“we will not waste a bullet on you… but we will leave you starving to death…”

Abdu Rahman is one of nine men who escaped Kadugli Prison in the South Kordofan capital. Of those nine, he and only three others made it safely into the SPLA-N controlled region of South Kordofan. Abdu Rahman told his story to Eyes and Ears Nuba. His history is similar to many of his fellow detainees; he is married with children, a farmer and accused of being a soldier for the SPLA-N and supporting SPLM-N political parties. In late September 2011, he was abducted at his farm by a militia for the National Congress Party. Armed with Kalashnikovs, the soldiers took him to the military prison in Kadugli. There, he was interrogated violently then taken to Division 14, an area within the prison, for further questioning. Division 14, Abdu Rahman says, was occupied almost exclusively by Nubans, Dinka, and Darfurians for suspected SPLM-N affiliation.

When he entered the ten internal rooms of Division 14, he encountered severely beaten prisoners. “They were being tortured,” he says, stripped naked and whipped by electric wires and hose pipes while being admonished to confess. Throughout the beatings, the prison guard warned, “we will not waste a bullet on you… but we will leave you starving to death…” After interrogations, he entered his four by four meters cell which he shared with forty to fifty other prisoners. Food and water were scarce and medical attention was nonexistent. The other prisoners attended to his wounds with the few resources available to them. The next morning, Abdu Rahman says, “my shirt glued to my flesh as a result of the bloody wounds” and they spared an already limited water supply to separate the cloth from his skin. Of the estimated 200 detainees in Kadugli, 66 perished from hunger, disease or torture. The bodies were not properly buried, Abdu Rahman says. Prison guards told him, “you will die here and we will take your body and throw you there [Khor Afin]. That is the job of the river.” But Abdu Rahman suspects the bodies were piled into a mass grave.

There are numerous scars left by his imprisonment, damage to the head and eyes and visible wounds on the skin. He expressed the depth of psychological scars as well. “My family doesn’t know whether I am alive or dead, I don’t know if they are alive or dead,” he says. Because of this, “I cannot forgive. God is forgiving, but I will never forgive them.” When asked if he would say something to the global community about his imprisonment, his words were a pointed warning to the Nuban people, “They are targeting Nuba ethnicity, it is genocide.” And to the SPLM-N, the very rebels for whom he endured months of near-fatal torture, he is hopeful: “May God make them successful in their struggle, and go ahead we are behind you and in front of you.”