Landmines and recovery in Sudan's Nuba mountains.

Introduction

Traditionally, many of the Nuba people of the Kordofan region of Sudan have located their homes and village communities on the face of rugged mountains, collectively known as the Nuba Mountains. Their choice of this architectural mode was an integral part of a complex adaptive response to hostile influences that threatened their homeland (for reference to the contemporary defensive value of hillside settlement, see Varhola 2007:48). Over the past two hundred years, the world of the Nuba, which once stretched over most of the arable clay plains of today's Kordofan region, was progressively circumscribed as a result of direct actions by an array of outsiders. Such actions ranged from open warfare--punitive campaigns by Mahdist armies in the 1880s; British colonial government pacification campaigns, which lasted for about thirty years following the defeat of Mahdist forces, in 1898; and from 1985 to 2002, Sudan government military and paramilitary campaigns--to gradual encroachment and settlement in traditional lands by groups that were not previously inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains, such as the Baggara tribes, which migrated to Nuba lands from northern Kordofan, elite Sudanese businessmen (collectively known as jellaba), who hailed from other parts of the country, and other ethnic groups, which migrated from the western stretches of the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa (Cunnison 1966; Manger 1994; Saeed 2001; Salih 1995).

Previous research examined every conceivable aspect of existence in the Nuba Mountains, including history, kinship, artistic traditions, linguistic heritage, patterns of culture, and social and economic organization (for instance, de Waal 1995; Faris 1972, 1989; MacMichael 1912; Manger 1994; Nadel 1947; Rahha12001; Riefenstahl 1974; Saeed 2001; Sargar 1922; Stevenson 1984; Varhola 2007). Its findings show that the Nuba have a long history and an ancient culture, and that they constituted what Nadel (1947) described as "a bewildering complexity" of more than fifty ancient ethnic groups, which inhabited the southern and western provinces of Kordofan region (Faris 1989; Stevenson 1984) and, despite tribal individuality (Faris 1989; Nadel 1947), have coalesced around a singular contemporary "Nuba" identity, derived from a shared homeland, strong similarities in social values, customs, physical attributes, social organizational patterns, and patterns of economic activity, and a long collective history of conflict with "outsiders" (Varhola 2007). An irony of this history is that, to stem indiscriminate deadly attacks by government troops and government-sponsored Baggara tribal militias, the Nuba started at some point in the second half of the 1980s to mine access routes to their mountain communities, as well as large tracts of their land (Landmine Monitor 2002).The ensuing and rather unintended self-imposed shrinking of the outer boundaries of many hill communities led to about seventeen years of practical isolation from traditional farmlands and other land-based survival resources: pastures, forests, and water points.

This article examines the impact of the introduction of landmines and the spread of unexploded ordnance in the Nuba Mountains after 1985. The deployment of landmines in Nuba lands has brought largely unrecognized complications to the patterns of Nuba access to water and land-based resources and has created unanticipated socioeconomic, psychological, public-health, and ecological problems, all of which deserve careful study. For instance, the spread of landmines and other explosive ordnance and the continued threat of injury or death due to explosions have restricted access to farmlands and water points and have caused considerable land avoidance and higher concentrations of people and livestock in inaccessible areas. These conditions have produced general economic hardship, frequent collapse of local markets, food insecurity, and outbreaks of deadly animal and human diseases, yet the pathways through which landmines and explosive war devices have impacted the livelihoods of Nuba populations have not been fully examined. Also, hardly any research accounts for the disruptions caused by the presence of explosive ordnance to traditional land use patterns among the Nuba and to the broader socioeconomic and sociopolitical relations the Nuba had with "outsiders." Research that demonstrates the potential causal impact of demining and explosive ordnance disposal on the success of postwar recovery and reconstruction is nonexistent. The apparent lack of such research has motivated this study.

Progressive Land Strangulation by Outsiders: 1800-2002

Baggara nomadic Arabs advanced into Nuba lands around the year 1800 in search of water and pasture for their livestock (Cunnison 1966; Henderson 1939). Ensuing bloody confrontations, exacerbated by trade in slaves that was driven by the new Egyptian-Turkish authorities following the conquest of Sudan in 1821 (Stevenson 1984), gradually forced the Nuba to move southward and up into the hills that are now known as the Nuba Mountains. Eventually, hostilities subsided, and barter-trade relations temporarily united the Baggara and Nuba communities in strong, reciprocal, but somewhat unequal, social, economic, and mutual defense relationships (Sargar 1922); but though the Baggara progressively intermarried and interacted with the Nuba, they maintained an Arab identity and strong notions of identity separatism from the Nuba (see Cunnison 1966:80-85). This separatism often adversely impacted Baggara-Nuba spatial and sociopolitical relationships.

In the 1880s, uncertainty about Nuba political allegiances and religious affiliation (Saeed 2001) drove the Mahdi's successor, Khalifa Abullahi, to send a sizeable military force, constituted mainly of Baggara tribesmen under the command of Hamdan AbuAnja and Al-Nur Mohammed Angara, to subdue the Nuba. As a direct consequence, approximately ten thousand Nuba were killed, and approximately ten thousand were enslaved by the Khalifa's army--enough reason for many Nuba to stay for a while close to protective zones in inaccessible mountains and away from fertile valleys and lowlands (Stevenson 1984).