Report 38 – Testimony of Moses Ruai Lat Dak and Angelina Nyador Kuany
Summary
The 31st plaintiff, Moses Ruai Lat Dak, testified to the court about two different attacks on civilians in and around Block 5A. Moses’s testimony also contained information about how some individuals allegedly linked to the company have tried to obstruct the course of justice in this case. Moses was subject to a lot of questions from the defence about his history that questioned his truthfulness. The 32nd plaintiff Angelina Nyador Kuany had a significantly shorter hearing but still testified about several violent incidents in which the military targeted civilians. Her recollection of some of the attacks included crucial details that were questioned by the defence.
Hearing with Moses Ruai Lat Dak
In the current case, in which Ian Lundin and Alexandre Schneiter stand accused of aiding and abetting war crimes, Moses Ruai Lat Dak was originally only heard as a witness, not a plaintiff. His status in the case was only later updated to plaintiff, though no information has been publicly provided as to when or why that happened. However, all along he has been a plaintiff in the parallel case about obstruction of justice where an investigation into threats against plaintiffs in this trial is currently ongoing. This was brought up in court by the prosecutor as a reason for why new information could arise, and therefore it would be hard to predict how long the hearing with Moses would last.
Prosecutor Eva Korpi initiated the hearing with Moses. Moses was born 1977 in Budang, a small village in the larger Bentiu area. He and his family moved from Budang to Pibor in Nhialdiu in 1986 because of attacks by Baggara Arabs. Moses grew up in the village of Pibor, only 30 minutes by foot from Nhialdiu. Moses fled to Ethiopia in 2002 and there he finally started his education. He has studied social sciences and journalism. For a time, he lived in Nairobi and worked as a journalist for Sudan Radio Service.
Bombing of Pibor
Moses testified that the war in Block 5A started in 1997 but didn’t reach Pibor until 1999. During the dry season in the beginning of 1999, meaning in either in January or February, gunships came to Pibor and started dropping bombs. The gunships came once late at night, and then they came back again early the next morning. He described how the helicopters were dropping what he thought were bombs on people, houses, and cattle.
When discussing the first attack, Moses recalled that the only casualty was a dog killed by the shrapnel. It was in the morning that the real tragedy struck. Moses grandmother was too old to run when they realised that the gunships were coming back, so the family was forced to leave her inside their house while they fled to the woods. When Moses’ mother realised that her own mother would be left alone inside the house with no one to watch over her, she turned around and ran back to be by her side. The rest of the villagers hid in the forest and Moses described that from a distance it looked like fire was raining down on the village from the helicopter gunships flying above.
When they finally dared to come out from their hiding place and returned to the village, they found only destruction. All the huts were burned, and dead cattle lay all around on the ground. Birds had even started eating the remains of the cattle. Inside what was once his home, Moses found the charred bodies of his mother and grandmother, so burned that they were almost unrecognizable. Later, Moses and his family buried Moses’s mother and grandmother close to their village. He recalled that at least three other burials were happening at the same time.
To his accounts of these attacks, Moses added that there was no rebel soldiers present in the area at this time. According to his testimony there had been rebels in the area before, since the war started in 1997, but at this point they had been defeated and driven back all the way to Dinka territory. Another important note Moses made during this part of his testimony was that this attack happened at the same time as the construction of the road from Bentiu towards Thar Jath and Nhialdiu started.
After their village had been attacked, Moses fled together with his brother in the direction of Waak. It took them a whole day to walk there. In Waak, life was very difficult for him and his brother. There were many displaced people, many of whom had experienced similar traumatic events as Moses and his brother. While recalling this period of his life, Moses suddenly started crying, leading the judge to call for a short break in the hearing. When the trial resumed, Moses had regained his breath, but it was obvious to the court and to those watching that these memories affected him deeply. From Waak, the brothers again fled to a village called Wang Rial. However, their life would not become more peaceful there.
Attacks in Wang Rial
Moses and his brother arrived in Wang Rial in 2000 and lived there for a few months. One night, gunships arrived in this village as well, shooting at civilians and houses. Just as the last time, the helicopters would come back time after time, terrorizing the civilians living in the village. This went on for three days. Moses and his brother are not alone among the civilians who lived in and around Block 5A during this time to describe how they were repeatedly attacked as they fled from place to place.
One thing that stood out about Moses’s testimony about the attacks on Wang Rial was that he recalled that the village chiefs had received word from the Sudanese military some time before the attack. informing them that they had to move, or they would be bombed. There have been other reports of village chiefs receiving warnings before an attack, similar to how Moses described it. Moses told the court that some people followed this order and some people didn’t. The two brothers did listen to the warning in this instance and had already left when the bombing started, Moses said after describing the attack.
Moses told the court that after the attack in Wang Rial, he went on to Bentiu. He didn’t feel safe in Bentiu, though, since there was a heavy military presence there and he feared being forcibly recruited into a militia. After staying in Bentiu for two or three months, he continued to Khartoum and then lastly to Ethiopia, struggling to find a safe place for his family. He had met up with his wife and child in Bentiu and he brought them with him to Ethiopia where they stayed in a refugee camp.
Earlier involvement in the case
At the end of prosecutor Eva Korpi’s examination of Moses Ruai Lat Dak, she asked some questions about his previous involvement in the case. Moses told the court that his first contact with the case was through “the reverends” as he referred to them: James Ninrew and Mathew Matiang. He participated in several meetings with the organization Liech Victims Voices along with the reverends and other survivors, all representing different affected areas. Other plaintiffs have talked about these meetings, which Petter Bolme and sometimes Egbert Wesselink also attended.
Moses described to the court that during one of the meetings, he received an assignment from the others in the group to search for others who had been injured in the same way he had. He was given a form that he could take with him for people to fill out when he went to search for other victims. When asked about the purpose of this information, Moses said it was to bring the oil company to justice. However, interviewing victims was not an easy job and as a victim himself, it was painful for Moses to force others to remember and talk about things they may have tried to forget. That was the reason Moses eventually stopped working with this.
When the prosecutor asked Moses how this case had affected him, he told the court about an incident where he was threatened by people who didn’t want him to testify. Once he was knocked off the road and injured by someone on a motorbike specifically targeting him, and since he had already received threats, he believed this had to do with the case.
Cross-examination by the defence
First out the gate in the cross-examination was Ian Lundin’s defence attorney, Thomas Tendorf, who had some questions for Moses, but not as many as one might have expected. He started off with questions about when the war started, then asked some clarifying questions about Moses’s testimony from the previous day, comparing his testimony with excerpts from his police interview in Kampala in 2019. A particularly interesting point was when he read a part where Moses had stated that in 1997 the fighting started “amongst southerners themselves.” Tendorf noted that this was different from what Moses had said the day before about the war between the rebels and the government starting that year.
When Moses was asked to comment on this, he explained that what he meant was that the fighting started between militias and rebels. Tendorf asked many questions about the clan affiliations of both Matiep’s troops and the rebels, clearly wanting to show that the violence was in fact about two clans fighting each other. However, Moses remained firm in his answer that this conflict wasn’t about belonging to certain clans, it was the rebels against the government. When Tendorf came back to this a little later in the hearing and started asking about the SPLA in Pibor and what clan they belonged to, things got a little confrontational. After asking multiple times and not getting a straight answer about which clan the SPLA soldiers in Pibor belonged to, Tendorf said “Okay, since you won’t answer this question, we will move on.” At this, Judge Zander jumped in and told Tendorf to adjust his tone and that he had to accept that Moses’s answer to the question was that the conflict was not about clans.
After the lunch break, there was a new addition in the courtroom in Kigali. Moses’s wife Angelina and their small baby were present, along with Moses, plaintiff’s counsel Carl Harling, and the two Nuer interpreters, Daniel and Luca. This meant that those in the courtroom in Stockholm could sometimes hear baby noises in the background. By this time, Alexandre Schneiter’s defense took over the questioning and defense attorney Johan Rainer started by asking about the relationship between the rebels and the village chiefs. Moses told the court that the rebel forces asked the village chiefs for food, and they would provide it. This was very different from the military and regime-allied militias who looted and took what they needed by force.
Facebook posts cause confusion
The defense also asked Moses several questions about Facebook posts he had made in recent years. Some of the posts were throwback photos showing him in the years around 2000, and comments made on the post made it seem like Moses was in Kakuma, Kenya much earlier than 2003 as he had claimed in the hearing.
One post on the Facebook page of Moses Ruai Lat Dak is a photograph of several SPLA officers accompanied by a text that is signed “Former SPLA fighter and journalist, Mr. Moses Ruai Lat Dak.” The post from February 2020 caused confusion in the courtroom since Moses during his testimony had not said anything about being affiliated with the SPLA – a position he stood by in his answer when the defense confronted him with this post. Moses explained to Courtroom 34 in Stockholm that what he had written was not true and he had written it to put himself in a better light for his political colleagues in Juba, South Sudan. Later, responding to prosecutor Eva Korpi’s clarifying question, Moses explained that in South Sudan you get famous and accepted in society if you say that you are with the SPLA.
Hearing with Angelina Nyador Kuany
On Thursday the 14th of November, it was time for the 32nd plaintiff, Angelina Nyador Kuany, to be heard in court. Angelina was born in 1981 in a village called Woi Tong, but she and her family moved to Nhialdiu in 1994 or 1995. In Nhialdiu she had the opportunity to attend a couple years of primary school to learn to read and write.
Bombing of Nhialdiu in 1997
This is Angelina’s own story of what happened in 1997 in Nhialdiu: She and some other children were playing under some trees close to their house when the sound of Antonovs could suddenly be heard in the sky. Her uncle, who had heard the sound before, came out of the house to find the children and bring them to safety. Her uncle was like a father to Angelina as he had moved in with the family after Angelina’s father, his older brother, had passed away. On his way from the house to where the children were playing, the bomb dropped by the plane suddenly hit the ground and shrapnel came flying everywhere. Angelina’s uncle was hit and fell to the ground. Angelina first remembered her mother screaming and starting to run over to him. Angelina started running over too. As she came closer, she heard what her dying uncle was saying to her mother. He was telling her: “Even though you can hear me I am already dead.” This made Angelina so scared that she just took off running. This was when she was separated from her family. Angelina told the court how after witnessing this traumatic event, she just ran and ran, and she didn’t know where she was running or who she was running with. She just knew that the other people running alongside her were also from the Nhialdiu area and were fleeing for the same reason as her.
Here there was an unexpected break in the courtroom where the connection with Kigali appeared to be lost, but for once it turned out to be the equipment in Stockholm that was at fault. The projectors in the courtroom shut down and as the screens covering the windows slowly retracted, the autumnal sunlight started shining in through the windows and everyone in the courtroom was suddenly reminded that while the trial hearing goes on and on in Courtroom 34, the world continued as normal outside.
Angelina described an incident she and others happened upon as they were running from Nhialdiu after the bombings. Their path was suddenly interrupted by soldiers and Angelina and some others quickly hid in the bushes. Not everyone was so lucky. In response to a question about what kind of weapons these soldiers had, Angelina answered that she did not remember what kind they were, only that they weren’t used to shoot at people but rather to threaten the girls that resisted the violence the soldiers perpetrated against them. In this situation, she felt very helpless, scared, sad and afraid. She didn’t know if she was going to survive.
Bombing of a market and a prison in Thar Jath in 1999
Angelina ended up alone in Bentiu and it was not until 1998 that she was reunited with her mother. They lived in Bentiu for a while, with her mother supporting the family as a small business owner, before they were forced to flee again due to new bombings.
They went to Thar Jath and lived there for a little while among many other displaced people. Food, water, and other necessities were in short supply. One day when Angelina was at the market, a man suddenly started shouting at her to lie down because he had heard Antonovs coming. She recalled that while she did as the man commanded and lay down, he was not as fast. The bomb hit a nearby building, which happened to be a prison facility, and shrapnel hit him. Angelina was one of the first to reach the man once the bombing had stopped and she described how he was lying on the ground, dying before her eyes. She described him as having a kind of shawl that only chiefs have. She saw burned remains of dead people inside the prison.
The day after the bombing, a UN plane arrived in Thar Jath to pick up the wounded. Angelina took her toddler sister, who at the time was very sick, and got on the plane, once again becoming separated from her mother. The plane flew them to Lokichogio, Kenya where there was a hospital that could treat her sister. Two weeks ago when Stephen Matut Gatpan was testifying, he also described how he had been flown by a UN plane to Lokichogio to receive treatment for a head injury. According to Angelina, the same plane that flew them to Kenya took them back to a place called Chochara in Block 5A in southern Sudan.
Cross-examination by the defense
The biggest uncertainty created by Angelina’s testimony was whether the Thar Jath mentioned in Angelina’s testimony was the same Thar Jath where Lundin Oil had an oil rig. During the defence’s cross examination, it became obvious that they were trying to place the Thar Jath in Angelina’s testimony in an area far from the oil rig.
At the end of Thursday when the hearing was concluded, Torgny Wetterberg from the defense pointed out that he thought it was very clear from the police interview that Angelina placed Thar Jath between Nhialdiu and Wang Kai, further north than the oil rig, and that this was validated during the hearing. Wetterberg suggested to the court that the theme of evidence (the wording of the description of the evidence) should be adjusted to reflect this. To this, the prosecution replied that they did not see any reason to change it since the location of Thar Jath had not been clearly established. It was clear that there was no consensus about this issue.
Next report
Our next report will cover the testimony of the next three plaintiffs in the case: John Kuiy Tap, Both Guol Nyinyar, and Kuol Ruai Kuol.
