17/12/2025
Today the official newspaper of the Vatican has published in the front page an interview with our own Fr, Kizito.
Here is the English translation done with Google. maybe it is not perfect.
SUDAN: NUBA MOUINTAINS EMERGENCY
by Guglielmo Gallone
The Nuba Mountains are under attack again. "And we didn't expect it," begins Father Renato Kizito Sesana, a Comboni missionary returning from a trip to the region located halfway between Sudan and South Sudan, "because recently the war here had been frozen: the two main factions currently competing for control of Sudan, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the government militias, were fighting elsewhere. This had left the region in a sort of limbo: people continued to suffer and live amid enormous hardship, but without weapons, without gunfire. You didn't see soldiers on the streets like you see in other parts of the country."
But everything changed when the leaders of the SPLM-North, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement–North, the region's historic liberation movement born in the 1980s during the long war against Khartoum, decided to draw closer to the RSF. "This decision," Kizito explains, "was not understood by the civilian population, because the RSF has a terrible reputation—just think of what happened in El Fasher a few months ago." The Nuba leadership appears to have justified this turn of events with three arguments. The first is linked to the deteriorating military situation: due to the war across Sudan and the prolonged isolation of the Nuba Mountains, there was no longer sufficient support to continue the resistance against the Khartoum government. Indeed, in recent months, the SPLM-North had lost control of some positions. This is reflected in the second argument: the Nuba never asked for independence but insisted on the recognition of their rights within the nation. And this recognition, even more so given such a situation on the ground, has so far never arrived. The final argument is strategic and cultural in nature. Nuba leaders believed that the experience gained over decades of conflict could have a positive influence on the RSF, contributing to more disciplined management of military operations and greater protection of civilians.
The problem is that this rapprochement between the RSF and the SPLM-North is costing the Nuba population dearly. This is demonstrated by the attack that occurred in recent days in the Kumo area, a town under the control of the SPLM-North, about ten kilometers from Kauda, one of the main agricultural centers in the region. According to information released by the liberation movement and reported by the press, a drone struck a civilian area, killing over 50 people, mostly students and young people undergoing health training. "It's a place I know very well," Father Kizito tells us: "It's not a military training center. It's a small clinic, near a school, where occasional training sessions are held for boys and girls who provide health services in the villages." The attack occurred in the morning, while an outdoor meeting was underway. "The first drone struck suddenly," the missionary reports, "killing many people instantly. However, the massacre was made even worse by a second attack, which occurred a few minutes later. Between the first and second attacks, other students, children from the nearby school, and people rushing to help the wounded had arrived. The second drone struck them too."
Father Kizito arrived on the scene a few days later. "I saw with my own eyes," he says, "that there was no military structure. It was and is a civilian clinic." What struck him most, however, was the manner of the attack. "There wasn't the large crater typical of bombs. Just scorched earth and a small depression." These are the effects of drones exploding a few meters above the ground. And they are marking a qualitative leap in the Sudanese conflict. "You don't see these 'kamikaze' drones coming, you don't hear them. They explode in a huge fireball and hit anyone nearby. This,” Kizito emphasizes, “is something that has never been seen in the Nuba Mountains.”
And if it were to continue, everything would change from a humanitarian perspective as well. Between 1995 and 2006, Father Kizito launched an educational center in the Nuba Mountains, through the efforts of the Koinonia community and the Amani association. This project has been halted several times by wars, but should be operational again by 2026. Working alongside Kizito in the Nuba Mountains is Tom Catena, a lay Catholic missionary and American doctor at the Mother of Mercy Hospital in Gidel. Last October 21, Catena had already raised the alarm in our newspaper about the cholera epidemic that had reached the Nuba Mountains from northern Sudan.
"We came to open a referral hospital in the Nuba Mountains region," the doctor told us, "and from a small 80-bed facility, we're constantly growing. We have many departments: the standard medical and surgical departments for adults and children; a tuberculosis and leprosy department; now also an eye clinic with a clinical officer specialized in eye surgery; a dental clinic; a physiotherapy department; and a community assistance program with 19 clinics spread throughout the region, which we support by sending staff, providing medicines, and training local staff. In short, over the past 17 years, our work has expanded dramatically. Today, we welcome patients from all over the Nuba Mountains, from every part of Sudan, despite the war, and even from northern South Sudan."
Faced with such an example, Father Kizito doesn't hesitate to admit that "in Dr. Catena's commitment, I see the Gospel coming alive. Tom is a rock. He is serene, calm, strong, he is one of those people who, if one day they were all to flee, would probably be the last to leave. And he seems to be in good company because the more than two million Nuba all seem intent on staying, on resisting.
When the Comboni missionaries were expelled from the entire region in 1982, only three catechists remained: Paul, Gibril, and Moussa. Thirteen years later, in 1995, on the eve of his first trip to the Nuba Mountains, Kizito received a specific assignment from Monsignor Antonio Menegazzo, his fellow Comboni missionary, the first missionary to arrive in the region in 1952 and later apostolic administrator bishop of El Obeid: to find Paul, Gibril, and Moussa. And so it happened. Kizito, arriving in August 1995 on a small seven-seater plane, took out the piece of paper with the three names and, he tells us, "I asked if they knew anyone with that name. And one said: 'I am Gibril.'" From those initial ten families, the community grew first to a hundred, then to a thousand. Recently I saw Paul again, who is now 85 years old but who remained in the most remote area of the Nuba, the furthest from everyone, where he trained generations of catechists. There was a large Christian community here in the Nuba: a faith perhaps with a essential formation, but more than catechism,” Kizito concludes, “I believe this is important: welcoming and protecting that disposition whereby, when something comes from Jesus, it is right, one accepts it and follows it.”
