BY BASBIBI KAKAR
When Ramzia, a pseudonym to protect her identity, sees people migrating from one country to another, she doesn’t blame them. “You can’t be in a place where your life is not guaranteed,” she says. “You have to migrate and start a new life because you need to live.”
Ramzia misses Khartoum, Sudan, the land she was chased away from by the government in 2011. She ended up in South Sudan but didn’t feel connected — “ I wasn’t born and raised there,” she said. Before the civil war, she said, “We were like brothers and sisters in Sudan even though I was a member of one of the minority tribes before the two majority tribes started to fight,” she said. The conflict took her family by surprise. In a few months, the political tensions escalated into war. Members of the two ethnic groups Dinka and Nuer, started killing each other, like something dark and evil had come to her land to wipe people out, Ramzia said. She had never before discussed her memories of that time, she said, because they were so painful.
Ramzia was not my original choice to interview. I initially set up a meeting with a friend who lives in International House because I knew she was from Syria and could share about the crisis going on there. However, she missed both meetings we scheduled. I wondered who else had such a story and thought of Ramzia. I remember Ramzia saying that South Sudan went through a big civil war in 2013 so I knocked on her door to see if I could interview her. And that was it. Here I was in International House living on the same floor with a person who had similar experiences as me and had unbelievable stories to tell — stories I had never heard until I asked.
Ramzia, who is 29 years old, was born and raised in Sudan before it split into two countries — Sudan and South Sudan. She is tall, lively and immediately makes people comfortable talking to her. On the rare occasions when she talks about the tough experiences in her past, she develops a distant faraway look, and one can see the pain in her eyes.
“I had a classmate whose family was killed by the soldiers. He said they first shot his family in front of him and then ordered him to drink his father’s blood,” she said. “He later lost his mind because he couldn’t bear the cruelty of remembering.”
The 2013 war didn’t come out of nowhere. There were conflicts from the 1960s between several ethnic tribes, primarily the Dinka and the Nuer; the first civil war, the second civil war in the 1980s, and small unrests over who could control the south, oil rich Sudan. Several other minor conflicts occurred before South Sudan obtained its independence on July 9, 2011.
“In 2009,” Ramzia recalls, “I was in Khartoum, Sudan, attending the university after completing my first year. War had already stopped but people were in preparation for the referendum. Because of that, my family and I came to Juba-South Sudan to vote for our self-determination Referendum in 2010.” During the process of the referendum, the University of Juba was not functioning because it was distracted. It took almost two years to transfer to the University of Juba from Sudan to South Sudan. She said “I was home from 2010 to 2011 when all the students were, in effect, homeless. I experienced an identity crisis. I went back to University in 2012 after South Sudan gained its independence.”
Another civil war broke out in 2013 and once more conflict erupted between the two larger ethnicities, the Dinka in South Sudan who had more soldiers, and the Nuer in South Sudan with fewer soldiers. She spent another six months at home. Finally, in 2015 she completed her University studies.
The civil war was a huge trauma for Ramzia. For the first time she was experiencing brutality and killing firsthand. Neither Ramzia nor any of her friends had ever experienced killing. She hadn’t known about conflict while she was in Khartoum. While people were running away from the country fleeing the governments of Sudan and South Sudan, they were killed. Ramzia said she lost many of her friends to the war.
As a result of these experiences and the stories of friends and relatives, she co-founded Advocates for Human Rights and Democracy in Juba in 2015, the year she graduated from law school. It is a non-profit organization that deals with human rights violations, gender-based violations, and trauma. She documents cases of human rights violations that happened to the victims of the civil war. Almost everyone has lost someone. Army officers torturing women and making them sex slaves has become a norm in South Sudan. In many cases the women suffering these traumas know their perpetrators. She hopes that one day women by documenting their stories, living conditions for other women can be improved. She believes that giving women a voice can aid their healing.
Ramzia would like to be part of the Historical Dialogue and Accountability where she can help bring people together to work on developing the civil society, including the issues of conflict and post conflict resolution.
Ramzia has been happily married for seven years and has two young daughters. She thinks about her two daughters in conjunction with the work she is doing. “I hope what I do will make a better life for my daughters and for all the daughters of Sudan and South Sudan.”