OPINION:The world does not seem very interested in ongoing atrocities by the authorities in Sudan, writes NICHOLAS KRISTOF
AS SUDAN tries to bomb and starve the Nuba people into submission, it faces an unlikely antagonist: an American man from Florida who married a Nuban woman, gets by on local foods like locusts, and is fighting mortars with video cameras.
Ryan Boyette (30) is trying to get President Barack Obama to do more to intervene to stop the bombing and avert a famine. He is risking his life to collect video footage of atrocities the world frankly doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in.
It was Boyette who smuggled me into the Nuba Mountains, driving on a rutted dirt track from South Sudan, at one point just a couple of miles from Sudanese military lines. He has set up a network of local citizen journalists who use small cameras to document atrocities and starvation in hopes of making the world care enough to intervene.
President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has presided over the killing of perhaps 300 times as many people as President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Bashir hasn’t drawn as much scrutiny, in part because the killings are in remote areas with no cameras – but Boyette is trying to change this.
I met Boyette here in the Sudanese state of South Kordofan in 2008, and even then he was a remarkable figure who had ritual scarring on his back and lived in a grass-and-mud hut. He had moved to the Nuba Mountains in 2003 to work for Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian aid group, putting on hold his plans to follow his father into police work.
Boyette fell in love with the Nuba Mountains and its people. Then he fell in love with Jazira (26), a Nuban woman whose high school education in Kenya he had helped to finance. Some 6,000 Nubans attended their wedding a year ago.
Their world shattered last June when the Sudanese government mounted a vicious offensive to destroy an insurgency by going after the Nuba people who supported it. Aid groups evacuated, and Samaritan’s Purse ordered Boyette to board an aircraft to safety. Jazira, fearing his white skin would make him a target, pleaded with him to flee.
Instead, Boyette – after much prayer – resigned from his job and stayed behind. “To get on a plane and say goodbye to my friends and family, to say, ‘I hope you survive this’ – I couldn’t do that,” he explained.
The region has no electricity or mobile phone service, so Boyette charges his laptop and satellite phone with a solar charger. So far the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News and Al-Jazeera have used his videos or photographs, and he plans to post more on a website, EyesAndEarsNuba.org. To pay for operations, Boyette is hoping for foundation grants, or public donations on an account he will be setting up on Kickstarter.com.
One challenge he faces is his personal safety, for he believes Sudanese intelligence makes use of spies and is targeting him. He hears bombs falling almost daily and has had some close calls. The night before he met me, he said, a government spy was shot while snooping outside the building where he was sleeping.
Another challenge is that food is running out in the Nuba Mountains. The government has blocked food shipments into rebel areas, and I interviewed families who were already starving. “Within three months you’ll start seeing people dying of starvation en masse,” Boyette told me.
To its credit, the Obama administration is working diplomatic channels intensively to try to end the food blockade here. On a visit to Washington in October, Boyette spent an hour briefing White House officials on the situation. He’s sceptical, however, as am I, that the measures under consideration will be enough to avert starvation.
An immediate priority must be to call on Sudan to stop indiscriminate bombings and to allow food aid, while seeking peace between the government and rebels. The UN Security Council could seek a ban on offensive military flights in the area. If that doesn’t work, more robust approaches include air drops of food or forcing open a humanitarian corridor from South Sudan. Boyette also argues for the destruction of a few Antonov bombers or the military airstrips they take off from so the Nuba would again be able to plant crops and feed themselves.
Any humanitarian intervention, even food provision, could be seen as an act of war with uncertain consequences, and right now there’s no appetite in the US or abroad for such a use of force. There are reasonable arguments against it. But the alternative may be the starvation of tens of thousands of people.
If Boyette has anything to do with it, images of suffering will make it into US living rooms to soften hearts and build political will for action if famine arrives.
I'm hoping Boyette stays safe and deluges us with images to prod our consciences. – ( New York Timesservice)