Report 40 – The last plaintiffs before the defendants
This week the court heard the last three plaintiffs before the defendants finally take the stand. There are two more plaintiffs still waiting to be heard but both of their court dates have been pushed forward because of visa-related issues. The testimonies from this week stood out in several ways. William Biliu Tut’s testimony contained many important details about how the interview with Swedish police was carried out. Gatmai Choul’s testimony was characterised by general claims about the environment in the villages in Block 5A at the time and details about how attacks were carried out. Ruth Nyanel’s testimony included accounts of violent attacks on her home village and other places in Block 5A from the years 1997 to 2000 which she described to the best of her ability given her young age at the time. Ruth is the youngest plaintiff so far in the trial, having only been 3 to 8 years old when the crimes were allegedly committed. For this reason, her testimony differed from the others in that it was more general and recounted more of her family’s story rather than her own story. Ruth explained to the court that while she has some memories from this time, many of the events had been retold to her later either by her parents or other children from the same area.
Hearing with William Bilal Tut
Wednesday 4 December marked the first day of plaintiff William Biliu Tut’s testimony. William testified about his observations as a civilian living in Block 5A during the years 1997 to 2003, and specifically about an attack on the village of Boriang. William started the hearing by asking if he could testify in English, which the court gladly accommodated.
William was born in January 1974 in Bentiu in Unity State. He grew up in Bentiu. He also went to school in the north of Sudan. He started his school in Yanyang, which is not far from Bentiu and is now called Rubkona. At the time it was a very small place. Before Rubkona was part of Yanyang but now Rubkona is bigger. Rubkona was the base of Chevron’s operations in the country.
After attending school in Yanyang, William started to attend secondary school in Bentiu but he was forces to complete it later on in Malakal after the war intensified. The war also prevented him from going directly to university after high school. At the time, the road between Khartoum and Bentiu was not possible to travel on, so he worked locally instead. All his family, including his father, mother, siblings and stepsiblings, were living in Bentiu. Most of his extended family were farmers and had lived in the area for generations. His father was educated but the biggest part of the family was farmers. Some of them worked in the city in addition to their farm life in the villages. William was also a youth activist for a long period, which sometimes got him in trouble as he would go on to recount.
Attack on Buriang in December 1999
William’s family went through a lot during this time period, beginning with the December 1999 attack on Nhialdiu, which continued to the village of Buriang, where part of William’s family lived. The village was burned, and cattle was taken. William himself was not there at the time, but he came to the village a month later in January 2000 and saw the destruction. He described how everything was covered in ashes and all the houses in the village had been burned down. What had once been a place where over one hundred people lived was now nothing but ashes. No one was left when he arrived. To this day, William does not know what happened to the family members that lived there – his father’s second wife and youngest children.
William explained that the reason he did not arrive sooner was that at the time, people didn’t have telephones in the villages so it could take a long time before news spread. William was active in the youth community and got updates from other people in the community, but it took time for news to spread. Because of his active role in the community, he would also attend youth meetings where he sometimes got information about how the military were preparing for new attacks. Sometimes the youth would get information about this, and they would send someone to walk to the target location early in the morning to inform people of the likely rissk and warn the civilian community to flee or hide.
Upon being prompted, William claimed that the Sudanese government was responsible for the attack together with their allies among the Bagara Arabs and different northern and southern militia groups. One issue that both the prosecution and the defence asked about a lot was William’s mention of meeting a small group of Peter Gadet’s soldiers in Boriang in January 2000. The soldiers told William to go search for his family by the river, but William did not find them there.
Attack on Tong in June 2000
William further described how he and his family were attacked in June 2000, when they lived in the village of Tong. What he remembered most about this attack was the gunships. There were multiple gunships, maybe two or three, and there would be a short period when they went away, but then they came back. William assumed that since they were so close to Rubkona, it was possible they went there to refuel. This happened several times in several villages. The gunships flew very close to the ground, so close that William could see the people inside of the helicopter. According to William’s description they were shooting everywhere. He and other civilians hid in the tall grass on the banks of the river to avoid being shot. When describing how he was lying in the grass, William leaned back in his chair in the courtroom, making himself as horizontal as possible. Then he gestured to his face and described that he was lying almost submerged in water. While he was lying there, he could hear the whooshing sound of bullets fired from the gunships passing over him.
William described the time they spent in the swamp as full of bad memories. They lost people, they were bitten by mosquitoes, there were snakes, and one person was seized by a crocodile. Despite these and other hardships, William and his family remained in the swamp because they feared that foot soldiers would follow the gunships as that was something they had previously experienced. Because of this, they stayed in the swamp for an entire night and only dared to return to the village the following morning. This was when the foot soldiers came. Of this experience, William did not give a very detailed description. During this attack, he was captured by Bagara Arabs. When asked if he knew why his village was attacked, William said he had heard that it was because they were suspected of giving food to the rebels.
After William was captured by the Bagara, they took him to northern Sudan. There, he saw how the Bagara would take the cows they had looted from the south, from families like his, and sell them in the north. Ultimately, William managed to escape his captors and fled Sudan, finally ending up in the UK. He has never been back to Sudan. Over the years, he has had some contact with his family still living in southern Sudan but since his stepbrother died earlier this year, he has no contact with them anymore.
Cross-examination of William Biliu Tut
Thomas Tendorf, defence attorney for Ian Lundin, led the cross-examination of William Biliu Tut. The first thing Tendorf brought up was the Gadet soldiers William said he had met in Boriang, asking William why he had spoken to these people and what information they had given him. William replied that talking to the soldiers was part of the investigation he carried out as a youth activist and that the soldiers were not the only ones he talked to: he also spoke to other family members of the people who had been living in the village.
As usual, the defence then brought up discrepancies between what William said in his police interview in London in 2016 and what he said the day of the hearing. Two examples of this were that William told the police that he had never seen gunships himself and that he had not mentioned the attack on Tong at all during that interview. In response to the defence’s questioning, William explained that his interview with the police was very short. It was lasted less than one hour, so he had not had time to mention everything that had happened to him. The interview was held at an office in London where he had been working at the time, and although he had booked a meeting room for the interview, they could only have it for one hour. When the defence attorney further questioned William about being detained in Khartoum in 1998, something he had mentioned to the police but not in the courtroom, William said that it was true that he had been detained because of his role as a youth activist. Even though he might have emphasized different things to the police or to the prosecutor, William insisted that they were all true and that in neither setting had he been able to tell his entire story. That would take multiple days, he said.
Alexandre Schneiter’s defence attorney Olle Kullinger took over the cross-examination. He asked brusquely if there had not been enough time to bring up the attack on Tong during the police interview, was seven years enough time for William to remember it and bring it up? William indicated that he did not understand the question. Kullinger then explained that when William presented his claim for damages seven years after the interview with the police, he did not bring up anything about Tong, but only mentioned things lost in the attack on Buriang. In response, William explained that at the time he was only thinking about the attack on Buriang and was not sure that the attack on Tong was relevant to the case. William then continued and told the court he had gone through much trouble because of this – the loss of family members, experiencing torture, psychological suffering. He had lost his mother, father, brother and sisters, and now he was now totally alone and could never go back home. After these words, the defence did not have any more questions. Judge Zander ended the hearing and thanked William for his participation. William thanked the court for hearing him and for giving him the opportunity for justice.
Hearing with plaintiff Gatmai Choul
The following day, 5 December 2024, Gatmai Choul took the stand in Courtroom 34. Prosecutor Ewamari Häggqvist started the hearing in the same way she has started every other hearing: by thanking the plaintiff for participating and then reminding the plaintiff to speak up if he did not understand the question or she misunderstood any of his answers. Gatmai Choul was born in the village of Leer in 1990. Before the war started, he lived a good peaceful life with his father, his mother, his father’s second wife, and his siblings. His family had cattle and cultivated crops. His father also worked with the government during his childhood. He was a bookkeeper and according to Gatmai’s description, he documented court cases and the like. Gatmai had an uncle who was a soldier and Gatmai’s father also held a military rank as he was working under Riek Machar.
In the beginning of the hearing, Gatmai reflected a bit about the war more generally. First, Gatmai was very young when everything happened – he was only 9 years old in 1999, when the attacks he experienced began. He remembered that during all of the 1990s, there was a lot of back and forth: people were fleeing then coming back, then fleeing again. Those who died first were the old people who could not run and who instead were burned in their huts. Gatmai was not the only plaintiff to describe this: see, for example, Moses Ruai Lat Dak’s testimony about the death of his mother and grandmother in the village of Pibor, also in Block 5A, in 1999. Gatmai also testified about young people being forcibly recruited into militias and women being abducted. Gatmai said that both his mother and stepmother had gotten kidnapped but that both eventually made it back home. Gatmai also mentioned that he had two aunts who were abducted in 2000 and didn’t come back until 2004. When they came back, they both had babies with them. Gatmai said he could not talk about what happened to them, but that it was the same thing that happened to other women in the area who were abducted. Not everyone made it back, though. Additionally, Gatmai testified about cattle being looted by militias, so much so that the locals began to talk about the militias as “the looters” in Nuer.
Multiple attacks on Leer
It was hard to make out specific attacks in Gatmai’s testimony as multiple incidents seemed to run together. However, they illustrated a pattern even though he could not pinpoint the exact chronology of things. The prosecution tried to get Gatmai to clarify his testimony to focus on three specific attacks, but it was sometimes apparent that he did not really make the same distinction himself. Rather, to him it was more of a long sequence of violence. Gatmai said that the attacks started in 1999, but he also explained to the court that the attacks he described in happened in 2000 and they were not the first time he and his family had experienced these kinds of attacks.
Gatmai described the beginning of one of the attacks. Ground troops arrived by foot or by car from the direction of Bentiu, north of Leer. Usually, the civilians in Leer knew when the troops might be coming because they would go to Wang Kai first and Leer would receive warnings from there. The military vehicles the soldiers traveled in were camouflaged. The troops were from both the Sudanese military and the southern Sudanese militias. When the shooting started, the civilians ran, but it didn’t matter what direction you ran in, they shot at you anyway. The soldiers had Kalashnikovs, RPGs, and machine guns. While the military uniforms were green camouflage, the militias wore both civilian clothes and uniforms. Gatmai’s parents took him to the swamp to protect him. They hid in the swamp for at least 24 hours. When they returned to their village, they saw dead people on the ground, some of whom Gatmai recognized as his neighbors. Gatmai later named some of his family members among those killed in this attack. He specifically remembered this because it was the first time he ever saw a dead person.
Gatmai’s little sister was killed in another attack. He and his sister were running from soldiers that had followed them into the swamp. They ran for a very long time. They came to the river Waat and knew that crossing it would take them closer to Adok and another village called Quigong. As Gatmai was carrying his sister across the river, something happened, and he lost hold of her and she drowned. When talking about this, Gatmai became very tense, speaking in short sentences, and was visibly upset.
In response to the prosecution’s follow up questions, he also explained that sometimes there would be Nuer rebels in the village to protect them from the attacks. These rebels would be fighting under Riek Machar. However, they did not have as high-quality guns as the military and therefore they did not succeed in stopping the attacks by government soldiers.
Gunship attack on Geir
After being displaced several times from Leer, Gatmai and his family fled to a village called Geir. While they lived in Geir, the village was attacked by both foot soldiers and gunships. According to Gatmai, this attack was carried out by Paulino Matiep’s militia and Sudanese soldiers. The ground troops on foot arrived first and then the Sudanese military followed behind in vehicles. He saw the soldiers carrying weapons, including guns, RPGs, and Kalashnikovs. Gatmai saw these soldiers shooting at civilians. However, the gunships came before any of the soldiers. When they came, Gatmai ran for cover along with all the other civilians into the forest and hid among the bushes there. From his hiding place he could see how the soldiers in the gunships did not start firing until they saw civilians. He described how he could see that they were clearly aiming to kill civilians. Gatmai’s testimony left unclear what happened when the ground soldiers arrived later. When asked about the timing of this attack, Gatmai said it happened sometime during 2000.
Hearing with plaintiff’s counsel Anders Sjögren
After the prosecution concluded their direct questioning, Gatmai Choul’s counsel Anders Sjögren had the opportunity examine his client. This hearing started after the lunch break. Sjögren began by asking Gatmai to clarify whether any of his family members had been injured in the attacks he had described. Gatmai answered that yes, some of his family members were killed in Leer but he had forgotten to mention it when the prosecution asked about the attack. He had not seen exactly how they were killed; he only saw their dead bodies when he came back to the village after hiding in the swamp. In addition to this, Gatmai said that he himself was wounded in his leg at one point and that his father was injured by a bullet. This also happened in Leer, before they fled to Geir.
Defence’s cross-examination
Torgny Wetterberg began the defence’s cross-examination by asking Gatmai what clan he belonged to. When Gatmai answered that he is Dok-Nuer, Wetterberg stated that two of the known rebel leaders at the time, Riek Machar and Peter Paar, were Dok-Nuer. Wetterberg also asked questions about Gatmai’s father and if it was true as he had said in his interview with the police that his father was a soldier. Gatmai said that his father worked for the government and that he had never seen his father in a military uniform, but that it was true that his father was very loyal to Riek Machar. At that time, Machar was the vice-president of Sudan after a peace deal had been reached between the southern rebels and the Sudanese government.
As the hearing proceeded, the defence asked many questions about the time period during which the attacks Gatmai had described occurred. According to the protocol from Gatmai’s police interview that Wetterberg brought up, Gatmai at the time had said that the first attack happened in 1997 and the second in 1998. To this, Gatmai commented that when he was interviewed, he didn’t understand what the case was going to be about so he might have been confused about some of the things he said. He was also very young during the years 1997-1999: only 7 to 9 years old. Gatmai said that he remembered events after 2000 much more clearly.
Hearing with plaintiff Ruth Nyanel
When the last plaintiff Ruth Nyanel arrived at court in the morning of 10 December, she was wearing bright red boots, making her stand out from the crowd. In the courtroom, she spoke clear English, and she could be heard throughout the entire courtroom – which has not been the case for all witnesses. One important aspect of Ruth’s testimony was that she was extremely young during the period the testified about.
The hearing started with prosecutor Ewa Korpi asking Ruth to tell the court about herself. Ruth was born on 29 March 1995 in a village called Pilier, close to Adok and Leer. It takes only around 20 to 30 minutes to walk from Pilier to Leer. She was too young to have received any proper education in her home village, but she described how she and the other children in the village would sometimes be taught basic reading and writing under a tree. Ruth grew up primarily with her mother, stepmother, and 3 siblings. She also has a younger sibling born in 1999. Her father was highly educated and worked as both a teacher and a preacher. He was often in either Khartoum or Leer for work. In Pilier, Ruth and her family lived a traditional life, farming and tending to cattle.
The first attack on Pilier
Because of her young age, Ruth had a hard time describing to the court exactly when the war started in her home village. She knew that a general called Galogai came to the village with ground troops and burned down luaks (huts), looted homes, and stole cattle. Ruth described the soldiers with the general as white, explaining that that was what they called people who were with the government since they were Arab and had lighter skin. According to Ruth’s testimony, this happened between 1997 and 2000, but before she was hurt in a gunship attack and flown to Lokichogio for medical care.
After the attack by ground troops, Ruth and her family was forced to flee to another village called Nyal. It was a long journey and they had to stop many times on the way to avoid places that had been captured by the government. One particularly interesting detail from Ruth’s account of this journey was that someone in their group had a radio with them, enabling them to get information about which villages to avoid. They were in Nyal for a short while, but life was not easy there. There was not enough shelter for everyone so some people had to sleep outside, even in the rain. As soon as they heard on the radio that the government had retreated from Piliar, they went back. When they returned, they started the process of building back their homes again. Ruth’s mother was pregnant at the time with Ruth’s youngest sibling – her baby brother.
Second attack on Piliar
Just when Ruth’s family had managed to rebuild their houses, gunships once again attacked their village. This time, the villagers were a little more prepared and had dug a kind of hole in the ground, called a keleb, to hide in. Later in the hearing, Ruth reflected about the soldiers’ method of attacking the civilians. It seemed to be their tactic to attack once, then wait until the people in the village had started rebuilding their lives, and then attack again and again, and so on.
Ruth and her mother hid in a keleb, but they were still hit by sharp metal shrapnel from a rocket launched by one of the gunships. The gunships flew low over the village, looking for people moving, so they didn’t dare move. It was only after they emerged from the keleb that Ruth’s mother realised they had been hit. After this, Ruth’s most overwhelming memory is the pain. Apart from that, she remembered sharp metal objects strewn on the ground where they had been hiding. Ruth was badly wounded in both her legs, most seriously in her right knee. At the beginning of the hearing, the prosecution had displayed pictures of the scars she still bears from this incident.
Because they were injured, Ruth and her mother were flown to Lokichogio in Kenya to receive medical treatment. When they came back from Lokichogio, Ruth’s father was not satisfied with how the doctors had treated Ruth in Lokichogio and she was instead treated in a traditional way at home in the village. Ruth remembered that a sort of grass mat was wrapped around her knee and then they poured hot water on her leg. She recalled this as being very painful, and that people had to hold her down during the procedure.
Attack on Koch and fleeing to Kakuma
After Ruth came back from Lokichogio, things were calm and normal for a couple of months. Then they suddenly got a telephone call from one of her uncles who said that he had fixed things so that they could fly out of Sudan to Kakuma in Kenya. The plane would leave from Koch, another village in the area, so they immediately gathered their things and started walking towards Koch. The uncle who had called was James Kuong Ninrew, the very first plaintiff in this case. One important detail that the prosecution later clarified was that even though Ruth referred to James Kuong Ninrew as her uncle, he is not actually either of her parents’ sibling. Ruth’s father did call James his brother, though, and Ruth confirmed that they were related somehow, but that they were not in fact brothers.
After walking for more than three days, during which Ruth had to be carried due to her young age and her injuries, Ruth and her family finally arrived in Koch. They waited close to the airstrip where they were told the plane would land. Suddenly, a man shouted at her mother to hide her children. He could hear gunships coming and he did not want the children near his luak as he was afraid that the gunships would spot them and shoot at his luak trying to hit them. The man offered them his keleb to hide in and they did, waiting out the attack while hidden in the shallow hole. When they emerged, they discovered that both the man and his hut had been hit by bullets from the gunship. The man lay dead on the ground and his luak had been destroyed. Ruth related to the court that still to this day she felt very guilty about this incident, feeling that the man would not have died had he not offered them his keleb. Soon after the gunships left, a plane landed on the airstrip. Ruth and her family boarded the plane and flew out of southern Sudan. Since then, she has only been back once to the area where she grew up.
Cross-examination by the defence
In their cross-examination, the defence focused on Ruth’s relationship with James Kuong Ninrew. They asked a lot of questions about how much contact she had with him before her police interview or before her testimony in court. Ruth stated that they had seen each other multiple times, as family does, but that they did not talk about the case. The defence was clearly trying to insinuate that Ruth had been influenced by her uncle. Ruth insisted that her uncle was very professional and never discussed the case with her. When asked how she heard many of the other things she had testified about, she replied that a lot of it had come from the other children from the same village who later lived near her in a refugee camp in Kakuma.
The defence later noted that Ruth had been involved in this case in more ways than just being a plaintiff. During some of the interviews the police conducted in Nairobi in 2016, Ruth acted as an interpreter. For example, she was the interpreter during the interview with Stephen Matut Gatpan, whose testimony you can read about here. Ruth’s own interview with the police was in fact connected to her role as an interpreter. The investigation records showed that her own interview began just 50 minutes after the last interview she translated ended. Ruth explained that this was due to her telling the interviewers her own story during a coffee break, which made them want to interview her. The defence asked her how she got the assignment to interpret for the interviews. Ruth answered that she had done interpretation before for both the Red Cross and UNHCR and that was why she was contacted in connection with this case.
Next report
The next report will cover the testimony of Ian Lundin.
