Documents obtained under the Privacy Act (.pdf 169Mb or ZIP 52Mb) and available from the website of the People’s Commission on Immigration Security Measures indicate that Mr. Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, was incarcerated in Sudan on the request of Canadian officials. While in prison in December 2003, he was interrogated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Since his release in July 2006, he has been blocked from returning home to Montréal.

Mr. Abdelrazik’s family lives in Montréal and has not seen him since he left for Sudan in 2003. Human rights activists and citizens groups have began a public campaign to repatriate Abousfian Abdelrazik. Project Fly Home, raised enough funds from at least 171 Canadian citizens to purchase a airline ticket to take Abdelrazik back to Canada. His ticket is scheduled for April 3, 2009.

UPDATE: Abousfian returned home to Montréal on Saturday June 27, 2009 around midnight after a six-year forced exile in Sudan, where he experienced torture, imprisonment without trial, and over one year trapped in the Canadian embassy. All with the involvement of Canadian officials.

- Abdelrazik pleads to clear his name: ‘I want to live like a normal Canadian — G&M July 24, 2009

- Abdelrazik describes details of interrogation in Sudan — Toronto Star July 23, 2009

- Abdelrazik ‘very glad to come back home’ — CBC June 27, 2009

+++

Below is a timeline taken from the ‘Project Fly Home’ campaign organizers:
1990
Mr. Absoufian Abdelrazik, flees the violence of a civil war and coup in Sudan, arrives in Canada and is granted political refugee status.

1995
Mr. Absoufian Abdelrazik becomes a Canadian citizen.

2000
After the arrest of Ahmed Ressam, the millennium bomber, Mr. Abdelrazik and other Muslims living in Montreal come under close surveillance by Canadian counter-terrorism agents. Mr. Abdelrazik says it amounts to harassment so severe that he calls the Montreal police for help. He is never charged with any crime, denies any connection with al-Qaeda and testifies for the prosecution at Mr. Ressam’s trial.

2003
MARCH 23: He arrives in Khartoum from Montréal, travelling on his Canadian passport to visit his mother.

SEPTEMBER 12: Mr. Abdelrazik is arrested and imprisoned by Sudan.

DECEMBER: Interrogated by people he identifies as “Canadians” while in prison. Mr. Abdelrazik says he was repeatedly beaten and tortured. In an affidavit this year, he admits to telling his interrogators “what they wanted to hear.”

2004
JULY: Mr. Abdelrazik is released from prison after 11 months. He was expected to fly home to Canada with a Lufthansa-Air Canada ticket paid for by his family. A Canadian diplomat was to escort him on temporary travel papers because his passport had expired.

JULY 23: The flight home is scrapped at the last minute when Air Canada and Lufthansa refuse to carry him on the grounds that he has been added to the U.S. no-fly list, even through routing doesn’t involve a U.S. stop. Mr. Abdelrazik is not told about the U.S. no- fly list but is told that the government of Canada is powerless to tell airlines to transport him. He’s required to live in a police-owned and monitored house.

JULY 29:  In DFA Case Note 123, senior consular official Odette Gaudet-Fee, says when Mr. Abdelrazik’s wife inquired about chartering a private plane, she was told that the government would not pay for this.

SEPTEMBER 29: Senior Sudan official warns Canadian diplomats that “Sudan realized however that keeping an innocent man in detention was a human-rights violation. So far, they had prevented him from having access to news media and HR organizations but this could not go on forever. He thought that protest and public attention to this story would impact adversely on both our countries. In particular, it would tarnish Canada’s reputation in Arab countries.”

OCTOBER 10: Sudan offers a private aircraft to get Abdelrzik to Canada if Canada will contribute to costs and provide escorts.

OCTOBER 31: Canada is not prepared to contribute to the cost of the flight and also not prepared to provide an escort for Mr. Abdelrazik on the flight.

NOVEMBER 24:Then-PM Paul Martin arrives in Khartoum on a Canadian military Airbus with seating for more than 150. Embassy officials thwart Mr. Abdelrazik’s efforts to meet with PM and the aircraft leaves with scores of empty seats. A senior official travelling with the prime minister meets Mr. Abdelrazik.

2005
APRIL 13: Canada’s senior diplomat in Sudan agrees to tell Mr. Abdelrazik “I can assure you that the Govt of Canada has had no involvement whatsoever in any decision to place your name on such lists.”

MAY 9: Senior Foreign Affairs diplomat warns that Mr. Abdelrazik “has reached the end of his rope, he has no money, no future, very little freedom and no hope. Should this case break wide open in the media, we may have a lot of explaining to do.”

JULY 26: Sudan Minister of Justice issues Mr. Abdelrazik a formal document exonerating him. We “did not find any evidence’” linking him to terrorism or crime or al-Qaeda.

OCTOBER 5: With a Canadian delegation scheduled to visit, Mr. Abdelrazik is arrested again and detained, without charge. Canadian consular access is denied. But an undated and heavily redacted Canadian Foreign Affairs document marked secret and carrying a CSIS stamp says he was imprisoned “at our request,” but it isn’t clear whether that was the first, second or both times.

DECEMBER 16: In a cable marked secret, diplomats warn Ottawa that “further delay in this case risks the perception of complacency on the part of the Government should this case become public, especially given our repeated observations regarding Mr. Abdelrazikis increasingly desperate frame of mind.”

2006
JULY 20: He is released from prison after 10 months as the Sudanese say they cannot hold an “innocent” man. A Canadian diplomat, in a message to Ottawa, says he “appears to be a broken man,” but Ottawa tells diplomats to tell Mr. Abdelrazik they won’t give him a passport or travel documents.

JULY 23: The United States formally designates him a terrorist “for his high-level ties to and support for the al-Qaeda.”

JULY 31: He’s added to UN Security Council terrorist no-fly blacklist by the U.S. All his personal assets are frozen. The ban, however, specifically exempts travel for return to the country of citizenship, for the fulfillment of a judicial process and for other justifications (such as for medical and religious purposes) if allowed by the U.N.

DECEMBER 16: A secret document sent from Khartoum to senior Foreign Affairs and security officials in Ottawa says, “Abousfian Abdelrazik was arrested on September 10, 2003 [word blacked out] recommendation by CSIS, for suspected involvement with terrorist elements.”

2007
MAY 15: Mr. Abdelrazik is called by the Sudanese secret police for an interrogation by a visiting FBI anti-terrorist team. He asks for Canadian consular help, but Ottawa expresslyforbids diplomats in Khartoum to escort him. After the interrogation, Canadian diplomats report to Ottawa that Mr. Abdelrazik was told that “he will never return to Canada” unless he co-operates fully.

NOVEMBER 6: In the process of examining Aboudelrazik’s request for de-listing from the U.N. list, CSIS declared that it had “no current substantial information regarding Mr. Abdelrazik”.

NOVEMBER 15: RCMP anti-terrorism branch formally tells Harper government that it has “conducted a review of its files and was unable to locate any current and substantive information that indicates Mr. Abdelrazik is involved in criminal activity.”

2008
FEBRUARY 22: Despite RCMP’s exoneration, CSIS’s most recent terrorist update summary still says Abdelrazik received training at the Khalden camp in Afghanistan in 1996 and is important Islamic Jihad activist.”

MARCH 25: Maxime Bernier, the Canadian foreign minister, visits Khartoum. His chief of staff and MP Deepak Obhrai meet with Mr. Abdelrazik, who lifts his shirt to show scars that he says were from torture and beatings while in prison.

APRIL: Sean Robertson, a senior foreign affairs official, formally writes to Mr. Abdelrazik’s lawyers assuring them that the government of Canada had already “transmitted our support for Mr. Abdelrazik’s de−listing request to the 1267 Committee,” (the Security Council resolution bearing that number that blacklists known al−Qaeda members).

APRIL 18: Sean Robinson, director of consular affairs in the Department of Foreign Affairs, confirms in writing that “we stand by the commitment” to “ensure that [Mr. Abdelrazik] has an emergency travel document to facilitate his return to Canada.”

APRIL 20: Senior Transport Canada intelligence and security officials, in a classified document say, “Senior government of Canada officials should be mindful of the potential reaction of our U.S. counterparts to Abdelrazik’s return to Canada as he is on the U.S. no-fly list.” Transport Canada documents state it was the U.S. no-fly lists that prevented Mr. Abdelrazik’s return to Canada when he was released from prison in July 2005.

APRIL 29: Mr. Abdelrazik seeks refuge in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. Mr. Bernier grants him “temporary safe haven,” suggesting that he poses no threat to the embassy but may be at risk of re-imprisonment in Sudan.

SEPTEMBER 15: Etihad Airlines agrees to fly Mr. Abdelrazik from Khartoum to Toronto via Abu Dhabi on this date. The Canadian government fails to deliver on its promise, first made in 2004, that Mr. Abdelrazik, like all Canadian citizens, is entitled to emergency travel documents to return home.

DECEMBER 23: Passport Canada adds a new condition – a fully paid-for ticket, not just a confirmed reservation – must be presented before Mr. Abdelrazik will be issued emergency travel documents. Mr. Abdelrazik is destitute. The government says it must seize his assets and anyone who gives him any money is committing a crime.

2009
MARCH 12: One hundred and sixteen Canadians break federal law by contributing towards the purchase of a plane ticket for Mr. Abdelrazik with a departure date set for April 3. The government has untilthen to issue travel documents.

(Most of this timeline appears in a March 5, 2009 article entitled “Exiled in Khartoum: CSIS asked Sudan to arrest Canadian, files reveal” written by Globe and Mail Correspondent Paul Koring. Additional sources, Globe and Mail.)

MARCH 20: CSIS posted a request on its website asking SIRC to investigate its role in Mr. Abdelrazik’s detention in Sudan, hoping to clear itself of allegations that it had acted inappropriately.

MARCH 27: Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon says Mr. Abdelrazik must have his name removed from the 1267 UN no-fly list before the government will issue travel documents.

APRIL 3: On the day Mr. Abdelrazik is booked to fly home, Minister Cannon uses his discretionary powers under the Canadian Passport Order to bar Mr. Abdelrazik from coming home. He continues to wait in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum.

APRIL 28: One year anniversary of Mr. Abdelrazik’s “temporary safe haven” in Canadian embassy in Khartoum.

MAY 7: Court hearing begins in Ottawa where Mr. Abdelrazik is seeking a mandatory order to compel the government to bring him back “on any safe means at its disposal.” The motion is based on section 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which states, “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada.”

Here is the transcript of the audio report with a few added photos:

Exactly three weeks ago, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Darfur. Like many people in Sudan, I was glued to the television set to view the announcement. It was 4 p.m.

An anonymous blogger who worked for an international aid agency in Darfur wrote on AlertNet, that one hour after the announcement was made, his agency received a phone call. “The Government had revoked our licence and we must close all our programmes. No further explanation. First thing the next day we were told all international staff had to leave Darfur by 4 p.m.” They had to be out of the area exactly 24 hours after the ICC announcement.

According the the UN’s Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 13 International Agencies were expelled:
- Action contre la faim
- Solidarité
- Save the Children (UK & US)
- Medecins Sans Frontières (NL & FR)
- CARE International
- Oxfam (GB)
- Mercy Corps
- International Rescue Committee
- Norwegian Refugee Council
- CHF International
- PADCO
- And three Sudanese relief agencies were also closed.

The International Herald Tribune reported on March 21, that armed men looted Oxfam’s Darfur Warehouse, “stealing all of its contents.” While in Malual Kon, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal State where Mercy Corps has a compound, I learned that all of their equipment from their Darfur and Khartoum operations were seized since their expulsion: computers, communication radios, everything. Since their communication system was centred in Khartoum, they have had to reorganize their communication strategy for their activities in Southern Sudan.

Internews—which is an International NGO affiliated with Mercy Corps—coordinates Nhomlaau FM in Malual Kon. It has three other community radio stations in Southern Sudan. One of these is located in  Kurmuk, Blue Nile State, which is within the North/South transitional area. The radio station there was nearly closed along with Mercy Corps, but they managed to continue broadcasting by arguing their independence of the US-based NGO.

I’ve been travelling throughout Southern Sudan for the past four weeks and was recently in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal state, which shares its northern border with Southern Darfur. According to the IRIN News Network, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal is expecting an influx of Internally Displaced People (or IDPs) from Southern Darfur as conditions are expected to deteriorate as a result of the expulsion of the 16 NGOs. Although the report suggests that the UN and the Southern Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission are “are preparing for potential inflows of Darfuris,”  their arrival will certainly put a strain on the area’s already scarce infrastructure.

IDPs returning to Northern Bahr el_Ghazal in 2007 (courtesy IOM)

Since 2007, there has been a coordinated transport of hundreds of thousands of IDP returnees to Northern Bahr el-Ghazal from Southern Darfur and Khartoum. These people are returning to their homeland after being displaced during Sudan’s other civil war that ended with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. Many are returning to rural locations without access to sanitation, safe drinking water, clinics or schools.

According to the International Organization for Migration (or IOM), many villages in the area have had a rate of IDP Returnees as high as 80-90% of their pre-2007 population. 2007 is the year when organized returns of Internally displaced people began in earnest with the help of IOM and the government of Southern Sudan.

waterhole in War Faj, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal

Access to safe drinking water is already in short supply throughout the state for those already living there. The influx of Darfuris could cause serious tensions at existing water sources and could lead to localized conflict. Waterborne infectious diseases, like cholera and meningitis, could become a serious problem.

To make matters worse, the rainy season is approaching. By the end of April, road travel will be become difficult and delivery of goods will be seriously impaired. Rain is a serious matter in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal and neighbouring states. During the 2008 rainy season the state experienced serious flooding. During my time in the area, I’ve driven past remnants of nearly half a dozen temporary camps where thousands were displaced to during last year’s flooding.

Flood Map of Northern Bahr el-Ghazal and Warrap States (courtesy UNJLC, Juba)

A  March 1, 2009 report from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, writes, “The potential movement of 1.5 million displaced Darfur residents into Southern Sudan’s Northern and Western Bahr el-Ghazal states, due to disruptions in humanitarian assistance, presents a severe threat to food security in the two states.”

During a visit to Darfur four days after the ICC arrest warrant was issued President Al-Bashir said that his decision to expel the 16 NGOs from Darfur was “irreversible.” The position of the Khartoum government has not changed since, although they have vowed to replace the international NGOs with Sudanese agencies and end the need for aid in Darfur within the year. No clear solution is in sight.

++++

An interesting article about Fallout Scenarios as a result of the expulsion of 16 NGOs from Darfur can be found here.

We drive for one and a half hours, averaging 25 km/hour, along dirt roads that will become impassable during the rainy season, which is expected to begin toward the end of April and last until October. As we approach the village of Lurcuk, Community Health Workers place the megaphone speaker onto the roof of the vehicle and announce their arrival. We continue toward the big tree by the local clinic and its borehole to set up registration and immunization tables.

Registration starts immediately after a public education information session about immunization. Mothers and their children continue to arrive. The two Community Health Workers who give the needles into the arms and legs of the villagers, and dispense the polio drops into the mouths of children work at a frantic pace for four hours non-stop. I am amazed at their patience in dealing with screaming and crying children who resist their efforts.

In total, 276 children were immunized for various childhood diseases like measles, tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, tetanus and 167 women of childbearing years received tetanus vaccines.

Below is a portrait gallery of villagers from Lurcuk, North Tonj County, Warrap State, Southern Sudan, who just received vaccinations under the big tree by the local clinic. They are each holding a piece of paper, on which is written their name, the vaccines they received and the date. All the photos were taken on Friday, March 21, 2009.

My flight from Europe to Africa, was supposed to include me, the white caucasian, bathing happily in a sea of black Africans. Swahili was to dominate the conversational soundscape with other African languages floating among the seats of those returning passengers with connecting flights to Addis Ababa, Kampala, or Dar es Salaam. But on this flight, pale-skinned Europeans dominated the landscape with English, German, Dutch and French languages competing for dominance. There were no more that 5% African representation on the second segment of the flight! I hope it’s because East Africans choose to fly on an African airlines like Kenya Airways, Ethiopian Airlines or Air Tanzania but I couldn’t prevent myself from wondering if there are more people living in Africa who travel on foot as refugees or internally displaced people than the number who fly overseas to other continents! So even before arriving, I felt colonial; that unwanted inheritance.

Midway across the North Atlantic The DC 111 is flying at 913 km/hour (ground speed) at an altitude of 10670 metres. The exterior temperature is -46 degrees Celcius. In 3 hours and 5 minutes it will be 7h36 in Amsterdam. The sun rises on Nairobi but before arriving there, there is still the Sahara Desert to cross.

I used to think the Sahara was untamable with its dunes flowing across the landscape at the mercy of the wind, burying anything it its way. The pyramids at Giza and their guardian Sphinx are prime examples of the desert’s tenacity. I don’t believe that anymore, at least in the short term. During the second leg of the flight over southern Egypt just a few hundred kilometres from the border with Sudan, dark circles blemished the otherwise uniform desert brown. Crop circles in the middle of nowhere at the end of a ribbon road that slices the landscape. But for how long. Long ago, it must have been a resting place for nomadic tribesmen. A converging oasis in the desert to forge alliances and replenish thirsty camels. Some of the circles have already lost the battle with the sand. When will the next wind storm overtake them all and remind us yet again that nature will prevail.

Later, while in Sudanese airspace, the flight crossed paths with the mighty Nile. A glimmering strip of moisture in an otherwise parched sea of sand. I will set foot on the banks of this mythical river once I arrive in Juba on February 26. But first, eight days in Nairobi

I am now comfortably staying at the Miti Mingi Guest House.

On February 16, I catch a KLM flight to Nairobi, Kenya. Fifteen hours of flying with a three-hour stopover in Amsterdam to get a scent of Europe before heading for Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time. Very exciting! Now I have an itinerary to plan out, a budget to establish, a what-to-bring list to determine, people to contact…

This all started with the desire to better understand what happens to a place once 21 years of civil war slips into the past with the signing of a peace agreement. In Sudan that translates with the January 9, 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) between the ruling government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M). I introduce this in a previous post.

So from Nairobi Airport, I will take a cab the Miti Mingi bed & breakfast in in the Muthangari neighbourhood of the city. I chose this place because it was referred by a friend of a friend’s friend. And because it is in the same par of town as the Sudan Radio Service (SRS), an “independant media dedicated to peace and development in Sudan” that I will be collaborating with in Nairobi, where it is based, and in Juba where it has journalist correspondents. It is also near the offices of Africa 24 Media, whose directors I will meet with to discuss their work in the African media landscape. As a Africa neophyte, starving for information about the continent mostly abandonned by North American media, A24 covers interesting stories I should have already known about but hadn’t. There may be place for collaboration.

(source: Sud Academy 2008)

While in Nairobi, I will also be visiting Sud Academy, a school established to provide a basic education for the child refugees from Southern Sudan who found themselves in Nairobi after fleeing the civil war. I’ve been in conversation with Jane Roy, who, with her husband—and Canadian Member of Parliament— Glen Pearson, started Canadian Aid for Southern Sudan (CASS).  I will be interviewing Jane Roy before I leave about CASS’ recent trip to Southern Sudan in January 2009. CASS provides funding to Sud Academy and have recently returned from their anual January visit  there. I will be meeting up with Kellee Jacobs, a CASS volunteer at the school. She is keeping a blog, The World as a Stage, about her experiences there.

After about ten days in Nairobi, I fly to Juba, where the journey continues. While in Southern  Sudan, I will visit and write about several United Nations managed projects in the region. I have a contract with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to write “Stories from the Field” about these projects. In Juba, I expect to visit UNICEF‘s Mine and Unexploded Ordances Risk Education project. I will also meet with SRS journalists, and other media outlets to gain a better understanding in the role the media plays in promoting and maintaining the tenuous peace in Southern Sudan as mandated in the CPA.

I will also be providing radio reports on a weekly basis on CKUT 90.3fm’s weekly Amandla. The pieces may be replayed on the station’s daily Morning After shows (7h00-9h00) and on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio . short video peices will be produced for the National Film Board of Canada’s CitizenShift web portal in the dossier: A Tenuous Peace. I will also write a couple of articles in The Dominion magazine. So stay tuned for lots of mobile journalism in the next three months.

From Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, I expect to fly north to visit another UNICEF project in Abyei, one of the transitional areas just north the border between Southern Sudan and the rest of the country. The project provides support to basic education in the three transitional areas: Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. Via email, we are establishing the itinerary and schedule to get to these project areas. If all goes well, I expect to then go to Aweil in Northern Bahr el Ghazal State, where the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) runs the Basic Infrastructure and Livelihood Support to Highly Impacted Communities of Return in the area. I am also planning on visiting a World Vision Tonj North Emergency Response and Returnee Assistance Project a bit further south in Warrap State.

So much to do. So little time: ten weeks in all. Come along for the ride.

The population of Juba his increased exponentially since 2005 with returning refugees and internally displaced persons and with the influx of international aid workers to the city. Some of the interviews provide articulate insight into the local population’s perspective of the huge influx of foreign capital to the city and some of the hidden cultural effects of this capitalist development.

Shot on location in Juba, South Sudan in May 2007. This 20-minute version was submited for his Master’s of Arts dissertation in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmith’s College, London, Britain by Jason Brooks.

Time/Money = Change — Jason Brooks — 22:46

Since the beginning of October, I’ve come to Le Cheval Blanc on Wednesday evenings to initiate a ritual meeting place among friends to establish tradition where non existed before. A recurrent gathering—without notice—to linger over a pint of locally brewed beer and discuss our respective projects and catch up on each other’s lives. Come after 17h00 and, barring lateness, I will be there. In my absence,  carry on without me.

This ‘tradition’ is important now because I’m feeling somewhat shaky these days, having left much of my former professional self behind to begin anew. Bye bye book publishing. It was nice knowing you. We shared ten great years. But without the meetings, editorial schedules and launch deadlines, I find myself with blank agenda pages and insufficient diversity on any given day. Since I closed the bed & breakfast 77 days ago, the early breakfasts, dirty laundry and evening check-ins cease to guide my days with their punctual familiarity. And now I’ve moved to another part of town. Terra incognita. A potentially dreadful place if one is captivated by fear of the unknown. A place of potential crisis if left untethered. A panic attack circling like a pack of hyenas. A pocketed paper bag in the onslaught of hyperventilation. Luckily for me I thrive on change but it sometimes takes a bit of adjustment.

I don’t fear the horizon ahead of me, of falling of the edge of the world. I enjoy facing the open ocean imagining the current taking me toward the rest of the world. These are moments when everything is possible. It’s the potential of it all that makes new projects worth pursuing. And it’s precisely this potential that leads me to Africa or more precisely to Sudan, a place devastated by post-colonial war. I read in this morning’s newspaper that just yesterday, at the National Forum on Darfur, held in Khartoum, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir called for a ceasefire in Darfur and the immediate disarmament of the Janjaweed militias 1, 2, 3, 4. Maybe the western region of Sudan will grasp the tenuous peace that continues in South Sudan, where I’m headed at the end of January or early February.

South Sudan may be one of the more remote and underdeveloped regions of the world but it is on the cusp of something new. Something great. Great because it has been at peace with the central Sudanese government since 2005, after two debilitating civil wars (1956-1972 & 1983-2005). Great because four million refugees are returning to their traditional homeland. Great because schools are being built to educate the girls and boys who have now experienced peace for the first time. Great because elections are coming in 2009 and the population is learning about democratic processes by state-sponsored, privately owned, and community media. Great because in 2011, the South can hold a referendum( as mandadted in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the northern Government of Sudan (GoS) and the southern-based Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement) that can give the South independence from the rest of Sudan. I’m not adverse to separation but I’d like to ask the South Sudanese what they want in their context.

Everyone knows that holding elections or referenda after decades of war can be volatile in the best of times, but its potential for holding onto the peace is palpable. I want to be there, as it unfolds, to witness, capture and understand this potential.

South Sudan, as a political entity in and of itself, is without tradition. Its existence is new, since the 2005 peace agreement. I am not referring to the traditions of the various community and ethnic groups, like the Dinka, Nuer, and 68 others listed by The Gurtong Peace Trust. Their respective traditions go back farther than anyone can accurately refer to. Theirs are oral histories that have been passed on through generations since the beginning of time.

The tradition I’m referring to is in the tradition of peace and co-habitation within a geographic area and political setting that did not really exist before the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The Agreement was signed on January 9, 2005, beginning a 6-year interim period and establishing South Sudan as an autonomous region within Sudan.

Now midway in this interim period, Sudan is preparing for elections. The Fifth National Population Census is underway to reveal the demographics of the country but I’m particularly interested in the South. How many people actually make up its population? A difficult questions considering about half of the four million refugees have yet to return to their ancestral lands. Some are internally displaced within Sudan, others are refugees in neighbouring countries,  while still others have taken refuge in Canada, the United States, and other western countries. How can so many people who are still on the move be accurately counted? And how accurate must the count be to consider election results fair and democratic? There hasn’t been an accurate census taken in Sudan since 1983 before the beginning of its 2nd civil war.

To give you an idea of the challenges, Southern Sudan’s land mass is huge with an area of about 640,000 square kilometres (about the size of France), with a population estimated somewhere between 7.5 and 9.7 million. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFDA), the population is expected to increase by as much as three million in the next six years due to the natural increase in population and the return of refugees and internally displaced people. Where will they all live? What infrastructure is needed to accommodate their arrival? What will they do when they get to where they are going? Humanitarian and development aid is needed in South Sudan to provide for those who are already there, so how much more is needed to accommodate the returnees? These are questions that are rarely discussed in Western media so how else is one supposed to genuinely understand without interviewing the few that follow the case closely and talking to the people living through the tumultuous changes? Although the peace holds a huge potential to rejuvenate a wounded land and its scattered people, its erratic interpretation by those who’ve only known war—and the geopolitical wrangling by those interested in the South’s resources—can foment crisis conditions reminiscent of the recent past.

If I can share challenges and successes of the peace process in written, audio and video reports and documentary films, which few others seem to be doing, then maybe it will be a little easier (if ever so slightly) for peace to settle in and make itself comfortable. That’s another reason I want to go.

Kapuscinski writes in the aforementioned book that experience has taught him that “situations of crisis appear more dire and dangerous from a distance than they do up close.” I tend to agree. He continues in the chapter about Zanzibar, that mythical island off the coast of Kenya, about when he chartered a plane from Dar es Salaam to Zanzibar to report the previous day’s coup d’état there.  He adds, “Our imaginations hungrily and greedily absorb every tiny bit of sensational news, the slightest portent of peril, the faintest whiff of gunpowder, and instantly inflate these signs to monstrous, paralyzing proportions.” Corporate media thrive on this sensationalism but I want to get past it; closer to the truth. However, Kapuscinski doesn’t denigrate the havoc that can reign during such times. He wrote “about those moments when calm, deep waters begin to churn and bubble into general chaos [...] it is easy to perish by accident, because someone didn’t hear something fully or didn’t notice something in time. On such days, the accident is king; it becomes history’s true determinant and master.”

I’ve never been prone to accidents and I plan on keeping it that way.