Escaping the War in Sudan

Photograph by Sebastião Salgado

There’s a sense of freedom you get when you climb a tree. Every branch lifts you higher and higher off the ground and pulls you up towards the sky. Once you’re up there, you can see everything below in a sort of separate and detached perspective. For a brief amount of time, you can escape the life you know. No doubt the boys in this picture are experiencing this sensation as they make their own climb -- but as free as they might feel, they have to climb down eventually. And once they do, they’ll find themselves just about as rooted to their troubles as the tree is rooted to the ground.

These boys were caught up in the mess of Sudan’s second civil war that began in 1983. While under colonial rule of Britain, Sudan was treated as two separate provinces with the north dominated by Arabic-speaking Muslims and the south by English-speaking Catholics. Differences such as these helped divide the nation, but Britain eventually gave in to the north’s pressures to integrate the two areas. This caused much turmoil for the south. As more and more conflict rose, the war became more and more of a reality.

To escape the pain of war, refugees began to give up the comfort of their homes to put these troubles behind them. To avoid forced recruit into the Sudanese Army, the boys in this picture entered the camp of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Front (S.P.L.F.). Though they thought they were finding refuge from the war, the S.P.L.F. rebel leaders in charge of the camp instead trained them to fight against those government forces. They never really had the chance for freedom.

In the end, a peace treaty was signed in 2005 and Southern Sudan won its independence. “Roughly 1.9 million civilians were killed in southern Sudan, and more than 4 million southerners have been forced to flee their homes at one time or another since the war began” (Wikipedia). If only those boys could have stayed up in their tree.

Works Cited

Salgado, Sebastião. Photograph. Migrations: Humanity in Transition. Aperture. New York, 2000. 163.

“Second Sudanese Civil War”. Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 2010. Web. 11 March. 2010.