Southerners in refugee camps outside Khartoum plan to return home

By TANALEE SMITH

JEBEL AULIA, Sudan, July 25, 2005 (AP) — The 75-year-old man sat under a crude awning, tying knots in a fishnet stretched out in front of him. But there was no fishing spot in sight.

A Sudanese internally displaced woman at the Al-Fateh camp. (AFP).

“It’s for when I return home,” Malong Wal said, pulling the nylon thread taut. “As soon as I get a place on a bus I will go.”

Wal, who is from Aweil in southern Sudan, echoed the desires of many in Jebel Aulia, a sprawling displaced persons camp 45 kilometers (28 miles) outside Khartoum. The camp, like three others around the capital, is home to tens of thousands of southern Sudanese who fled their homes during the 21-year civil war.

With a peace agreement signed in January and the former southern rebel leader, John Garang, installed in Khartoum as first vice president earlier this month, many southerners are anxious to leave the dusty camps where food is scarce and jobs are scarcer.

“I will return to my village in the Nuba Mountains,” said Morris Zakaria. “Here there is no work. We are very tired.”

A similar strain played around the camp: excitement over peace and the inauguration of John Garang as first vice president, dissatisfaction with the situation at the camp, and a pressing desire to leave.

The war caused an estimated 3.5 million southerners to flee north. Another 570,000 sought refuge abroad, most in neighboring Kenya and Uganda.

The camps outside Khartoum are impoverished cities that have arisen from the mud of the flat dusty plain.

At Jebel Aulia, homes are squat mud-brick abodes with straw thatched roofs; some with bright blue doors to contrast the pervasive brown surroundings. Goats wander freely; dogs sleep lazily in the shade. The wind is always blowing; plastic bags catch in the few weeds that spring up; papers and empty food containers lie in the streets. The camp has water pumps and electricity _ a recent development _ but there is no sewage system and few doctors or medical centers.

“There is disease, there is malnutrition. It is too difficult,” said Jemima Peter, 32, a community health coordinator. “Here I am suffering. We all are.”

Peter said she hopes to return to her home in Juba soon but she is paid in food, not money, so she can’t afford the trip.

On Friday, the U.N. envoy to Sudan said the “highest priority” would be given to facilitating the voluntary return of displaced people and refugees during the upcoming dry season.

“In that period, we expect about 600,000 of them to return. We will establish way stations and provide a minimum package of assistance,” Jan Pronk told the U.N. Security Council.

Until the day a return is possible, however, life goes on in Jebel Aulia and there is no sign that people are about to decamp. Zakaria was shin-deep in mud that he was patting into shape to rebuild the wall around his family’s compound, which collapsed in recent rainstorms. His family of seven cannot afford a relocation.

At a small marketplace with a low thatched roof to provide shade, men stacked vegetables into neat piles and women measured spices into small plastic bags. One woman crushed peanuts with a wooden block, swatting children away. On nearly every street, boys kicked soccer balls. Some walls had posters bearing photos of Garang and the words, “Towards the New Sudan.”

Outside a small coffee shop, Regina Alwal, 25, ground coffee beans with a wooden pestle before customers began arriving.

“I think it is safe now,” she said of her home city of Aweil, which she fled in 2000. “I will go home in October.”

At a bus depot on the edge of Khartoum on Monday, a few southerners were already making their trips south. Acha Ayeek paid 7,000 dinars (about US$28) for a one-way ticket to her home in Abiye province.

“I’ve been here so long that even my children have children,” she said. “I want to see what happened to my house, my fields.”

But her family is staying behind. Some of her children are in university and others have jobs they don’t want to leave. She said she will make sure things are set for their return.

Not everyone wants to leave the north, though, even at Jebel Aulia. Aisha Osman, 39, is a refugee from Darfur, where the situation is still too volatile to plan a return home. Osman, selling popsicles to schoolchildren from an orange cooler at the Nuba Market, wasn’t certain her region would ever see peace.

“For now, this is better. Anything is better than Darfur,” she said.