In 1990, Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years in South African prisons -- early on toiling in a lime quarry. A few weeks after his release, he spoke with the African Student Association in Cairo.

In the audience was an 18-year-old from Sudan named Justin Laku. Three months earlier, he had fled the mostly Arab-controlled Sudanese Military Academy in Khartoum. He snuck into Cairo on a train among hordes of Sudanese students arriving for university.

AWOL from the academy, he had simply disappeared without telling family or friends in order to protect them from later interrogation.

The academy suspected Justin, a Christian, of subversion, of planning to fight for the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against the Khartoum government. He had, indeed, joined the military to train to fight for "equality and justice and shared power" -- and to stop the Khartoum government's genocides.

At the time, Sudan was in its fourth genocide, he says, which began in 1990. The systematic attacks on African Muslims and Christian Sudanese fall into five distinct genocidal campaigns: 1967, 1987, 1990, 1997 and the 2003 genocide in Darfur, which is in full swing today.

"Darfur is Rwanda in slow motion," says Justin. As a teenager in Cairo, he saw that South Africa's apartheid was no different than the killings, rapes and bombings calculated to drive the indigenous Sudanese out of their own lands.

After the speech, he asked a question of Mandela, who had triumphed over apartheid (and was later to earn the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for his struggle).

Justin's question: "What can we learn from you and how can you help resolve the issue of the genocide in the Southern Sudan with equality and justice?"

Mandela's response: "I have no answer for your problem. You would be the best person to solve this problem, to come up with the answers, to champion this issue."

"I was disappointed, of course," Justin recalls. "Everybody looked at me. Nelson Mandela said, 'This was a good question.' However, he didn't give me the answer."

Today, speaking in his cramped Ottawa apartment, Justin says: "I have become hostage to this question."

He has since risked his life twice to talk to the rape victims and the hungry and thirsty in the squalid refugee camps in Darfur and in camps in Khartoum where his fellow Sudanese are crowded in their hundreds of thousands.

He grew up in a middle-class family in Juba, the capital city of Southern Sudan. The son of a pastor of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan who worked days as an auto mechanic, Justin says, "We had everything."

As with so many people caught up in civil war, his family history is entwined with the events of the day: "My parents were refugees in Uganda in the first phase of the 1967 genocide."

It was a cousin who got embroiled in the 1987 genocide -- a cousin the military academy had sent to England to study. He returned and was sent to Southern Sudan to fight against his own people, says Justin, the Christian freedom fighters in the SPLA.

Ambushed by the SPLA, his cousin and the other soldiers fought for two weeks, but out of food, water and ammunition, were captured by the SPLA. After two years' absence, their families gave them up for dead. But Justin heard his cousin on SPLA radio in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The officers at the military academy heard of his cousin's survival, too. "We're going to train you and then you're going to join the SPLA, too," they told Justin. "Nobody trusted me," he says. "They looked at me as an enemy from the inside."

On June 30, 1989, Omar al-Bashir seized power by coup and continued the persecutions. Justin says he was at a neighbour's house in a Christian area of Khartoum when police raided it during a routine check for alcohol.

"They started beating me up. They handcuffed me, beat me badly. You see this stick" -- he picks up a wooden baton from a bookshelf and jabs it in the air. "They beat me on the head, everywhere. There was a person at my back with a pistol hitting me on the head."

He was rescued by his brother-in-law, a captain in the army, who lived nearby.

Justin fled to Cairo with no money and only "my trust in God." There, he heard Mandela.

Later, he was accepted at Cairo University. But the first Gulf War started and Bashir supported Saddam Hussein's 1991 invasion of Kuwait. Justin's host country, Egypt, sided with Kuwait and the U.S. coalition.

Egypt punished Sudan by demanding that Sudanese studying in Cairo immediately pay tuition in U.S. dollars. Bashir summoned the students home. Students from embattled regions in Darfur, Nuba Mountains and Southern Sudan refused to go back.

"If we went back, that meant the regime of Bashir would control us," Justin explains. "We would be contained in Khartoum. We would be indoctrinated. We would be Islamized. We would be Arabized. You have to get rid of your culture, your language. It would mean that Islam saved you from paganism, from this backwards African culture."

"And, for us to study inside Sudan, you have to join the military service for two years first. And in these two years, you're going to be in the front line, fighting your own people in the SPLA who are fighting for justice and freedom."

With funding gone, Justin turned to NGOs for work and found a friend and financial supporter in Roger Star, head of the Cairo office of the U.S-based Ford Foundation charity. Justin earned a diploma in community development and business administration at American University.

For a while, he studied to train people to teach the Sudanese in Cairo's refugee camps. "Sudanese are not recognized as refugees. We are called displaced persons, people without status, in limbo." This is contrary to the 1983 Nile Basin Agreement, he says, which requires that Sudanese in Egypt are treated as Egyptians and Egyptians in Sudan are treated as Sudanese.

Far from equal, he says, many Sudanese suffer blatant prejudice in Egypt. "I was walking downstairs at American University and the person on the first or second floor would dump garbage on my head. Deliberately. And sometimes they will call you 'monkey, monkey,' or they will call you 'nigger, nigger.' "

Despite the obstacles, Justin finished a four-year degree in education from the Evangelical Theological College in Cairo -- along the way meeting staff at the Canadian Embassy there. A first secretary told him: "We need people like you in Canada. You're still young. Come to me when you're finished with your degree and I will help you. Look, you will make it in Canada."

In 1996 -- six years after arriving in Cairo -- he returned to the Canadian Embassy for help. He had a degree, a diploma, was fluent in English, Arabic, German, Swahili and Bari (his mother tongue), and could read and write Hebrew and Greek.

Three months later, he was accepted in Canada as a landed immigrant.

Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is donnabjacobs@hotmail.com

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007