ran until darkness fell, when he had to climb a tree to avoid being

eaten by lions or hyenas. So began a trek to Ethiopia that lasted months,

part of an exodus -- led by a few adults -- of thousands of boys of all ages

clumped into groups, dressed in rags or naked, bombed and strafed by

Sudanese government planes, feet bloody. Some drowned in rivers; others were

eaten by crocodiles and lions. Dying of thirst, they drank any water they

could find; some drank urine. Starving, they chewed on inedible plants or

ate dirt.

Now, as summer approached in 2007, Deng and the others -- who had not seen

each other, only e-mailed and talked on the phone, since 2001 -- were

returning to visit their villages. They weren't sure what they would find,

though they desperately hoped to find their families alive. They wanted to

know what peace had brought, and what lay in store for their people. These

young men -- Dinka, but also Americans, schooled now in the world of paved

streets and vacuum cleaners, iPods and laptops -- were about to take another

dizzying odyssey, this one into the past and, possibly, the future.

Of the three returnees, Deng seemed the most fully formed and took the

greatest pains to make himself accessible. He struck me as idealistic but

also open-eyed. During the seven weeks we traveled together, I came to value

his insights. Deng is a natural leader: he expresses himself forcefully, yet

knows how to listen. Stocky, with blunt features, he maintains a stolid

expression, occasionally transformed by the flash of an irrepressible smile.

He networks relentlessly and would probably make a good, conventional

politician, but for now he is single-mindedly in pursuit of a dream that

springs from his experience as a refugee. He wants to establish a primary

school in his childhood village, Ariang.

Deng was about thirteen when he attended school for the first time in that

refugee camp in Ethiopia. There, he realized the power of education. He had

just graduated from first grade in 1991, when the camp was attacked. After

another harrowing trek, in which many of his young companions were shot or

drowned, he eventually ended up in Kenya at Kakuma camp. He was about

fifteen when he finished second grade there. The instruction was better at

Kakuma. The UN provided trained teachers for the upper grades. Determined to

advance as quickly as possible, Deng sold okra that he grew in a garden

behind his tukul to pay for private classes during school-term vacations.

Rations were spare, so sometimes he went hungry in order to learn, but he

managed to skip from third to fifth grade.

"We had no paper to write on," he recalled. "No books. I learned to listen

very carefully to the teachers. I separated cardboard from boxes into layers

so I would have paper for taking notes."

On May 20, 2007, two days before we took off from New York's Kennedy

International Airport for Africa, Deng graduated from Le Moyne College, a

Jesuit school in Syracuse, with a B.A. in math education. He is now pursuing

a master's degree.

Homecoming in the Shadow of Darfur

The bond between the three men was palpable the moment they embraced at the

airport and lapsed into Dinka. Although they had assimilated in different

ways into American society, they shared some striking similarities. All

three brought several changes of fashionable clothes that they would keep

scrupulously clean, while Marlowe and I got by with backpacks and grubby

T-shirts. When we missed a meal -- which often happened -- I would complain

that I was "starving," whereas they, who had actually experienced

starvation, endured without comment or complaint; yet they rejected food

that affronted their pride -- if, for instance, they did not feel adequately

welcomed in a place.

As a group, whatever their individual differences, all three were strikingly

compassionate. Each wanted to give something back to their people. The

chartered single-engine Cessna that took us a thousand miles northwest from

Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, deep into South Sudan carried a cargo of

medical supplies and 300 insecticide-treated mosquito nets -- most of it

purchased by Chris Koor Garang, the youngest of the three, who lives in

Tucson, Arizona, and was recently certified as a nurse. Garang had raised

money on behalf of a U.S. faith-based nonprofit called Jumpstart Sudan [9],

which had built a new clinic in the town of Akon. (Jumpstart was founded by

another "Lost Boy," Akot Lual Arec [10].) During the three weeks that we

planned to use Akon as a base for overland travel, Garang would volunteer

his nursing skills.

The third man, Samuel Garang Mayuol, lives in Wheaton, Illinois just outside

Chicago. Taller than the others and soft-spoken, he seemed the least

focused; yet he commanded respect. When he talked, others listened. Mayuol

had already completed an Associates Degree in business and was launched on a

degree in marketing and business accounting. Of the three, he alone knew

that one of his parents -- his mother -- was still alive. This he had

learned from cousins in 1998, while still at Kakuma, and years later he

managed to talk with her on the phone. Mayuol wanted to do something for his

village, but wasn't sure what -- apart from helping with the purchase of the

mosquito nets. By the journey's end, however, his mission was clear.

After a six-hour flight from Nairobi, with a stop for refueling, our plane

touched down on the red clay landing strip at Akon, a county seat about 300

miles northwest of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, and about 45 miles

south of the Darfur border. A few miles east of that border -- at the border

between Warrap state and Southern Kordofan -- is the oil-rich region of

Abyei, claimed by both North and South. Abyei could easily become the

flashpoint for Sudan's next war.

Akon's proximity to Darfur is worth highlighting. Darfur, portrayed as if in

a vacuum by much of the American media, shares several hundred crucial miles

of border with South Sudan -- one reason their destinies are inextricably

linked. Scholars like to argue about the ethnic, religious, environmental,

and historical distinctions that set Darfur apart; but, to put it simply,

Darfur is just the most recent manifestation of a larger schism that has

pitted the ruling Islamo-Arabist elite in Khartoum against the black

periphery. At bottom, it is all the same war. For this reason, it is hard to

imagine a separate, viable, lasting peace in either Darfur or the South

while the other remains at war.

Within minutes of our arrival, we were welcomed with exuberant singing by a

delegation that included tribal elders and the county commissioner -- a

graceful Dinka woman, standing easily six-and-a-half feet tall in a colorful

flowing garment and speaking eloquent English. She would make available a

new Toyota Land Cruiser for our travels to nearby villages -- as authorized

by the wife of Salva Kiir Mayardit, the president of South Sudan.

Surreally, the World Health Organization compound, where Marlowe and I

stayed, has Internet access and cold, filtered water. But outside the W.H.O.

stockade is a world -- apart from the occasional bicycle or motor vehicle --

that conjures a distant past, where life is very close to the bone: a

terrain alternately dusty and muddy, with

scrawny children and wandering goats; a tented marketplace whose vendors

sell sorghum, groundnuts, sugar, charcoal, and conical blocks of snuff, but

little in the way of fresh fruit or vegetables, which generally have to be

imported from Uganda. Wells with hand-pumps discharge water of

uncertain quality.

Akon's brick secondary school, which serves the surrounding villages, is

dark and decrepit; the children ragged; the younger ones crowded together on

the cement floor. Only the upper grades have desks. Girls rarely make it

that far, most having dropped out to work in the fields or care for younger

siblings. The teachers we interviewed had not been paid for months. Soldiers

had gone eight months without pay. These were the first hints we had of the

financial crisis that had overtaken the new government in Juba. Little was

being reported.

"Nothing We Can Do Is Enough"

We stayed in a group, visiting each man's home village in turn. At each, our

Land Cruiser was swarmed by children who wanted to touch it, peek inside,

and gaze into the rear-view mirrors. The shrill ululations of women would

split the air and the young men would be embraced by aunts, uncles, and

others from their long-lost lives.

Colorful robes would be thrown over each of us. Spearmen dressed in crimson

or white tunics would hold down a young bull for us to step over and then

slaughter it. They poured water from a gourd onto the feet of the returning

men to purify them and to bind them again to the village, then spat on their

foreheads in blessing.

Apricot-colored dust rose from the feet of dancers. Drums throbbed. Bottles

of soda and traditional chairs made of hewn wood and strips of cowhide, or

ubiquitous molded plastic lawn chairs from Uganda would be brought out for

us. The three men received a steady stream of well-wishers and, in the midst

of this joyous celebration, they learned who had died. Dinka are famously

proud and stoical, not inclined to show pain. But these homecomings were

overwhelming; each man, at some point, shed tears.

Deng got an enormous reception at Ariang. He has, he figures, close to 600

relatives, since his father had five wives and his uncles on both sides

several wives apiece. The Land Cruiser stopped a couple of miles away as

excited well-wishers began running across fields, flocking past us. Deng got

out and walked, carrying a toddler at one point, looking the part of a hero.

After the rites with the bull had been performed, he was taken aside by his

uncle, led into his mother's family tukul, and there gently told that both

his parents had died. Deng bowed his head. It was the news he had, for

years, prepared himself to hear. His parents were not young. Still, he told

me afterward, the knowledge had filled his heart with grief. "It was the

hardest news I ever heard."

At the celebration, Deng searched the crowd for his childhood friends -- the

age-mates who are so important in Dinka culture. Later, when he did the

math, he was stunned to realize that only perhaps a third of them had

survived. The civil war had cut deep into Ariang -- and now, ironically

enough, peace, too, was taking a toll. As he visited the various tukuls the

following day and spoke with families in private, he began to grasp their

desperation. W.H.O's measles immunization program had not yet reached

Ariang, owing in part to the poor roads. Earlier that very spring, 35

children had died of the disease in this village alone. Some showed signs of

malnutrition. "People tell me that with the peace signed they are no longer

running," Deng said, shaking his head, "but nothing else has changed."

In the face of such poverty, such hardship and suffering, he suddenly felt

overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. The other men voiced similar

feelings. Garang, the nurse, realized his cargo of medical supplies -- which

had taken him so much time and effort to assemble and deliver -- was a

pittance. The need was too great. He treated a snakebite victim, a

four-year-old girl with an abscess in her foot that reached to the bone and

smelled of gangrene. She would probably die, he told me, despite his best

efforts, because there was no hospital to perform an amputation. More than

once Garang said, in anguish: "Nothing I can do is enough."

Shortly after our arrival, he received good news: his mother and father were

alive -- and in Kuajok. He sent a cousin by motorcycle with word that we'd

be coming, and we shortened our stay in Akon in order to have a few extra

days in Kuajok, only 60 miles away as the crow flies but half a day on a

road -- more nearly a track -- that would become increasingly impassible in

the rainy season, which was beginning in earnest.

The tenuousness of life in the South made Garang's reunion with his parents

the more astonishing. He had only been about seven when he fled. That he had

walked 1,000 kilometers, survived parasites that threatened to kill him,

made it to Kenya, and ended up a man with the means to return, bearing

gifts; that his parents, who had fought together in the rebel army, had

somehow endured two decades of bombs, land-mines, and famine, to be on hand

to greet him -- all of it seemed little short of a miracle.

We arrived in Kuajok at dusk, eighteen passengers crowded into a Toyota

pickup with all our gear. (We never traveled anywhere without promptly

doubling our number in cousins and hangers-on.) When we pulled into the

Garang family compound, where family members had been waiting for hours,

pandemonium broke loose.

Garang's parents were still officers in the Sudan People's Liberation Army,

and much of the extended family was decked out in the ill-fitting

butterscotch uniforms of the SPLA as well. Ecstatic embraces were followed

by extravagant heel-clicking salutes by cousins.

Later, we made the trip south to Wau, the capital of Western Bahr-el-Ghazal

state, between rains, squeezing into a 4x4 Toyota van -- nineteen of us now,

including Garang's parents (his mother toting an AK-47 as part of our

security detail), and three young children. Those 70 miles were on a road

that seemed to consist of little but an endless braiding of water-filled

ruts. Whenever it became a lagoon, the driver was forced to abandon it

entirely. Once, he zigzagged so far afield, skirting around household plots

of sorghum, that he had to ask directions. Incredibly, this is the main road

to Uganda.

Three times the size of Juba, the southern capital, Wau is a full-fledged

city, with a population of more than three million. It is connected by rail

to Khartoum to the northeast and Nyala in Darfur to the northwest. Wau

boasts numerous single-story masonry buildings, including indoor markets, a

university, a hospital, 11 mosques, and a large Catholic mission complex

whose brick walls hearken back to British colonial days.

Outwardly, the city looks intact, but the appearance is deceptive. Posters

warn pedestrians of the danger of unexploded mines, left over from the civil

war. The university of Bahr-el-Ghazal is barely functioning, crippled by a

student strike over lack of teachers, classes, and textbooks. Although the

single hospital is the largest in the region, its monthly payroll has shrunk

by nearly half in the last year. Hospital administrator Ater Chawul Malisal

opened a cupboard to show us the meager available supply of Chinese-made

medicines. "It is not nearly enough. Since the CPA was signed, there is

peace, but no drugs." Neither he, nor the medical director, Dr. James

Patrice Ibrahim, had been paid in three months.

Ibrahim, who wore a striking chartreuse dashiki, was even more outspoken.

Shortfalls in salaries, medicines, and personnel had all worsened, he told

us, since the CPA. He blamed poor planning in Juba. "I have no budget. I

have to ask for everything. Even diesel fuel. The [state] minister of health

is in Juba now three weeks, looking for an ambulance, looking for salaries."

We encountered similar frustration everywhere we went. Part of the price of

South Sudan's new semi-autonomy is that the ten southern state governments,

which are supposed to deliver basic services, and which previously had been

funded at least meagerly by Khartoum, now depend wholly on the government of

the south. And clearly, very little money was coming out of Juba.

Something was seriously wrong. Oil had triggered the longest civil war in

Africa's history. Today, oil exports are the driving force in Sudan's

economy. Oil was supposed to fuel the peace. Why isn't that money reaching

the South?

We were well positioned to hear the opinions and complaints of ordinary

southerners. Western journalists, when they arrive at all, usually zip in

and out of the South in a day or two with an interpreter, or they interview

only those who speak English. Our advantage was that the three Lost Boys

were chatting informally in Dinka everywhere we went for seven weeks. They

caught the drift of public opinion in all its nuances in ways no western

journalist could possibly do. What they encountered above all was cynicism.

To our surprise, in the areas of the South we visited, blame was as likely

to be directed at Juba as at Khartoum. The Sudanese People's Liberation

Movement was criticized for not getting out into the countryside, for not

improving living conditions. SPLM officials were accused of feathering their

own nests, as well as engaging in nepotism and outright corruption.

We found some truth to this, but we expected to discover other answers in

Juba -- our next stop. Answers are important. Huge and strategically

located, Sudan is nearly a million square miles in area, straddling the Nile

and bordering on ten countries. At the moment, southern Sudan is bearing the

brunt of the industrial world's quest for resources. Sudan's stability, or

lack of it, may well hold the key to the future of Africa.

In Juba, we got some surprises.

David Morse is an independent journalist and human rights activist whose

articles and essays have appeared in Dissent, Esquire, Friends Journal, the

Nation, the New York Times Magazine, Salon, and elsewhere. His novel, The

Iron Bridge [11] (Harcourt Brace, 1998), predicted a series of petroleum

wars in the first two decades of the 21st century. He traveled to South

Sudan most recently with support from the Nation Institute's Investigative

Fund [12] and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting [13] and wrote this

article during a residency at Blue Mountain Center [14]. Morse may be

reached at his website: dmorse@david-morse.com [15].

[Note: Part 2 of "With the Lost Boys in Southern Sudan" will appear at this

site Tuesday morning.]

Copyright 2007 David Morse

_______

About author Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com

[16] ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of

the American Empire Project [17] and, most recently, the author of Mission

Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and

Dissenters [18] (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch

interviews.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson