IN THE NUBA MOUNTAINS, Sudan — The eight children in the Shanta family lived in a village of grass huts and had never turned on an electric light or worn a watch.
Their first real interaction with the 21st century came one February night as they huddled in a foxhole while the Sudanese government shelled their hut.
If you want to understand why President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, the Shanta family offers a reminder that Bashir’s atrocities will continue as long as he remains in power.
Inside the foxhole, the children survived the initial blast. But the explosion set fire to a nearby hut, and its grass roof slid into their foxhole while aflame. These foxholes are deep earthen pits beside almost every home, school and building here so that people can crouch for protection when the government bombs them — as it does almost daily, in one village or another. The depth offers protection from shrapnel, but it also makes it difficult to escape in cases like this when they become fire pits.
“They screamed,” recalled Osman Shanta, the father of five of the children in that foxhole, who was frantically throwing water on the blaze. “And then the screaming stopped.”
Two of his children — Diana, 12, and Bashir, 9 — were immediately burned to death, but his three other children survived, along with three cousins.
This was not an accident of war. It reflects a deliberate Sudanese scorched-earth, counterinsurgency strategy here in the southern end of Sudan.
A rebel army with many thousands of soldiers, seemingly strongly supported by local people as their protector from the national government, governs the Nuba Mountains. The Sudanese government bombs the rebels and periodically attacks them, but the majority of its attacks seem to target civilians, apparently to make the area uninhabitable so that no one is left to support the rebels.
The staff at the hospital alerted me to the six burned Shanta children. “They were burned horrendously when they arrived,” remembers Dr. Tom Catena, an American who is the lone physician at the hospital. A 3-year-old girl, Ayat, almost half her body charred, died within a couple of days.
A sister, Hosana, 10, looked as if she might make it, but then the wounds became infected with tetanus and she died as well.
Dr. Catena focused on trying to save their 8-year-old brother, Shanta, who persevered for weeks. But flies were laying eggs in his wounds, and soon the burns were crawling with maggots. Dr. Catena says that he would cut out the maggots, and the next day more would return. The boy showed extraordinary courage, Dr. Catena remembers, but he would scream every day from pain as his dressings were changed.
Eventually, he, too, died.
Osman Shanta and his wife, Sadia, grieve for their lost four children, as well as their nieces. They comfort their surviving son, Abdullah, when he has nightmares.
As a senator, President Obama criticized President George W. Bush for acquiescing in Sudanese atrocities, but the Obama administration has done less to pressure Sudan than the Bush administration did.
That single shell killed six cousins in one family, and left three children disfigured. And these bombs and shells continue to fall, day after day after day.
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