We will struggle to liberate the land of Sudan
We will! With the AK-47
The battalions of the Red Army will come
We'll come!
Armed with guns on the left hand
And pens in the right hand
To liberate our home, oh, ooo
.
Meanwhile a platoon of fifteen soldiers marched into the grounds and assembled themselves in a straight line, shoulder to shoulder, facing us. Next, a line of men, bedraggled and tied together by rope, were pushed into the parade grounds. Seven men, all of them looking malnourished, some bleeding from abrasions on their heads and feet.
— Who are they? Achor Achor whispered.
I had no idea. They were now kneeling in a line facing us, and these men were not singing. The SPLA soldiers, in clean uniforms, stood behind them, AK-47s in hand. There was a man, one of those tied to the rest, sitting directly in front of me. Quickly I caught his eye, and he stared back at me with a look of unmitigated fury.
When Deng Panan finished his song, Giir Chuang took the microphone.
— Boys, you are the future of Sudan! That is why we call you the Seeds. You are the seeds of a new Sudan.
The boys around me cheered. I continued staring at the tethered men.
— Soon Sudan will be yours! Giir Chuang yelled.
The boys cheered more.
The commander spoke of our potential to repair our beloved country once the war ended, that we would return to a ruined Sudan, but one waiting for the Seeds-that only our hands and backs and brains could rebuild southern Sudan. Again we cheered.
— But until there is peace in Sudan, we must be vigilant. We cannot accept weakness within our ranks, and we cannot accept betrayal of any kind. Do you agree? We all nodded.
— Do you agree? the commander repeated. We said that we agreed.
— These men are traitors! They are deviants!
Now we looked at the men. They were dressed in rags.
— They are rapists!
Giir Chuang seemed to have expected a reaction from us, but we were silent.
We had lost the thread. We were too young to know much about rape, the severity of the crime.
— They have also given secrets of the SPLA away to the government of Sudan, and they have revealed SPLA plans to khawajas here in Pinyudo. They have compromised the movement, and have tried to ruin all we have accomplished together. The new Sudan that you will inherit-they have spat upon it! If we let them do it, they would poison everything that we have. If we gave them the opportunity, they would collaborate with the government until we were all Muslims, until we begged for mercy under the boot of the Arabs and their sharia! Can we let them do that, boys?
We yelled no. I felt that the men should surely be punished for such betrayals. I hated the men. Then something unexpected happened. One of the men spoke.
— We did nothing! We raped no one! This is a cover-up!
The protesting man was struck in the head with the butt of a gun. He fell onto his chest. Emboldened, the other prisoners began to plead.
— You're being lied to! a tiny prisoner wailed.-These are all lies! This man was also struck with the butt of a gun.
— The SPLA eats its own!
This man was kicked in the back of the neck and sent into the dirt.
Giir Chuang seemed surprised at their impunity, but saw it as an opportunity.
— See these men lie to you, Seeds of a new Sudan! They are shameless. They lie to us, they lie to us all. Can we let them lie to us? Can we let them look us in the eye and threaten the future of our new nation with their treachery?
— No! we yelled.
— Can we let such treason go unpunished?
— No! we yelled.
— Good. I'm happy you agree.
And with that, the soldiers stepped forward, two of them behind each bound man. They pointed their guns at each man's head and chest, and they fired. The shots went through the men and dust rose from the earth.
I screamed. A thousand boys screamed. They had killed all these men.
But one was not dead. The commander pointed to a prisoner still kicking and breathing. A soldier stepped over and shot him again, this time in the face.
We tried to run. The first few boys who tried to leave the parade grounds were knocked down and caned by their teachers. The rest of us stood, afraid to move, but the crying wouldn't stop. We cried for the mothers and fathers we hadn't seen in years, even those we knew were dead. We wanted to go home. We wanted to run from the parade grounds, from Pinyudo.
The commander abruptly ended the assembly.
— Thank you. See you next time, he said.
Now boys ran in every direction. Some clung to the closest adult they could find, shaking and weeping. Some lay where they had been standing, curled up and sobbing. I turned around, vomited, and ran away, spitting as I ran to the home of Mr. Kondit, who I found already sitting inside, on his bed, staring at the ceiling. I had never seen him so ashen. He sat listless, his hands resting limply on his knees.
— I'm so tired, he said.
I sat on the floor below him.
— I don't know why I'm here anymore, he said.-Things have become so confused. I had never seen Mr. Kondit express doubt of any kind.
— I don't know if we'll find our way out of this, Achak. Not this way. This is not the best we can do. We are not doing the best we can do.
We sat until the dusk came and I went home to the Eleven, whose ranks had been depleted. We were now Nine. Two boys had left that afternoon and did not return.
After that day, many of the boys stopped attending rallies, no matter what the stated purpose. They hid in their shelters, feigning sickness. They went to the clinic, they ran to the river. They invented any reason to miss the gatherings, and because attendance could not be counted, they were seldom punished.
The stories abounded after the executions. The men had been accused of various offenses, but those implicated with the rape were, according to the whispers in the camp, innocent. One of them had eloped with a woman coveted by a senior SPLA officer, who then framed the groom as a rapist. The woman's mother, who did not approve of the marriage, collaborated with the accusers, and claimed the groom's friends had raped her, too. The case was complete, and the men were condemned. All that was left to do would be to execute the men in front of ten thousand adolescents.
I was very close to the age where I would have been sent to train, Julian, but was saved from that fate when we were forced out of Pinyudo, all forty thousand of us, by the Ethiopian forces that overthrew President Mengistu. This, I learned later, had been in the works for some time, and would drive the problems of Ethiopia for years to come. But it began with an alliance between disparate groups in Ethiopia, with help from Eritrean separatists. The Ethiopian rebels needed the Eritreans' help, and vice versa. In exchange, the Eritreans were promised independence if the coup succeeded. The coup was indeed successful, but thereafter, things got complicated between those two nations.