Guns rule the range in Sudan

Shrouded in plumes of dense white smoke from burning dung, the dawn procession of barefooted herdsmen and 2000 harp-horned cattle winds slowly into a landscape turned luminous green by overnight rain.

The groups of 20 to 30 cows are all accompanied by tall, angular youths, their faces covered in a mask of ochre ash, and their naked bodies etched with the star-burst patterns of scars that announce their status as cow keepers.

These are Mandari warriors, a tribe of nomadic cattle herders who have performed this same daily dawn-to-dusk journey from their open-air camps to pasture and back again, unchanged for millennia, across the brick-red soil and hardy scrub of their homeland in the vast open expanses of southern Sudan.

Unchanged, that is, except for one item. Strung across the shoulders of each cow keeper is what the Mandari call a perik, a weathered AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle, which gets its Mandari name from the sound it makes when it looses its lethal rounds at a rate of four bullets a second.

It is a sound which has become all too familiar to the Mandari. Until a fragile peace was declared nine months ago, the region was the battlefield for a 23-year civil war which claimed two million lives.

Sitting in Kwajroji, a camp of open shelters and mango trees in the wilderness to the north of Juba, the battered capital of southern Sudan, one of the herdsmen, Malual, says: "We need the perik to protect our cows. We used to have spears and axes. But our lives have been changed by war.

"You must have a gun or else you will be robbed of your animals and killed like a dog. We have no choice. We must carry them."

Beside him, Andria Killa, 20, points towards his Chinese-made Kalashnikov. "My family bought ours for six cows. It is our custom never to sell cows. That is how important such things have become - we forget the customs. Last year, my cousin was killed by a gun. The Kalashni is the ruling power here, whether you like it or not."

These ageing weapons from the Cold War era represent the ultimate trickledown of the global small-arms industry. It is a trade which each year adds eight million more guns to the 650 million, a conservative estimate, already circulating the globe.

Those same weapons claim 1000 lives each day across the world - from the lethal child soldiers in the Congo to the streets of American and European cities.

About 60 per cent of guns in the world are in civilian hands. There is now thought to be one AK-47 for every family in southern Sudan, one of the world's poorest regions and one in the throes of a cholera epidemic.

At the forefront of this deluge of munitions are the world's richest nations. From manufacturers, the guns are sold to governments and exporters, who set in train an arms trail to warlords and rebel armies until, finally, they reach wandering farmers who have them only because everyone else does.

The International Action Network on Small Arms, a coalition of 700 campaigning groups that include Amnesty and Oxfam, is pressing governments for action to staunch this flow of lethal technology.

Rebecca Peters, the action network's director, says: "War and conflict act like funnels for weaponry - vast amounts pour into war zones in Africa and elsewhere. When that conflict is over, the weapons remain and become part of civilian life.

"The majority of people who are killed by guns are not killed in situations of war but in those of crime and personal attack. It is often a conflict over resources.

"It is very difficult to stop but more can be done to curtail and control this trade than is being done by governments, which is very little."

A world away from the Mandari, efforts to prod and cajole the politicians into tackling the small arms issue will reach a head next month at the United Nations when the Small Arms Review Conference will discuss the implementation of measures, already agreed in 2001, to restrict the flow of weaponry.

But the real goal sought by the International Action Network on Small Arms is the start of negotiations for the first global arms-trade treaty to set out principles prohibiting the sale of weapons by any government or supplier when it would lead to human rights abuses, fuel an existing conflict, or hinder development.

Such a treaty would close a key loophole which allows arms traders to get around tight export laws in countries such as Britain by simply transferring the purchase to less-scrupulous countries.

Privately, campaigners admit that even a vital measure to be tabled next month - producing compulsory minimum standards for the civil control of guns, such as registration schemes - will once again fail in the face of longstanding American opposition.

So while the diplomats argue, Mandari elders warn that their own arms race is destroying their culture. From child abduction by gun-toting rivals to a new and unfamiliar lack of respect for human life, the gun is seen as a necessary but corrosive evil.

As well as being caught in the civil war, the nomads have continued their age-old conflict with the other cattle-keeping tribes, in particular their great rivals, the numerically superior Dinka.

Armed raids to steal cows from the herds of "enemy" tribes have been commonplace since time immemorial. But the arrival of guns has changed these battles from skirmishes conducted hand-to-hand with spears and bows and arrows to ambushes conducted by an enemy that often cannot be seen.

About 1000 Mandari live in the clearings around Kwajroji. Tribal chiefs said that before the arrival of the guns during the war, fought broadly between the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum and the Christian or Animist peoples of the south, and each side's allied bandit militias, they expected no more than two or three injuries a year. Now they average 25 killings each year and dozens of injuries.

Juru Bontend Mula, the 85-year-old supreme chief for the Mandari in the Juba region, said: "Before the guns, to take a life in a raid was a serious matter. It meant you were a great warrior but the life taken had to be atoned for.

"Both spear and warrior had to be cleansed. The gun makes that impossible. You cannot throw a spear at someone with a gun. Instead you shoot from far away - you don't look your enemy in the eye. You don't receive or pay blood money because you cannot know who carried out the killing. Life has become cheap."

During the war, the Mandari herds were also targeted by militia groups and the opposing armies of the Khartoum defence forces and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which now leads southern Sudan's embryonic regional government.

But this is not a story about picturesque nomads caught in the cross-fire of a war in which they had no part or interest. Many of the tribesmen were recruited into the armies. When the Dinka sided largely with the SPLA, the Mandari felt obliged to fight alongside the Khartoum government and were supplied with the AK-47s that many of them carry today. Both sides were guilty of atrocity and cruelty.

The result has been ruinous for the nomads. Cattle valued at $3 billion have been stolen and killed in the past 25 years by guns and the minefields that pepper the area.

Such was the glut of artillery shells rained down on Mandari lands during the war that they melt the brass casings and turn them into heavy amulets.

To the Mandari, it feels as if a careful balance of power built up over centuries has been replaced by savage anarchy in which guns are the sole arbiters of power.

Kwajroji, translated from the Mandari, means the Village of the Good. Its inhabitants say they take pride in living up to the name by preserving the traditions of their culture.

The Mandari herders are largely illiterate. They see little point of reading and writing in a life lived in the bush. What possessions they have must be carried.

Their entire material wealth is bound up in the cattle, which sleep and eat beside them, tethered to hundreds of wooden pegs in the safety of the cattle camps. It is therefore difficult to understate the love the Mandari lavish on their cows and their produce.

The loss of a herd casts shame on an entire family. That means all means possible must be deployed to ensure its protection, including wielding the assault rifle.

But the all-pervading presence of the gun in southern Sudan has led to a sinister phenomenon, child abduction.

The Mandari in Kwajroji say they were raided by gunmen from a rival clan - where infertility is common because of sexually transmitted diseases - who tried to kidnap three children. The children were saved after their families raised the alarm and the kidnappers were tracked down and shot.

Machar Butis, 50, who heads one of the family groups in Kwajroji, says: "This is how bad life has become - they no longer want just our cattle but also our children.

"All the rules that once applied have been rewritten."

At the Juba teaching hospital, the only one in an area the size of England, 50 people have been shot in the town in the past six weeks. Doctors say that guns are being used to settle even the most minor disputes.

One tribesman says: "When I was a boy, the only thing I was afraid of in the bush was that a lion might attack and kill me.

"Now a man might attack and steal all my cattle. That would kill not only me but all my family. This is what guns do."

- INDEPENDENT