1
A REFUGEE IN SUDAN
copyright 2009, Jonathan Fine
Story is provided free of charge for personal reading. Selling, photocopying, altering and/or reusing in other media, or the printing of more than one copy is prohibited and a violation of the both copyright law and the spirit with which this text is provided to you for free.
Prologue
Murahaleen.
What is the weight of a single word- how much meaning can a word convey? Can its very sound tell of the attempted extermination of a people, of the darkest acts of man?
Murahaleen. Say it to yourself. Mur-a-ha-leen.
Literally translated, "people on the move", an Arabic cattle herd on horseback. More commonly- more recently- a mercenary, merciless death rider. Traveling in nomadic bands, widely known for killing, raping or enslaving the non-Islamic tribal residents of southern Sudan.
I read an article. Time, US News- one of these. Probably in a doctor's waiting room. Jarring me out of my bloated, western hemisphere, black top and cable tv world. Masked death riders bearing down on villages amidst their horses' thundering and low lying sand storm. Swords held high- then slicing, stabbing or carving with avarice. Villagers standing defiantly before the door of their huts lost their lives through the jugular vein or the severing of their brain stem. Those attempting to flee might be decapitated as well, should the murahaleen rider be skilled enough, otherwise simply run through from spine to sternum. No male survivors of full maturity. Only a handful of men left alive from any given village and then only because they were not home at the time of attack- most of them enlisted as soldiers in the S