During a 7-week visit to Southern Sudan, I interviewed over a dozen Southern Sudanese men and women. Each person offers an intimate view of their lives during the 21-year civil war and since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. We get a glimpse into their family lives and their hope for a country with an uncertain future.

Alberto, tells about his education first in a Minor Seminary in Kenya, then in a Major Seminary in Khartoum toward his vocation of becoming a priest. He offers a glimpse into the family structure and community influence of being the son of the 19th wife of an Executive Chief. His hopes for a continued peace are revealed as are his willingness to take up arms should an unjust war return to Sudan.

Interview recorded in within the International Organization for Migration compound in Malualkon, Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Southern Sudan. the street scenes were filmed from the front passenger seat of an IOM vehicle in the town of Aweil. The photographs were taken during various visits to various villages in Northern Bahr el Ghazal in March 2009.

Special thanks to everyone at the Malualkon office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and to the villagers in the area who shared their stories with me during my visit.

Click video portraits to view others in the series.

I read in one of your blog entries that Sudan’s civil war between the Sudanese government and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army created 4 million refugees and one million Internally Displaced People. What is the difference between a refugee and an internally displaced person and what happens to them now that the war is over? Are they allowed to go back home, and if so, how do how do they get back and where do they live? Can you interview a refugee or IDP that has returned to give me an idea of what it is like for them?

ANSWER:

Sudan’s civil war between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) began in 1983 and ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The war lasted 21 years and displaced five million people, predominently from regions in the South where most of the fighting took place. Of these five million people, approximately four million were displaced internally to other places inside Sudan. The other one million people took refuge beyond Sudan’s borders to neighbouring countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Libya, Egypt).

Considering that refugees have crossed international boundaries, they are entitled to certain rights and international protection. But it’s still not easy being a refugee. Internally displaced people receive no such protection nor special rights because they remain under the jurisdiction of their own government and cannot claim extra rights not available to their compatriots. Internally displaced people are often in need of special protection because their governments may be unwilling or unable to protect them or may actually be the cause of their displacement.

According to Forced Migration Online, the recognition of ‘internal displacement’ gradually came to the fore in the 1980s and “became prominent on the international agenda in the 1990s [because of] the growing number of conflicts causing internal displacement.” The problem of internal displacement from the civil war in Sudan (the country with the largest number of displaced people in the world at the time) may have influenced the recognition by the UN. In 1992, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed his Special Representative on Internally Displaced Persons, Francis Mading Deng, himself a ‘southern’ Sudanese. Deng described internally displaced persons as:

persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of, or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognised state border.“

On page 82 in Douglas Johnson’s, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil War, Johnson writes of experiences of ‘southern’ Sudanese being displaced northward in peak numbers in the mid- to late-1980s which probably contributed to Boutros-Ghali’s decision to establish a Special Representative on Internally Displaced Persons:

Murahalin raids were at their peak in 1986 and 1987. Their impact in creating famine and spreading human rights abuses have been well documented. Not only were cattle taken, but Dinka villages were attacked and burned, civilians (including women and children) were killed or abducted and taken back to the North where they were traded or kept in slavery. Families split in order to survive: women, children and the elderly tried to follow the rail line from Aweil into Kordofan, and from there made their way to the displaced settlements around Khartoum.”

Forced Migration Review has an issue of its journal dedicated to guiding principles on internal displacement.

Johnson continues with a description of the same raids’ role in forcing young men to seek refuge in neighbouring countries because they:

were usually killed by the army or the Murahalin if they were caught in northern Bahr al-Ghazal or Southern Kordofan [so] they tended either to go with the cattle as far south as they could, or head east for Ethiopia, to settle in the refugee camp at Itang or join the SPLA (or, in sequence, both).”

Since the civil war ended in 2005, refugees and IDPs are returning to Southern Sudan. Not everyone wanted to return home soon after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement because of the novelty of peace and the fear that war may return. An article posted on the International Organization for Migration (IOM) website on March 31, 2006 gives a good idea of the desire Internally Displaced People in Khartoum to return home one year after the signing of the peace agreement. Photos below are courtesy of IOM.

IDPs returning to Southern Sudan 2008 (source: IOM)

IDPs returning to Southern Sudan 2008 (source: IOM)

IDPs returning to Southern Sudan 2008 (source: IOM)

According to a January 2009 report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), an estimated 2.24 million displaced people have returned home to Southern Sudan and border areas since 2005 . The report states that 81,432 IDPs were assisted home by the United Nations and their International Organization for Migration, which organized “more than 250 separate movements in 2007-2008″ that were mostly by land but also by air and river transport.

During a visit to Southern Sudan last March and April, I spoke with many people working with refugees and IDPs who said that not all IDPs had their returns assisted in the same way. While the IOM provided transportation (see above photos), and ‘non-food items’ like tarps, kitchen tools and jerry cans for water, other ‘spontaneous’ returnees were brought home by Southern Sudan government authorities who sent truck convoys northward to Khartoum. Those that returned on the convoys are considered spontaneous returnees because they basically had to decide quickly whether or not they wanted to to head southward by returning on the trucks and joining the convoys.

The IDMC report writes that 68,000 returnees went home during 2007 and 2008 from “other state authorities and other bodies [who] launched organized returns.” These government sponsored returns may have been politically motivated by the Government of Southern Sudan to assure that ‘southerners’ living in the north would get counted in the south and categorized as such by the census. Other spontaneous refugees are also those returnees who decide on their own to return to their homeland and do so without assistance.

The same report states that the total number of spontaneous returns of internally displaced people and refugees since 2005 is 1.95 million. Figures from last year alone equate to 456,155 returns of both spontaneous and organized refugees and IDPs.

Many still wait to be returned to their homelands: “511,597 Internally Displaced People have been registered by UN/IOM [in greater Khartoum, South Darfur and Wau, Western Bahr el Ghazal] as expressing their intention to return home.”

Living conditions of returnees

Returning home is no panacea for the inadequate living conditions experienced while displaced. An IRINnews article from May of this year notes that the returnees “still experience limited access to livelihood opportunities and basic services, among other obstacles.”

I visited many villages in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal state of Southern Sudan and interviewed dozens of people about their situations. One village elder told me that most of the people in the village have just returned in the past two years. He pointed out a man who had returned the previous week. The new arrival had no place to stay, had no family that he know of and did not have any goats or cows to help establish himself.

Waterhole in War Faj village, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, Southern Sudan (March 2009)

In his village of War Faj, where the temperature during my visit in March was 39°C, They did not have a proper well from which to get clean drinking water. A borehole was expected to be dug within about a month of my visit. In the meantime, women (who are responsible for getting water for their families) had two options for getting water: One is to take all day to fill one jerry can from their local water hole (above photo) or walk to the next well, three to four kilometres away and wait in line with other women to fill their cans and walk all the way back with excessive weight on their heads.

War Faj village centre, villagers of War Faj, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, Southern Sudan (March 2009)

Villagers of War Faj, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, Southern Sudan (March 2009)

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Refugees returning to Southern Sudan:

Rebuilding Hope

Without context, the article is no more than another record of ‘tribal’ violence in an African country already mired by war. Without prior knowledge of the situation in Southern Sudan—and the Canadian media provides very little—the details are meaningless. Actually, Southern Sudan is in a post-war renaissance that may lead to a lasting peace, self-determination and independence; if, and only if, they can hold on to the four-year-old peace that Le Devoir describes as “already fragile.”

It’s important that news about Southern Sudan gets reported because newsworthy stories in Sudan are not just related to Darfur or to the International Criminal Court indictment of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir, which deserve media attention for the international condemnation and reduction of human rights abuses that can come from exposure. But the situation in Southern Sudan is also in need of media scrutiny to support democratization and to help maintain a fragile peace deal that ended Africa’s longest civil war between the government of Sudan and the southern Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

Sudan’s second civil war since its 1956 independence from British colonialism, lasted 21 years and officially ended on January 9, 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in neighbouring Nairobi, Kenya. The CPA set up a power-sharing structure between the central government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement with the creation of a coalition Government of National Unity for all of Sudan and the Government of Southern Sudan; both with new interim constitutions. The agreement allows for the transformation of the Southern rebel forces into a regular army for semi-autonomous Southern Sudan with Joint Integrated Units of both armies in specific border areas. It prescribes oil revenue-sharing protocols and the establishment of a border between the north and south of Sudan, which will transect oil-producing areas.

An interim period of six years is established to implement the peace agreement, after which the South can hold a referendum to decide to remain within Sudan or to opt for complete independence. This is tentatively scheduled for 2011.

Approximately two million people were killed during the war and about four million were displaced from their homes to other regions of Sudan and nearly one million refugees fled to neighbouring countries. Since its independence 53 years ago, Sudan has been at peace for only 15 of those years (1972-1983: Addis Ababa Agreement, and since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement). Despite these statistics, almost no editorial space in Canadian media is given to the current situation in Southern Sudan.

Media attention of the region was particularly abundant during the 1988 famine when more than 250,000 people starved to death. But since the signing of the peace deal, the media has focussed more on the conflict in Darfur than the tenuous peace in the South. The negotiations of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with former southern rebels may have added to the current civil war in Darfur, whose own rebels wanted to be included in peace negotiations but were kept from it.

Sudan presently hosts the largest United Nations mission in the world (not including the UN African Union Mission in Darfur) with a mandate of “supporting the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement… [and] facilitating the voluntary return of refugees and displaced persons.”

Why is the movement of refugees and displaced people more newsworthy when they flee war and persecution than when they return to the homelands they were previously forced to flee? The story of returnees to the south is a mirror into the future for Darfur refugees whose current situation is a glimpse into the past for the Southern Sudanese still struggling with their new peacetime conditions.

According to Amnesty International, the civil war now raging in Darfur has displaced more than 2.25 million people since 2003, while IRIN reports that more than 2.24 million Southern Sudanese have returned to their homeland since 2005. Both are impressive migrations of people that require an important amount of support from the United Nations and other NGOs to help them resettle. Donor countries like Canada (via CIDA, page 16), which provides $66.8 million in humanitarian aid to Sudan, have an influence in Sudan’s future and also need journalistic scrutiny.

Those that return to their homeland in the south believe that the peace deal will endure and are eager to help rebuild the country, while many are still unwilling to return for fear of the reoccurrence of war. Those that do return, discover that—in many areas—living conditions in the war-ravaged south are more difficult than the areas where they are returning from: lack of sufficient drinking water, no schools, nor clinics and a difficult means for livelihood generation. Most arrive in their homeland after more than a decade of absence with little more than a few belongings. NGOs provide some with a tarp to set up a temporary shelter, blankets, water containers, cooking utensils and other non-food items, while the World Food Program provides food subsidies.

Being a refugee from war and a returnee to peace—both in Sudan—look all too similar and deserve equal attention. Media attention about Darfur needs to continue to help end the war there and it needs to begin about Southern Sudan to help it cling to its tenuous peace.

[translated and published in French in Le Couac)