Tomo Križnar: “I accept borders but not the unnecessary ones”

Photo: Tomo Križnar archive

“I followed my yearning”

September 2011

He always liked reading and was curious. “I never believed that in my culture I can fully express all my human potentials and capacities – since my early years I have had a feeling that more could be felt and comprehended. Already as a student he travelled by hitchhiking around the world, by motorbike in Africa, by moped in South America and a by bicycle in Asia. As he says, he is not the only traveler in the family since his grandfather on his mother’s side was a wood trader and floated logs down the Sava and the Danube rivers into the Black Sea. Apart from courage, innovativeness is also embedded in his genes. “My grandfather on my father’s side was a mayor, he brought iron plow, a bridge and soybeans to the village of Okroglo in Upper Carniola. Farmers were chasing him with forks convinced that he brought the devil to the village that will disrupt the established order.”

First encounter with the Nuba in 1980

Shortly before he joined the army in 1979 he saw the front cover of the book “Nuba, die Leute wie von die anderen Sternen” (The Nuba, People as From Some Other Stars) by Leni Riefenstahl in a display window of a bookshop in Maribor. He followed the call and together with a donkey, two goats and four chickens managed to sneak into hardly accessible mountains of the Kordofan province which were closed to foreigners already at that time. He came naked between naked people in an environment resembling the Christmas crib as imagined by the Christians. “I felt instinctively that I have to take off all the junk of civilization and get rid of Westerner’s mind. Already then I felt that Western reason would bring the world into environmental crisis, social distress and spiritual disaster from which all its agitators combined would not be able to find an easy way out …”

He started helping indigenous peoples and cultures in Africa as well as in Tibet, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania and both Americas by visiting them without machines and oil, on the bike, carrying nothing but a camera.

During the two-month period of staying with “primitive barbarians”, after which he contracted an unknown tropical disease, he experienced by his own senses that European conceptions of “wild savages who indulge in the most vile of passions in the wilderness” are merely the remnants of lies by European anthropologists who were sent to the Third world by colonial metropolises in the previous century in order to find justification for mass slaughtering of Indians, Aborigines, Eskimos and other indigenous peoples on occupied continents. Soon after that he experienced the greatest shock that completely changed his life. His new friends led him to the Kaka village by the Nile river that was bombarded by a Sudanese army airplane that morning. Among burnt huts he found remnants of at least a hundred chopped and charred bodies. In that moment he realized that the spirit of civilization based on machines and exploitation of non-renewable energy sources escaped out of the bottle and that not only his own people exterminate animals, plant species and people still connected with nature. 

Shocking images of the most hidden genocide have been revealed

Photo: Tomo Križnar

After he biked around the world he returned to the Nubas 19 years after his first encounter with them, sneaking with a bicycle through besieging rings of various armies and filming the proofs of the most hidden genocide.

When in December 2005 Janez Drnovšek, Slovenian president at that time, saw Križnar’s documentary “Nuba: Pure People,” he called him and asked him how he could contribute. “I told him that transaminases of the same cancer were already spreading in Darfur at that time as well as along the entire border between Northern and Southern Sudan and I offered myself to be his special delegate.”

After the United Nations convinced Drnovšek that presidential visit to a refugee camp in Darfur on the border between Chad and Sudan would not be safe, Drnovšek called Križnar to return back to Slovenia. But Tomo was not ready to give up and despite the danger he crossed the border between Chad and Sudan alone and recorded the war between Arabic authorities and various groups of Darfur rebels by cameras for five months – until observers of the African Union handed him over to the Sudanese military and security intelligence in July 2006. He was accused of spying and false reporting about Sudan and convicted to two years in prison. After two months spent in prison in El Fasher, Sudanese dictator Omar Bashir amnestied and exiled him on 6 September 2006.

For those who care

Photo: Tomo Križnar

Ever since, Križnar has been addressing everybody who cares. He has been warning that all areas between Northern and Southern Sudan where the last remaining indigenous people suffer due to the consequences of climate change has to be equipped with devices for finding water so that local people would be able to stay at home. Areas where there still is water should be equipped with video surveillance which would prevent wars for water that are being abused by western and eastern great powers for their own wars and the control over Sudanese oil reserves by using the tactics “kill a slave with another slave.”

In March 2009 he used funds gathered at the charitable concert of Slovenian and African musicians to purchase five video camera sets, small portable computers and satellite phones and returned to Darfur illegally. In cooperation with the humanitarian coordinator of Darfur rebels Suleiman Jamous he tought volunteers how to record and send evidence of violence to the media and the International Court of Justice in the Hague that prosecutes crimes against humanity. In May 2009 Jamous reported that in the areas known by everyone to be equipped with cameras there were no more reports of rapes and other worst atrocities.

Internet and cameras - digital senses

In December 2009 Križnar was joined by Klemen Mihelič with an idea of using miniature video cameras which are even more helpful to women in camps and on frontlines since they are easier to hide. In November 2010 they returned with satellite portable modems for even cheaper and more efficient transmission of information and this year they expanded video surveillance also to the Nuba mountains and the Blue Nile on the border between both Sudans. So along the entire border where due to the secession of Southern Sudan which was, apart from the USA, orchestrated also by EU member states, the Sudanese dictator Omar Hassan al Bashir, convicted of four worst crimes against humanity at the Hague Court, started fighting a new – maybe the last – war against African indigenous peoples on 6 June.

“Humanity, humanitarianism, nobility and nobleness are being lost in the West ever since we massively started to lose faith in God’s ability to see and hear everything,” says Tomo Križnar and warns that God that has become a little blind and deaf has to be assisted with digital senses. Insisting that profit is the main driving force of life on Earth will eat our planet away and kill everything natural, including natural peoples and cultures and in the end also our grandchildren if we fail to see, hear and feel the pain of transaminases with digital senses and cut off cancerous growths while there still is time.

Text by Hana Souček Morača, Sinfo 9, 2011 

Photo: Tomo Križnar archive