Author name: Gregor

Dear participants of the meeting on Friday, 16 May, at 15:15, at the Directorate for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Assistance of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia,

Please accept my apology for having shouted and gesticulated so traumatically during our first meeting—where we were meant to decide how to allocate the EUR 200,000 that the Government of the Republic of Slovenia has reallocated for assistance to the Indigenous families of the Nuba Mountains, organized within the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army under the leadership of Abdel Aziz al-Hilu.

Because I had only just returned from the greatest humanitarian and refugee catastrophe unfolding today—and because millions of people to whom no aid reaches in Sudan had silently followed me back into my overburdened mind, while I myself have only my mouth and my tongue and so few nerve cells—I am sending you this letter to explain, in greater calm, why we must send assistance not only to the centres, but also beyond them, to places no humanitarian worker ever ventures.

SUDAN IS SHAPED AND DOMINATED BY THE CULTURE OF SLAVE HUNTERS.

Throughout the entire history of our relations with the vast region known as Sudan (in Arabic Bilad al-Sud—“Land of the Black People”), Europeans have repeated the same mistake.
The same mistake is the support of zaribas.

A zariba is a fortified enclosure where traditional slave hunters in Sudan kept enslaved people. Enslaved Africans were captured by Arab, Turkish, European and other slave raiders in regions of Sudan that were once—and remain today—almost untouched by what most white people in the West call “civilisation.”

All economic, military, expansionist and colonial investments were poured into the zaribas, so that captured slaves could be guarded there before being sent in slave caravans along slave routes to slave markets across the Ottoman Caliphate and in Europe.

Most major settlements and towns in Sudan grew out of the zaribas.
We cannot say that the Sudanese towns south of the Sahara that you see on today’s maps—Khartoum, Malakal, Wau, El Fasher, and others—“developed,” because they did not; they simply grew out of the logistical needs of centres for detaining and guarding captured slaves.

The descendants of the slave-owning elites still attempt to control Sudan today.

Sudan is vast—until the secession of South Sudan it was Africa’s largest country. Its size is such that real development outside the centres is nearly impossible: the rural population is sparse, distances immense. Only the descendants of the great slave-hunting clans live in relative comfort, because they invested the profits of the slave trade exclusively in the security of their own centres of power.

The countryside was perceived as an uncontrollable wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples—hunters, herders, and farmers living in the savannahs, mountains, and swamps in symbiosis with wildlife—were regarded as little more than docile or savage primitives.

Slave hunters, in order to capture and trade human beings, first had to dehumanise them—strip them of their basic rights and declare them to be animals.
Animals that one may capture, chain, yoke two-by-two to wooden stocks, and force to march in caravans guarded by askaris—armed men who hacked off the limbs of the exhausted and shot those who tried to escape. They were sold for sexual exploitation, for reproduction, for labour in building “civilisation,” and as janissaries to patrol urban neighbourhoods.

In the culture and economy of slave hunting—which still governs Sudan—foreigners have always invested only in the zaribas because the Land of the Black People is simply too vast and too sparsely inhabited for investment in the countryside to be “worthwhile.”
Floods sweep away buildings in the rainy season; corrugated iron rusts; thatched roofs are consumed by termites.

This same fate befalls every foreign culture seeking to penetrate the Sahel (which old maps uniformly label as Bilad al-Sud).

Colonial Britain called Sudan “The Land of the Great Illusions”—illusions born of limitless horizons, endless time, oppressive heat, and exhaustion, all of which tempt us into believing that everything is possible, that whatever we imagine we can achieve.

In truth, foreigners can do good only if we adapt.

We can adapt to the extraordinary Nature and the extraordinary Indigenous cultures that truly govern Sudan—cultures far stronger than those of the foreign slave hunters who besiege Sudan today, whether in the name of human rights, development cooperation, humanitarian aid, democracy, or the rule of law.

Indigenous peoples in Sudan have resisted foreign domination throughout their entire history. Among them are communities that will not sell themselves for comfort or be deceived by false promises of “civilising missions,” for the experiences of their ancestors have taught them to resist such illusions.

Although global media barely report on Sudan—even less than on Palestine or Ukraine—every reasonably informed citizen of the world knows that the greatest refugee crisis on Earth is unfolding there. What few understand is why.

I, the undersigned, Tomo Križnar, have been studying Sudan by every means possible for nearly half a century. From field experience and conversations with locals and foreign experts deeply concerned for the seventeen million displaced and more than twenty-five million starving—whom UN agencies claim they cannot reach because both warring parties deny them access—I believe I now understand the “root cause of Sudan’s main problem.”

The root cause is foreign investment in the traditional zaribas—whether money, weapons or humanitarian assistance.
Centralisation of power marginalises those outside the centres of provision.
Marginalisation provokes resistance.
The marginalised no longer wish to be abid, zurga—words that in Sudanese Arabic mean slave.

Slaves will no longer remain slaves if they are granted more than what is currently hoarded exclusively in the zaribas.

During the month after my wife Bojana returned home, while I remained alone with 38,000 Indigenous people in Nuba Kauniaro, I could immerse myself even more deeply in their reality.

For our new documentary A Letter to Europe, I recorded interviews with members of the Nuba community in the most isolated, sealed-off, ostracised, besieged and—in relation to the rest of the Nuba Mountains—most marginalised place on Earth.

All of them said:
“We most urgently need and ask for access to drinking water, medicines and doctors, and schools with teachers who will liberate us through knowledge.”

Conflicts between centres and peripheries in Sudan are financed by foreigners for their own interests.
“When two quarrel, the third profits.”
“Killing the slave with the slave” is an even more insidious strategy than “divide and rule.”

“Please—give us peace at last!”

One hundred and seventy-five years after the beginning of the mission of the Slovenian missionary Ignacij Knoblehar in Sudan, and twenty years after President Dr Janez Drnovšek’s peace initiative The World for Darfur, Slovenians are returning to Sudan with the largest contribution so far—EUR 200,000 in development and humanitarian aid.

I understand this as the beginning of the most sincere and morally clean effort to help the most abused and long-suffering people.

Judging from the response to my books and documentaries—through which my co-authors and I attempted to portray the greatest and most innocent victims of the wars for control of Sudan’s natural resources—I know that Slovenian taxpayers expect our assistance to reach those most deserving of it: the people at the very end of the seemingly endless line of those in need in Sudan.
These are the Indigenous communities of Kauniaro, Western Jebels, and Rashad.

This is almost utopian.
But let us at least try.
“We small ones can do what the great ones cannot,” as the late Dr Janez Drnovšek urged.
Let us try—even though we all know everything else would be easier and less risky.
Let us try this in memory of Janez, who dared stand almost alone against the entire world in 2006.

Let us not repeat the mistake we Europeans have made throughout our entire history with Bilad al-Sud—whether unconsciously, consciously, or even deliberately.

At our meeting on Friday at 15:15, I unfortunately did not have the opportunity to describe what I had to overcome on 16 April 2025 while distributing food in the village of Fungor, and how the “hyenas” nearly snatched it from the mouths of the hungriest.
I kindly request the opportunity to give a brief presentation with Bojana and our footage as soon as possible.

Written in haste on a phone—my apologies for any editorial imperfections.

With goodwill and anticipation,
Tomo Križnar, Postojna, Monday, 19 May 2025, 08:11
Phone: 041 936 935

(The WhatsApp/communication exchanges follow; translated faithfully but concisely.)

19/05/2025, 09:51 – Edvin Skrt:
Thank you very much, Tomo! And thank you for your work! We will try to contribute what we can to this mosaic of suffering in Sudan and across the world—305 million people in need every night on this planet.
Thank you also for your efforts and for raising awareness among political decision-makers in Slovenia.
Best regards, Edvin

20/05/2025, 03:14 – Tomo Križnar:
Thank you very much, Edvin, for your reply…

20/05/2025, 03:14 – Tomo Križnar:
Thank you very much, Edvin, for your response. I am deeply aware of the 305 million people in need across the world, for I have spent most of my life searching for answers as to why so many innocent fellow human beings must suffer so unbearably. And why, in the end, so many are left with no alternative but to flee, to starve, to wait and wait… for a salvation that never arrives.

I have personally visited most of the sacrificial altars across the Earth—places where we, the rest of humanity, ritually sacrifice the most innocent among us, much like the Aztecs and Maya once sacrificed lives atop their pyramids. We sacrifice our most blameless human beings so that we might redeem ourselves before the gods, bribe them so that we may avoid penance, and ensure that the sun will return and rise and warm us, shine upon us, ripen our maize, and allow Life to keep growing.

For most of my life I have been searching for answers—what truly lies behind such suffering, and who bears the greatest responsibility for all this unnecessary agony. And why, despite the establishment of the UN Security Council, despite the creation of UN agencies, and despite the allocation of taxpayers’ money to humanitarian and development projects, almost nothing on this planet truly changes.

So thank you, as well, for understanding why I am striving so hard to ensure that at least something—whatever small part we can—might actually be changed now through the support offered by this EUR 200,000 contribution.

Some of my personal experiences and one of my own answers to the question of why the people of Sudan suffer as they do are described in my books Nuba: Pure People (2000) and Oil and Water (2009), as well as in the accompanying documentaries Nuba: Pure People, Darfur: War for Water, Eyes and Ears of God – Video Surveillance of Sudan (2012), and Decay 2022.

During the thirty years of the longest civil war in African history—when, before the secession of South Sudan and the proclamation of the Republic of South Sudan, more than two million people, mostly Indigenous, perished—UN agencies and most NGOs distributed aid exclusively to the central government, the regular Sudanese army, and its militias. In the Nuba Mountains, for example, UNICEF supplied food for children and schools in 64 centres that the government called Dar es Salam—“cities of peace.” I was the first and only foreign reporter who managed to infiltrate the chain of these “pacification centres” surrounding the mountains, where I filmed evidence proving that these were, in reality, military garrisons.

Garrisons of the government army, into which captured Nuba were dragged as slaves, where children were recruited with UNICEF’s humanitarian and development assistance to serve government interests: boys to become janissaries hunting their own peers who remained on the side of the rebels—organized in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) led at that time by its founder, Yousif Kuwa Maki; and girls to serve as concubines and wombs for the birth of children with Arab identity.

The UNICEF leadership in New York responded to my first book and film by sending to Slovenia none other than the former James Bond, Roger Moore, who came to declare that UNICEF does not support concentration camps and that therefore Tomo Križnar cannot possibly be right.

The then State Secretary at the Slovenian Foreign Ministry, Franko Juri, in collaboration with Eva Tomič at the UN Office for Human Rights in Geneva, demanded a fact-finding mission to the Nuba Mountains. Comprising delegates from several states, the group received permission from the Sudanese authorities and landed in the mountains by aircraft.

On the very first day, an incident occurred. Another aircraft appeared in the sky—unexpected. It was a Russian Antonov, the type traditionally used by government forces to drop cluster bombs on Nuba villages. They particularly targeted water pumps, where women gathered in greatest numbers…

The head of the mission stopped distributing chocolate candies and, from a natural outcrop overlooking the valley, called UNICEF headquarters in New York via satellite phone to demand an explanation. The official in New York contacted Khartoum and formally inquired what was happening.

While the bomber circled above us—we all pressed against the granite cliffs, exactly as the Nuba traditionally do when the Antonovs appear—and time seemed to stop, after half an hour the Ukrainian-made aircraft turned and flew off to bomb elsewhere.

The mission participants protested to their leader: “This is not what we agreed to.”

Just as they had arrived and landed on the makeshift airstrip, they departed the next day.

They saw nothing but mountains from above and the path from the airstrip to specially built huts atop the first and only mountain they visited—where armed soldiers kept watch so that no naked, swollen-bellied child, no desperate mother with a limp baby, no starving old man could reach them—because such had been the arrangement.

When Maja Weiss and I received the award for best documentary at the Telluride Film Festival in the United States, the film Nuba: Pure People was seized upon by American activists for Native American and African American rights, who bombarded U.S. institutions with it until Congressman John Denford at the State Department offered himself to President George W. Bush as Special Envoy for Sudan. As a handful of European activists had done before him, he ventured “illegally” under the protection of the rebel army to verify the truth.

Upon his return, he confirmed the reality to the State Department and recommended a complete shift in U.S. foreign policy toward Sudan.

In addition to supplying arms to the SPLA south of the Nuba Mountains, the Friends of the Nuba were established to assist the Nuba in the mountains. In February 2002, at a Swiss castle, they issued a clear message to the world: Sudan was being added to the list of states with which the U.S. would reckon for supporting international terrorism. They secured a ceasefire between the militant Islamic government and the SPLA in the Nuba Mountains—the first ceasefire in Sudan—signed by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and, on behalf of the SPLA in the mountains, Yousif Kuwa Maki.

Only when professional military monitors began supervising the ceasefire did enough decision-makers within the UN finally understand that providing aid solely to the centre—and solely to one side—was, in effect, assistance in the sorting and partitioning of human beings.

In conditions of hunger, thirst, general deprivation, and the absence of all schooling, humanitarian and development assistance to only one side in the war has the same effect as distributing weapons and ammunition. It colludes with the policies of “divide and rule” and “kill the slave with the slave”—the most insidious and shameful participation in genocide against the most innocent Indigenous peoples.

UNICEF and other UN agencies only joined German Emergency Doctors, Christian Aid, Slovenian Caritas, Italy’s Amani, and the grassroots Indigenous organisation NRRDO (Nuba Rehabilitation, Relief and Development Organization) once genuine peace prevailed in the mountains.

Which, of course, could not last, because…

Enough! I must stop here. I apologise for the length. I have condensed this entire history because I do not expect that you have time to read all our books and watch all our films.

In the hope that you now understand why it is so crucial to send assistance not only to the centre of the Nuba Mountains—the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel, with Dr Tom Catena and the staff treating leprosy patients brought in by Sister Anita Cecilia from the most inaccessible peaks using a vehicle purchased with donations from Slovenian Catholics in Carinthia, the Slovenian missionary station in Ljubljana, and participants of the concert following the premiere of our film Decay 2022—but also to those most endangered, most neglected, forgotten by the world, and marginalised even by the Nuba themselves: the people of Kauniaro, Western Jebels, Rashad, and Blue Nile.

The centre of the Nuba Mountains, Gidel—home to the Mother of Mercy Hospital—and Kauda, the largest settlement on SPLA-North territory under Abdel Aziz al-Hilu, constitute the principal centre in the mountains.

This centre has already grown to resemble a Sudanese zariba.

A Sudanese zariba is a fortified and best-protected place where slave hunters concentrated enslaved people; today it represents a centre in which all power and all development and humanitarian assistance are concentrated relative to the periphery.

Such assistance divides Indigenous peoples into the privileged and the marginalised—driving them into opposition and, potentially, into future wars even within the Nuba Mountains.

I am convinced that we do not wish to help in the manner colonial officials of European empires once helped—and still help—Indigenous populations.

Therefore I beg you: let us undertake the difficult task of ensuring access to drinking water, healthcare, and schooling also in Kauniaro, Western Jebels, Rashad, and Blue Nile.

I apologise for the missing diacritics and any punctuation errors—these letters were written on a phone and outdoors, where I can best heal my soul…
Tomo Križnar, Tuesday, 20 May, 06:24

23/05/2025, 21:55 – Edvin Skrt:
Tomo, your arguments—that aid must reach the most vulnerable in order to protect their dignity and even their lives—are entirely well-founded. Thank you for everything you have written; I have also read your latest book and seen all your documentaries and many of your interviews.

This week, on the margins of the European Humanitarian Forum in Brussels, I met with one of the highest representatives of Trócaire and asked whether they could do everything in their power to ensure that Slovenian assistance reaches the four villages you highlight. She assured me that they will make an additional effort. We will keep you informed if this succeeds; otherwise, we will strive to make it so in the future.

Safe travels to Ukraine,
Edvin