Song of Solomon

Again and again, violence has plagued the family of Sudanese Lost Boy Gabriel Kou Solomon '06. Yet he's chosen not to flee his homeland's horrors — but to face them.

By John Allen

With a growing sense of foreboding, Gabriel Kou Solomon '06 spent the early days of last October dodging phone calls from his cousin, Samuel Barr.

"Usually I don't pick up the phone for him that much," Solomon says, "because when we talk, we talk for a long time. But he called me three times in one day, and I had to wonder why."

Solomon, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, had reason to be nervous, even in the relative comfort and safety of the Twin Cities. He's Sudanese, which means that, like the refrain to a particularly unhappy song, violence has dominated his life and his family with a periodic and shattering inevitability. Urgent calls from Barr, also a Sudanese expatriate, living in Houston, could not be good news.

And they weren't: Barr wanted to talk to Solomon because he'd heard from Solomon's family in Sudan. A few days earlier, on October 3, armed men had gone to Solomon's grandmother's home in the rural village of Liliir and demanded that she give them Solomon's nieces, Yar, age three, and Ajak, twenty months. Solomon's grandmother refused, and the men shot her dead. Solomon's stepmother intervened, and they shot her, too. The men then took the girls and disappeared.

Members of Solomon's family walked for three days to the city of Bor to report the incident. None had seen or heard from the little girls since.

Solomon was devastated. He'd met Yar and Ajak just once, a year earlier, during a six-month visit to Sudan, but he felt a deep connection to them nevertheless — and their abduction only deepened that connection. Solomon knows what it's like for children to be stolen from their home.

Kou (pronounced "koh") Solomon is one of Sudan's "Lost Boys." Abducted at age six, he lost his home, family, and childhood to that nation"s civil war. He spent nearly a decade as a child soldier, forced laborer, and refugee before escaping to the United States. Now, with his nieces stolen in a new round of violence, he"s decided to forgo his own career and ambitions - and possibly his own safety - to launch a campaign to save Yar and Ajak, and to fight the ongoing problem of child abduction in South Sudan.

Sudan may be a single country, but it's hardly a nation - not in the sense of having a unified ethnic structure. Rather, it's a patchwork of tribes, languages, cultures, and religions. The strongest division is between the country's Arab, Muslim north, which dominates the national government in Khartoum, and the black, largely Christian and animist south. Since before Sudan's independence in 1956, the two halves of the country have been at war with each other more often than not - the two Sudanese civil wars spanned nearly forty years.

The Second Sudanese Civil War began in 1983, after the Khartoum government took a strongly Islamist turn and attempted to enforce Sharia, or Islamic law, throughout the entire nation. In response, a group of southern Sudanese soldiers created the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), announcing their aim to make Sudan a democratic and secular state. Drawing on aid from the Marxist government then in power in Ethiopia, the SPLA launched an insurgency campaign, and the resulting conflict lasted twenty-two years.

None of this was particularly important to Kou Solomon then. Born around 1980 - no one is sure exactly when - he was just a small boy living in a rural area of southern Jonglei state when the war broke out. But he couldn't avoid it. In late 1986, a group of SPLA men came to his village and assembled the community. "They took the children," he says, "especifically the boys, and told us that they wanted to send us away to school in Ethiopia. Our parents didn't have any choice."

Though he would have been too young even to join the Cub Scouts in the United States, Solomon then embarked on an epic hike. He and about fifty boys from his father's clan were told that they would have to walk the hundred miles or more to Ethiopia, escorted by a few soldiers from the SPLA. They had to face the wilderness of the upper Nile region, crossing rivers, plains, and jungle. But they would not have to face the heat of the tropical sun; fearing attacks by the Khartoum government's air force, the SPLA forced the boys to walk only at night.

For weeks, as Solomon and his band traveled across southern Sudan, thousands of other boys were making the same journey. Ultimately, more than twenty-five thousand of them - including three of Solomon's brothers - would converge on refugee camps in southwestern Ethiopia, near the Sudanese border, only to find that the school they sought did not exist. Though the camps were nominally under the protection of the UN, Solomon says they were run by the Ethiopian government for the benefit of the SPLA.

"I remember when the UN would come, we were not allowed to be interviewed," Solomon says. "We were not in control of ourselves - the SPLA was - and we were all controlled and monitored. We did not have rights in Ethiopia. We did not even call each other by name, but had to call each other comrade."

The camps may not have been the promised schools, but they were meant to educate the boys - the SPLA wanted them trained for the war against the Sudanese government. At an age when American boys are learning to pitch a baseball, Solomon and his comrades were taught to lob hand grenades and to shoot and fieldstrip an AK-47 assault rifle.

"At night, the SPLA would come," he says. "They would take the boys out to a training camp. Every month or so, they would come and look through us to see who is tall, who is strong, and they would take these boys away to fight."

As one of the youngest boys taken by the SPLA, Solomon was too small then for combat duty. So he and the others left at the camp were used as forced labor instead - cooking, doing laundry, or cutting grass and trees to build quarters for their SPLA captors. And to keep them in line, the SPLA introduced occasional bouts of terror.

One night, Solomon says, "all the children were called out, and we were told that somebody important was coming, somebody big. And we were taken out in a line on the floor, on the ground, and then an SPLA commander came and spoke to us." The officer had brought along some soldiers he said the SPLA had captured. "Ten men were lined up in front of us, and their eyes were blindfolded,"Solomon says. "They were shot. Killed."

For more than four years, Solomon survived terror and slavery while there was no end in sight to the war in Sudan. But in May 1991, the government of Ethiopia collapsed, and control in the camps evaporated. The boys who remained were forced to flee again on foot. Many of them, including Solomon's brothers, returned to Sudan, but Solomon ran to the south, entering Kenya, where once again he landed in a refugee camp. But this one, located near a town called Kakuma, was a genuine refugee center, and it became Solomon's home for the next four years.

In 1995, a humanitarian agency called the International Rescue Committee managed to transfer Solomon to the United States, making him one of about 3,800 Lost Boys brought to America. Uncertain of his age, they found him a home in Washington, D.C., and placed him in Bell Multicultural High School, which specializes in teaching refugee children. Half of Bell's students come from other countries, and the rest are drawn from Washington's inner city. Though it took a decade, Solomon had finally arrived at the school he'd been promised.

The International Rescue Committee brought Solomon to the United States believing a home and school here would give him two things: safety and stability. At first Bell Multicultural gave him neither. But it did offer Solomon one major benefit. It introduced him to Erin Heitkamp '95.

When Bell Multicultural's founders created the school, they assumed that ethnically diverse Washington would provide its international students with a sense of, if not belonging, then at least camouflage. Africans such as Solomon, for instance, would see many black faces in the hallways and city streets, and so they wouldn't stick out as much as they might in predominantly white middle America. However, Solomon was a rural boy at heart, and the massive crowds and social tensions of an urban environment were more bewildering than comforting. They only emphasized the ways he didn't fit in, and so Bell Multicultural was not a happy place.

Heitkamp tried to help him with this sense of dislocation. She'd graduated from the UW with a degree in political science and a deep desire to help people in distress. During her junior year, she'd gone to Kenya to study international development, and now she was a volunteer instructor at Bell Multicultural, where she taught a subject called peace studies.

"It was a pretty broad curriculum," she says. "We studied different ways to advocate for peace and to resolve conflict - the approaches of [Mahatma] Gandhi, things like that. It was complicated stuff, and actually, most of the kids in the school were pretty far behind their peers - many of them were refugees, and their schooling had been badly disrupted. They were much more interested in learning English and how to find a job and support a family."

After one term as an instructor, Heitkamp decided to take a different position, one that would help her relate to the students more easily - she became a track and field coach. It was in this role that she met Solomon, who was trying out for the team.

"He was a natural runner," Heitkamp says. But cultural dislocation came between Solomon and competing. On the day of his first meet, he showed up in street clothes, refusing to wear the running shorts that were the team's uniform. Told that he couldn't take part if he didn't suit up, Solomon decided to walk away.

"I guess wearing shorts is considered shameful for men in Sudan," says Heitkamp, "because he absolutely refused. He left the team on the day of the first meet and he never came back."

But though Solomon gave up on track and field, Heitkamp didn't give up on him. She became his mentor during his time at Bell Multicultural, and they compared memories of Kenya and discussed his sense of isolation. She told him about her hometown, Moorhead, Minnesota, a location that intrigued Solomon because a Sudanese acquaintance lived in nearby Fargo, North Dakota. Heitkamp then hatched a plan to take Solomon out of Washington and place him in Fargo. With the aid of her parents and Lutheran Social Services, she helped him find an apartment and a job so that he could transfer to Fargo's Oak Grove Lutheran High School.

From then on, Solomon became, effectively, part of the Heitkamp family. "We consider him our adoptive brother," says Lisa Heitkamp Moreno '93, Erin's sister, "even though it isn't legal. He spends holidays with us, he attended our weddings - he's godfather to Erin's daughter and to one of my sons."

The Heitkamps also helped direct Solomon's academic career, steering him toward UW-Madison, where he majored in international studies and history, with a certificate in African studies. While at the UW, he grew increasingly interested in affairs in his homeland. He began dropping Gabriel and used Kou, a name that emphasized his African origins. He grew more connected with the Sudanese diaspora community, a loose network of Sudanese living around the world through which he managed to locate two brothers and a sister living in Australia, as well as Samuel Barr and other far-flung relations.

Further, Solomon began forging the connections that would enable him to pursue what he sees as his calling. "I knew I was looking for something in human rights internationally," he says. "I want to affect issues, specifically the issues that are important to Sudan."

As Solomon began creating a life in the United States, Sudan's civil war ground on. In 1991, his mother was killed when one faction massacred residents of her village. In 1992, his brother Michael Dut - who had been big enough to attract the SPLA's attention - was killed in fighting around Juba, the southern region's capital.

But though the rebels in the SPLA were forced to depend on child soldiers, they were slowly turning the war in their favor, with assistance from America and other nations. Through the 1990s, the U.S. government grew more sympathetic to the cause of the South Sudanese, particularly after they severed relations with Ethiopian Marxists and as Khartoum became increasingly friendly with Al Qaeda.

In 2005, the Sudanese government found itself pressed by rebellions on all sides, with insurgencies growing in Darfur in the west and on the border with Eritrea in the east. To free itself to deal with these crises, Khartoum needed to make peace with the south, and under American pressure, Sudan and the SPLA signed the Naivasha Agreement, granting the southern provinces autonomy, with an option to vote for full independence in 2011. The new Government of South Sudan (GOSS) is dominated by former SPLA officers, including General Salva Kiir Mayardit, who is now the region's president.

At the same time, Solomon was advancing his own public career. While at the UW, he received U.S. citizenship, and he took on an internship with Tammy Baldwin JD'89, who represents the Madison area in Congress. After graduation, he arranged another internship, this time with a project run by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) - a position that took him back to Sudan for the first time since his abduction. The work, he says, was rewarding but difficult.

"They had me doing educational programs in Juba - particularly gender-equity programs," Solomon says. "And the students, specifically the boys, had a hard time understanding. They weren't mean or confrontational - they just didn't get it. They'd ask, 'Why would we want to send girls to school? Why would we want them to take jobs outside the home? This just makes our life harder.'"

When not teaching, Solomon traveled outside the capital and returned to Jonglei state. "I met my father for the first time in twenty years," he says. It was like meeting a stranger." But he also met his grandmother and two new additions to the family - his sister Amer's daughters, Yar and Ajak. By the end of his six months in Sudan, he knew his life's calling.

"I wanted to go back to South Sudan to help rebuild the country," he says. "I wanted to be a human-rights advocate, to be a voice for the things that are being hidden. I know it's risky - most African governments don't want to talk about human-rights abuses. The things that happened to me - most Sudanese would say that talking about that is shameful. But I say why? It happened; it's wrong. I'm not afraid to be that voice."

When he returned to the United States, he enrolled in the University of Minnesota's graduate program, where he's studying human-rights advocacy. In St. Paul, he would be near the Heitkamp sisters, who had both moved to the Twin Cities, and he could devote himself to developing the skills and connections necessary to improve human rights in South Sudan.

But Solomon didn't realize how personal that work would be.

South Sudan may be a nearly independent state, but like the country it was carved from, it isn't so much a nation as a conglomeration of different ethnic groups. The largest of these is the Dinka - Solomon is a member of the Dinka people, as is GOSS president Kiir and the founder of the SPLA, the late John Garang. But there are other groups, and one of these is the Murle. A pastoral people who exist on the fringes of Sudanese society, the Murle center their lives largely on their cattle. When they need anything from outsiders, they trade, or, when times are hard, raid their neighbors. The Dinka and Murle have an uneasy relationship.

It appeared to be a band of Murle gunmen who entered the village of Liliir in October 2007 and shot up Solomon's family. But this wasn't the first such attack. According to South Sudanese officials, as may as 450 children have been abducted in South Sudan since 2004, most of them by Murle raiders. Very few of the children have been recovered.

No one knows exactly why these abductions happen. It may be that the Murle have been stealing children to keep as slaves or to sell. One common theory holds that the abductions are motivated by a deeper need.

"[The Murle] have tremendous fertility problems," says Barbara Frey JD'82, director of the University of Minnesota's human-rights advocacy program. "Possibly due to sexually transmitted disease or to a genetic disorder, their women are experiencing widespread infertility. For the tribe to survive, it needs to extend its population." Historically, she says, the Murle had carried on a trade with their neighbors, offering cattle for unwanted children. But the social disintegration caused by the civil war disrupted that trade, leading the Murle to raiding.

Or maybe not -Murle leaders maintain that they're being made the scapegoats for general lawlessness in South Sudan, and that many different ethnic groups carry out child abductions.

Very little of this was important to Solomon, though, when he first heard the news about Yar and Ajak. The October call left him stunned - but not immobilized, according to Erin Heitkamp.

"He just felt that he had to do something," she says. "After all that had happened to him, he couldn't just sit by while these children were stolen."

What Solomon did, at first, was seek out Frey, who was one of his teachers that semester. The two had a long discussion about what to do, and she suggested that they enlist the help of the rest of their class.

"Every year, I have my students take on a project," Frey says. "Here was a real case, involving one of themselves. I knew they'd want to help."

And she was right. When Solomon informed his classmates, they decided unanimously to make Yar and Ajak their cause. Within a few days, they'd organized a program - called the Save Yar Campaign - and a plan of action. They launched a Web site, www.save-yar.org, to collect and distribute information about the two girls and about South Sudan, and it includes online petitions to members of Congress and to GOSS officials.

In short order, Solomon began drawing his network of U.S. connections into the campaign's work. Heitkamp and Moreno have aided by hosting fund-raising events; Tammy Baldwin is one of the members of Congress to whom the campaign has reached out; and various elements of the University of Minnesota community, from the local chapters of Amnesty International and the United Nations Student Association to the school's African studies department and its Institute for Global Studies, have lent support as well. Frey, the campaign's faculty adviser, even found university money to make Solomon and two other campaigners - chair Robyn Skrebes and coordinator Daniel Lynx Bernard - paid research assistants.

The campaign helped give Solomon's concern a more strategic structure. "This isn't a rescue operation," says Frey. "The students are researchers and advocates, not rescuers. But they want to make a stand for what they see as not just a one-time crime, but a problem that spans an entire region."

"We quickly realized that we could not tell the world that only these girls mattered," says Bernard. "We needed to advocate for all kids in such situations."

In November 2007, when the campaign members learned that GOSS president Kiir would be visiting the United States, they hastily organized a trip to Washington to meet with him - even though it would mean sitting face to face with one of the leaders of the movement that had taken Solomon years earlier.

"Kou was really nervous before meeting with Kiir,"says Amanda Lyons, a campaign volunteer. "I felt like there was a lot going on between [him and the members of the South Sudanese delegation] - sort of an attitude. It's like they were implying, 'We know who you are.'"

Ultimately, the meeting produced mixed results. "[Kiir] was very receptive," says Skrebes, "though he didn't always tell us what we wanted to hear. He seemed very inclined to push for military action, and we oppose that. We want to find and address the root causes of this problem so that we can end child abduction altogether."

Still, Solomon knows that Kiir and his officials have limited means to help. "They're just a baby government," he says. "They're very new and not very strong. They don't want to do anything that will destabilize the country any further."

And so Solomon decided he had to return to Sudan. In March, he departed for a three- to six-month journey to the country that had abandoned him, to see if there's anything he can do.

"If I have a presence on the ground there," he says, "I can go to government offices and say, 'ËœI'm not going to give up [on] my nieces. They are still captive - what are you going to do about it?'"

Initially, two students from the campaign, Skrebes and Kaitlin Doherty, accompanied him, but both could only stay for two weeks. They were also limited to staying in and around Juba, as the University of Minnesota considers South Sudan's backcountry too dangerous for student travel.

"There's still a lot of violence there, especially in the rural areas," says Skrebes. "Even Kou wouldn't be safe traveling out into the countryside."

Still, Frey maintains, even a limited stay should be helpful for the campaign. "There's only so much research you can do from here," she says.

But Solomon intends to stay as long as he can, and to travel at least as far as Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, where members of his family are staying. "I need to meet with them," he says. "I need to see, as far as I can, what's going on."

From there, he may accomplish little. But he feels driven to make the attempt - not only to save Yar and Ajak, but also to save his homeland.

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John Allen is senior editor of On Wisconsin.