Sudanese Emigres Seek Peace
Southerners Hope to End Tribal Conflict as Step to National Reconciliation

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 13, 2002; Page C03

She lives in South Dakota, works for the Gateway computer company and is a mother of three. But like many members of the Sudanese diaspora living in the United States, Nyachuat Deng, 31, defines herself mostly in the context of her war-torn African country, and that is what brought her to the nation's capital yesterday.

Deng and about 60 other representatives from the two main tribes of southern Sudan are meeting at a Southeast Washington church, the first such gathering outside Sudan, for a two-day reconciliation conference aimed at adding momentum to peace efforts in their homeland.

Civil war has wracked Sudan, Africa's largest country, since its independence from Britain in 1956, except for a decade beginning in 1972. The war has claimed 2 million lives. It is being fought almost entirely in southern Sudan between the largely black, Christian and animistic peoples of that region and the ruling Arab and Muslim north.

Three years ago, a grass-roots effort led to a peace agreement between the two main tribes in the south, the Dinka and the Nuer, which had been fighting each other. The peace between them has held on the whole. But hostilities between the north and south continue,because much of the Nuer land has been targeted by the government for oil exploration.

The purpose of the meetings in Washington, according to organizers and participants, is to help resolve continuing differences between the two tribes and unite the south in order to negotiate a just peace with the ruling fundamentalist Islamic government.

Community organizers say the United States has the largest population, about 17,000, of southern Sudanese outside Sudan, with an estimated 65 percent being of the Nuer tribe. The largest groups live in the Midwest; the Washington area has a tiny community.

During welcoming remarks yesterday at the Church of the Brethren, speakers urged the men and women there to remember the power of a unified group.

"You are the people who are going to stop this war," Fatima Garbang, a Nuer woman married to a Dinka, told the audience.

"What happens in the diaspora has an effect on our people in the south, and what happens to our people in the south has an effect on the diaspora," said Martin Mabil Kong, 29, a Washington hotel desk clerk who helped organize the meeting.

"If our political leaders are not going to do peace, we will do it from the grass roots," he said.

Participants such as Deng, who spends much of her time mentoring others in the Nuer community in Sioux Falls, said an important step is for tensions among Dinka and Nuer living in the United States to ease.

At the tiny Presbyterian church where Deng's husband, a Nuer, is a lay pastor, there are 35 southern Sudanese members. All are Nuer. The Dinka belong to a different Presbyterian church, she said.

The tensions are such that if a member of one tribe went to the home of a person from the other tribe for a meal, that person would be seen as betraying their own tribe and criticized for "eating together with somebody that could kill you," she said.