AFRICA PEACE MAKER

A SCOTS priest has been given the task of helping the people of war-torn Sudan recover from the traumas of the bloody conflict.

Father Paul Boyle has spent years there caring for hundreds of thousands of hopeless refugees, displaced by brutal fighting. And now Sudan's leaders have asked him to help the country get back on its feet.

Father Boyle, from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, said: "The problem they face is this - you can take the person out of the war but it's difficult to take the war out of the person. That's where my expertise comes in."

The Mill Hill Missionary has been driven to near-suicide and alcoholism since leaving Scotland in 1984.

Civil war broke out in Sudan 1983 when the Sudan People's Liberation Army set up the Sudan People's Liberation Movement to lead the battle against the north.

More than 1.5 million people were killed in the 22-year-civil war.

But on January 9, leaders of the SPLA signed a historic peace agreement in Nairobi with their enemies of the north.

Among them was Dr John Garang, commander-in-chief of the SPLA who has become Vice President in the new government.

He met Father Boyle in Kenya and appealed directly for his help.

The two will sit down again face to face tomorrow in the city of Rumbek - the headquarters of the SPLA - to discuss the future.

Father Boyle, 42, now based in Kenya, first went to Sudan in 1989 - when he was immediately arrested in government-held territory and held in a cell for a day.

"They told me I was being held under suspicion of espionage, and when I said I was from Scotland, they thought I was working undercover for Scotland Yard," he said.

"I was expelled from Malakal and sent to Khartoum where I spent the next eight years including four as a parish priest at a displaced camp of 300,000 people in the desert, trying to keep them alive. But after all that time I was badly traumatised and it didn't help that I had been arrested 12 times and charged twice with spying. Like anyone who suffers from trauma you often end up suffering from addiction.

"For a time I was hitting the drink hard and had feelings of helplessness and despair. For a short time I gave up and felt life was not worth living."

For the last four years Father Boyle has run his own project called Healing the Healers - working with church leaders and victims in Sudan and Kenya who have been exposed to the horrors of conflict.

He is now setting up another programme called Holistic Trauma Healing and will offer his services to government leaders around Africa.

He has been back in Sudan recently, helping in the refugee camps of Darfur. Now he is ready to go back to take on a more hands-on role with the men responsible for much of terror.

"I try to teach people about TLC, which we know as tender, loving care. But here the letters mean 'traumatised', 'leadership' and 'conflict'," he said. "They have seen enough war and conflict to last a dozen lifetimes, now the leadership need to show TLC to the people. And hopefully I can help."

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