The forgotten war

“This is a large battle. It’s not little skirmishes between militias. There’s tanks involved. There’s been aerial bombardment by MiG and Sukhoi fighter jets.”

That’s how Ryan Boyette described life in the Nuba Mountains, an area in Sudan that sits north of the South Sudan border. It’s been at war since June 2011.

“There’s been over 400,000 people displaced by the conflict. Certain towns are destroyed and burned down the villages and people have fled into the mountains, living in caves,” Ryan Boyette said.

“Most of the Nuba people are farmers. They’re still trying to farm despite the war but they now have to farm in the mountainous areas which doesn’t have fertile ground, so they don’t have enough food most of the time. Water is very far and very hard to get and sometimes, in many cases, it’s very dangerous.”

Sudan endured two civil wars, with the most recent lasting more than 20 years. The Nuba Mountains was a frontline until a fragile peace agreement was signed in 2005. That was followed by South Sudan separating from Sudan to form the world’s youngest nation.

The local people in the Nuba Mountains felt they didn’t benefit from the agreement and a series of decisions made by the Sudanese government upset the population, so conflict followed.

Little aid gets through to people in the Nuba Mountains. There are accusations the Sudanese government stops humanitarian organisations from entering the area, so people largely fend for themselves.

For Ryan Boyette this means meeting the crisis head on. In his travels to South Sudan for supplies, he saw a couple carrying a young child. They frantically waved him down, so he stopped his car.

“I told him before he said anything, “I’m going north. I can’t drive you. You’re going south.” He looked at me with disappointment and I realised something was very wrong and I asked him, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “My child has died on the way,” Boyette explained.

“They were carrying their child for three days walking to make it to the refugee camp and on the last day the child had died of malnourishment and the father was carrying the child. And I said, “Okay, please get in the car. I can bring you to Ida, so you can bury your child.”

“And when they got in the car the mother was so strong up until the point she got into the car. She got in the car. You could tell that it was the first time she had sat down and rested for three days and she just started crying in my car.”

These are the stories that rarely get out of the Nuba Mountains. Journalists are restricted, so entry is dangerous and expensive, which is why Ryan Boyette decided to start a news organisation called Nuba Reports.

“We have people from the region reporting from the region. They’ve now received many trainings and we focus on video and photo journalism,” he said.

“Our reporters are doing character based stories, they’re doing frontline news stories about what is taking place here, so we can get that out into international media.”

The team at Nuba Reports are determined to document a war that is largely out of sight.

“If we were not here, no one would know their story, no one would know those issues, no one would hear their voice, and these are the people that are being affected every day by what the Sudan government is doing,” Boyette said.

“These are the people who are being bombed every single day, these are the people whose villages are being burned down, and this is why we are here to tell their stories.”