Richmond Times-Dispatch May 05, 2014
Friends separated by civil war in South Sudan reunite at Fort Lee
Two Sudanese men separated for more than two decades find each other at Fort Lee
By Louis Lllovio
Sudan. 1987. A civil war is raging across the country. When combat finally ends eight years later, 2.5 million people will have died.
Two boys from different villages are among the tens of thousands of children who, facing slavery or becoming victims of ethnic cleansing, are forced to flee the fighting.
The boys – Gabriel Deng and Mamer Peter Magot – are 9 years old. At least they think they were 9 at the time. Villagers, they say, don’t keep records so age and seniority are often determined by size.
The two walked to Ethiopia where, eventually, they wound up at a United Nations refugee camp.
That’s where they met the first time.
After five years of friendship, they were separated. They were about 14. Deng wound up in the U.S. while Magot went home to fight in the seemingly endless civil war.
For the next 22 years, each assumed the other was dead.
It was a safe assumption; in those days, it was conventional wisdom that anyone you lost contact with was probably dead.
Such was life in southern Sudan.
Over the next 20 years, the boys became men. They thought about each other, but life went on. Deng was busy with school and Magot had a war to fight.
Their childhood memories of each other became just that: fleeting remembrances of a boyhood pal.
That’s until late last year when Deng, a captain in the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Lee, heard some soldiers from South Sudan were coming to take classes at the base’s Army Logistics University.
On a whim, he checked out the class roster. One name stood out: Mamer Peter Magot.
To really understand what Deng and Magot survived and the near-impossible odds of them finding each other, you have to know what happened in Sudan in those days.
Not only was there civil war, the second in 50 years, but even today the fighting isn’t over. Just two weeks ago, the United Nations reported that hundreds of South Sudanese were killed in attacks on a hospital, mosque and a Catholic church in mid-April. The U.N. described the atrocities as ethnic killings.
Beyond the fighting, extreme poverty, famine and disease are rampant.
How Deng and Magot see it, that two boys survived at all only to meet up again at a central Virginia Army base two decades later is nothing short of a miracle.
“A gift from God,” Magot said.
According to the GlobalSecurity.org, an organization that provides information on defense, space, intelligence, and homeland security, the seeds for Sudan’s first civil war were planted in February 1953.
The country, at the time, was ruled by a joint British and Egyptian government that oversaw the northern half of the country, which was and is largely Muslim, separately from the south, which was Christian and animist.
In February 1953, the two countries agreed to allow Sudan to govern itself, and the next year the country’s first parliament was sworn in. Sudan became independent Jan. 1, 1956.
But in the years before independence, power in Sudan became increasingly concentrated in the north. Frustrated by the development, a military unit mutinied on Aug. 18, 1955. They took their weapons and went into hiding.
This was the start of a 17-year civil war – the first of two in the 20th century.
By the late 1960s, about a half million people had been killed and hundreds of thousands of southerners were in hiding or in refugee camps in neighboring countries.
In 1971, the rebel group joined up with the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, a precursor to today’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
The first civil war came to an end in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement between the SPLM and the northern government. The south was given regional autonomy on internal issues. The peace held for just over 10 years.
In 1983, then-President Jaafar Nimeiri decided to “to incorporate traditional Islam punishments drawn from Sharia Law into the penal code,” according to GlobalSecurity. That, along with Nimeiri backing out of the Addis Ababa Agreement, led to the second civil war.
The two sides fought for six years before agreeing to peace and the suspension of Sharia Law in 1989.
But there was a military coup on June 30, 1989, and the fighting began again soon after. The two sides continued fighting until a peace agreement was signed Jan. 9, 2005.
All told, the second civil war left more than 2 million people dead, 4 million people displaced and 600,000 refugees, according to the U.N.
As part of the peace agreement, the south was allowed to hold a referendum on whether to secede or become a part of Sudan. On Jan. 9, 2011, 98.83 percent of southern Sudan voters cast ballots to break away and South Sudan was born on July 11 of that year.
For Deng and Magot, trying to survive was all one could do.
The two were born in villages in the Jonglei region in Sudan. They describe their lives as one of privation, where poverty was rampant and people were just trying to survive.
When the boys were about 9, government troops began coming to the smaller villages, burning down homes and beating people. Word got out that they were going after children to force them into slavery or to kill them as part of an effort at ethnic cleansing.
To avoid that grim fate, they were sent away in hopes that they’d reach the refugee camps in a neighboring country.
The two 9-year-olds were among the thousands of children who made the dangerous trek. They had no food and no water and were sometimes attacked by soldiers, Magot said.
Deng and Magot wound up in Ethiopia at a U.N. refugee camp. It was September 1987.
Deng remembers first seeing Magot soon after arriving when the latter was playing soccer.
Eventually, the two boys were put in the same group and they became inseparable.
But everything changed in 1991.
This is the point where these two boys’ story could have become a typical tale from South Sudan.
In 1991, Ethiopia was fighting its own civil war and the boys were forced to flee the camp they’d called home.
They worked their way to another U.N. camp in Pachala in Sudan. A year later, government troops attacked the camps and the boys had to flee once again.
This time they wound up at an SPLM base just as factional fighting was heating up in the area near their former village.
“At that young age you kind of look at yourself and see what can you do,” Deng said. “It depends on your height. We were too young. The AK-47 was a little bit taller than some of us.”
Magot, though, was a tall boy and lucky – their sentiment – enough to go with the SPLM. Deng was sent to another refugee camp.
“From there we never see each other” again, Deng said.
In the intervening years, Magot traveled the countryside with the SPLM as a helper until he was old enough to fight. He has spent most of his life as a rebel soldier.
For his part, after they split up Deng went to the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and eventually was sent to Kansas City, Mo.
He attended the University of Missouri where he joined the ROTC program. He became an American citizen in 2007.
Deng is currently at Fort Lee in the Combined Logistics Captain’s Career Course at the base’s Army Logistics University.
That’s where he was late last year when he decided to check out the class roster of soldiers coming to ALU from South Sudan.
“When I saw the name I was like, ‘I think I know the name, but I’m not sure whether it might be him or somebody else,’ ” Deng said.
He was waiting for Magot when he arrived.
The last time the two saw each other they were in their early teens, so they started off asking about old times and old friends to establish their identities.
Once they figured it out, they began to laugh about how the years had aged them, Magot said.
The pair has spent the past few months catching up on the lost years. They’ve gotten close once again and are committed to not let time and distance come between them again.
But hanging over their heads and their relationship is the very real world of their homeland and the very different lives they lead.
South Sudan is still a dangerous place. When Magot, who has spent his entire adult life fighting, returns home this month he’ll take the lessons he learned at ALU to begin bringing order to South Sudan.
Deng, who graduates this month, will head to Fort Riley in Kansas. In recent years he’s visited his villagewhere some family still live and found his mother alive in Uganda. He’s thousands of miles away, but still fretting over the poverty and lack of education his people deal with.
And, for both men, the fear of renewed violence in South Sudan is always there. But as they spoke at Fort Lee a few weeks back, those worries seemed to momentarily take a back seat and they enjoyed just being a couple of guys hanging around.
“It’s been a long way and a long time,” Deng said.
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