Abyei: as it is and as it was

For the Pulitzer Center, Abyei, Sudan

Published on October 27, 2010

Scheduling was such that I did not reach Abyei until the weekend, and while I have press accreditation from the government of southern Sudan in Juba, telling me I am free to work as a journalist anywhere in the south, Abyei is a unique case. The drafters of the CPA could not determine whether Abyei belonged to the north or south and so punted the problem forward to today by drafting something called the Abyei Protocol, establishing that this borderland would have a special administrative status until January 2011 when the people of Abyei would get their own referendum on whether they wanted to be part of north or south. I’ll have lots more to say on this later, but the relevant point for now is that I need another stamp on my accreditation letter, this time from the joint administration in the area, before I can start interviews here. And the person who can give me that rubber stamp will not be back in his office until Monday. So today I walked the length and breadth of Abyei town with Abraham, a local teacher I enlisted to give me an informal tour.

We walked for five hours. But what was apparent within the first 30 minutes was that I was being given a tour not of one town, but two. One Abyei was what I could see in front of me; the other was the Abyei that existed before the violence of May 2008, in which much of the town was razed by Sudanese government forces and allied militia and some 50,000 civilians fled along the road to Agok. In some cases there were visible remnants of the destruction, like the charred bricks at the foundations of what used to be the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement headquarters. A slashed-up billboard in front of the ruins indicated its former existence. But in most cases I was being shown structures that now exist only in the memories of those who lived here two years ago. “See?” Abraham pointed. “That was a church.” He spoke as if I could imagine it still standing there the way he clearly could. “You see?” he checked, as we looked out over a flat patch of grassland.