Documentary Ethiopia: Nuer, history of a Refugee (English)
[ENG]Nuer, history of a refugee. Pel is 24 years old and like so many other Nuer lives in a Sudanese refugee camp in Ethiopia. His family moved from Sudan to Ethiopia, fleeing the war, and today live on land that has been occupied from another people --the Anuak, with whom they dispute the territory. His dream is to go to Australia to do a degree. His refugee status will possibly enable this dream to come true. Once his studies are over, he would like to return home to be able to help his people acquire the knowledge he has picked up abroad.
The Nuer people are said to have originally been a section of the Dinka people that migrated out of the Gezira but south into a barren dry land that they called Kwer Kwong, which was in southern Kordofan. Centuries of isolation and influence from Luo peoples caused them to be a distinct ethnic group from the Dinka. The Arrival of Bagarra Arabs and their subsequent slave raids in the late 1700s caused the Nuer to migrate en masse from southern Kordofan into what is now Bentiu. In around 1850, further slave raids as well as flooding and overpopulation caused them to migrate even further out of Bentiu and eastwards all the way into the western fringes of Ethiopia, displacing and absorbing many Dinka, Anyuak and Burun in the process.[4]
The intrusion of the British in the 19th century greatly halted the Nuers aggressive territorial expansion against the Dinka and Anyuak. [5]
There are different accounts of the origin of the conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka, South Sudan's two largest ethnic groups. Anthropologist Peter J. Newcomer suggests that the Nuer are actually Dinka. He argues that hundreds of years of population growth created expansion, which eventually led to raids and wars.[6]
In 2006 the Nuer were the tribe that resisted disarmament most strongly; members of the Nuer White Army, a group of armed youths often autonomous from tribal elders' authority, refused to lay down their weapons, which led SPLA soldiers to confiscate Nuer cattle, destroying their economy. The White Army was finally put down in mid-2006,[7] though a successor organisation self-styling itself as a White Army formed in 2011 to fight the Murle tribe (see 2011–2012 South Sudan tribal clashes), as well as the Dinka and UNMISS.[8]