Chapter 52: Three for Survival

AP News Report

JUBA, South Sudan -- At least 129 children were killed, with boys castrated and girls raped, during a government offensive against rebels last month in South Sudan, according to the U.N. children's agency.

South Sudanese military spokesman, Col. Philip Aguer, on Thursday questioned the credibility of the report, saying it is not in South Sudanese culture to commit such atrocities and has called for a full investigation.

UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a statement Wednesday that survivors reported that boys were castrated and left to bleed out, while girls were gang raped and killed.

Other children were thrown into burning buildings, he said, adding that the killings took place over three weeks in May, in Unity state.

"In the name of humanity and common decency this violence against the innocent must stop," Lake said.

Maalik choked down his terrified sobs, gasping to breathe in the choking smoke and the stench of burning flesh. He struggled to hold his hands pressed tightly against his ears, to drown out the screams of his mother burning in their hut. Someone was tugging fiercely on his arm, pulling him. He resisted, but the pain was too much. He turned his head, looking up into his friend Zareb's tear-streaked face.

"Crawl, Maalik, before they find us," Zareb hissed into his ear, barely daring to speak at all. "Stay low, but hurry!"

Maalik tried to rise to his feet but his injured leg buckled under him. Sadiya, an older village girl, angrily held him down, hissing into his frightened face.

"Stay down! Crawl! On your hands and knees, now!"

The three children scrambled frantically into the thorny brush that screened them. They crept under orange clouds of smoke that smothered their retreat. By some cruel providence, the wind covered them and blanketed them. The thick smoke choked them but it saved their lives, concealing them from the merciless militia attackers who swept into their village without warning in the pre-dawn darkness.

Thirteen-year-old Sadiya, a tall, skinny girl with fierce dark eyes led them, laying flat on the ground, her long legs and bony knees pumping frantically against the hard-packed dirt and litter, her fingers clawing and pulling herself through the gaps between the thorn bushes. Zareb stayed beside his injured friend, alternately pulling himself forward and then pulling Maalik, tugging him along. Zareb focused himself on Sadiya's sandaled feet as she struggled forward. It was pitifully slow progress through the low-hanging thorns, crawling over the sharp gravel and fallen thorns of the desert litter. The cruel ground cut their hands, scraped their elbows and knees; thorns tore bleeding scratches on their arms, their shoulders and their backs. Deadly bursts of automatic gunfire, the screams, the shouts and curses of their attackers in the pre-dawn darkness overcame their pain with fright.

Maalik sobbed in gasping, grunting breaths. He struggled to keep up. His left knee throbbed; his leg was useless. It hurt too much to pull it forward or to push with it. He dragged his useless leg while he tried harder to push with his good leg, terrified that he would fall behind. He struggled to surge ahead, then lay gasping while he pushed his right leg back to gain another foothold. He barely noticed that he was dragged forward each time that he paused in his one-legged crawl. Zareb, strong for his twelve years, stubbornly pulled Maalik along, his muscular legs moving both himself and his friend. He lay half sideways, lifting his right arm to grasp under Maalik's shoulder, pulling and sliding forward, his left shoulder scraped and bleeding.

One hundred, two hundred, five hundred meters they crawled through the scrub land bordering their village compound north of the huts and west of the fields. The thorny fringe ran against a low hill and up into a shallow gap leading to the waterless wastes where no one lived, few animals grazed, and no one would follow.

Sadiya looked back over her shoulder to see that Zareb and Maalik were still there, close behind her. She crawled forward into an opening behind a fractured section of stone that had split away from the ledge above them. She scrambled forward into the small sheltering area behind the stone. She watched while Zareb pulled himself and Maalik in behind her. The three of them collapsed, exhausted. Hunger, thirst, scrapes and wounds; all were forgotten in their exhaustion and sleep.

All day they lay in the dust and litter behind the stone. Some time in the afternoon they woke and waited, stiff, thirsty, bruised, and crusted in dried blood. Safiya pulled her torn shirt together to cover herself. Her khaki shorts, filthy with dirt and torn from crawling, barely hung together on her thin hips. Zareb's long trousers gaped open at the knees; his shirt hung in ragged tears from his thick shoulders, exposing his muscular arms, his bleeding shoulder, and his dirt-encrusted thorn scratches. Maalik lay still. He breathed raggedly and tried not to whimper in pain. His trousers were torn, exposing his swollen left knee. His thin t-shirt was filthy with dirt and soot. He had barely escaped out the back of his family's burning hut. He broken through the flaming back wall above the low mud-brick base. He'd fallen, hard, after he'd burst through the flames with his arms and hands shielding his face. He landed awkwardly and twisted his leg. He had run a few staggering steps until his leg collapsed. He'd plunged into the sheltering thorn brush where he'd been found by Zareb and Sadiya.

Sadiya was barely thirteen years old. She was tall for her age but thin, with oversized hands and feet; awkward in her adolescent growth. She was strong-willed, intelligent, and a leader among the other village girls.

Zareb, twelve and some months old, was strong. His shoulders were nearly as broad as he was tall. His father was a bull of a man, the strongest in their village. Zareb would grow to share his father's strength if he could survive the days and weeks to come. He was intelligent but reserved. He said little. He preferred to build and fix things.

Maalik was barely twelve. He was average in body; slender, with thin arms and legs. He was a brilliant student, curious, inquiring, hungry to know all that he could find in books or in the fields surrounding their village. He had never missed a day of school until their school teacher was killed and the building burned in a raid the year before. The map of their region that he held in his head would become their greatest asset.

Of the nearly three hundred people of their village, only these three remained alive!

They tried not to look at the bodies scattered between the charred circles where the huts had stood. They breathed shallowly, trying not to inhale the stench from charred corpses within the burned circles. Some were hacked with savage cuts, dismembered, mutilated. None of their cattle or goats remained. Unlike people, the animals had value. They'd been taken.

Sadiya peered into the village well, afraid of what she might see in the dark water. She saw nothing there, nothing breaking the reflected sky above. Another miracle was that the old, frayed rope still stretched down to the carved wooden bucket.

Maalik sat and leaned back against the low stone well enclosure. Zareb had pulled rags from a body and soaked them in cold well water. Sadiya wrapped them around Maalik's swollen knee.

She brought up another pail of water, and waited while Zareb searched around the village corrals for water skins and, perhaps, some surviving shoulder bags for carrying food and camp items. The older boys and men often took the village cattle to outlying grazing grounds where they would stay for several days. When they returned, they would leave the older skins and bags in a pile near the corral.

"We are lucky," he said, returning. He held out several.

"Then hold the skins open while I fill them," Sadiya said. "Did you find any grain, anything we could carry to eat?"

"A little, yes," he answered. "They must have been in a hurry to leave. They didn't burn the fields, and there are still things in the gardens."

"We will eat, then," she said. "We must find something to bind up Maalik's leg, and a crutch to hold his weight."

"I will look, after we fill these skins. You should find something more for us to wear, and a small pot for cooking," Zareb said, "We should also find more food and a fire starter."

"The sun is nearly down. We must go back to the hiding place behind the rock while we can still see," Maalik spoke painfully. "This time we won't have to crawl, but we mustn't be here when they come back to poison the well and burn the fields," he urged.

It was no idle speculation. They'd heard stories of how the government militias not only burned the villages but destroyed any hope of the village living again. Dead animals or people were thrown in the wells, to spoil them. Fields were burned and harsh winds would come to erode the soil and carry its fertility away.

They had made a tiny fire under their small cooking pot. They huddled together, hidden behind the large stone in the darkness. A handful of grain, a few bunches of greens and roots and some thin strips of lizard flesh made a boiled stew. They ate from cups found in the wreckage of their village. Zareb found two spears hidden in a cache near the corrals, and a new shoulder bag. It held fire starter, a sharp knife, and a bundle of strong twine.

Sadiya, her belly full, worked with the knife and some twine to better fit clothing for themselves from the less blood-soaked garments she'd stripped from the dead.

Maalik, his swollen knee tightly wrapped with splints and strips of rag, worked to fit a rectangular leather patch with lengths of cord to make a sling. He'd asked Zareb to gather a handful of round stones for him as they'd walked in the twilight back to their shelter. They'd been lucky. They'd flushed a lizard from hiding and Zareb killed it with a thrown stone.

Zareb was deadly with a long spear. Sadiya was tall and could learn. Maalik was good with a sling and could make and set snares. With luck, they would find and kill small things to eat while they traveled.

"We cannot stay here in the south. We cannot go anywhere south of here, either. It is all too dangerous for us now. There is no one we can trust. One bad person, one bad meeting, and we are dead or worse," Maalik advised. Zareb grunted and nodded; Sadiya stared over Maalik's head, her dark eyes remembering the horrors of the attack.

"Then where do we go?" she asked, her voice a bare murmur.

"The visitor who came last month..." Maalik explained, "I was not supposed to hear, but I made myself small and listened. He said there were camps and many people who fled from the killing. They were living in safety. He said there were blue helmet soldiers who protected the camps. The attackers fear the new Fox soldiers who capture and take them to prison camps, far away from the people."