Sudanese Southerners Impatient for Peace
By TANALEE SMITH Associated Press Writer
JEBEL AULIA, Sudan, Nov 28, 2003 (AP ) — Peter Gat Kuoth has done well in the year since arriving at this refugee camp outside the Sudanese capital. Far from the chaos in his native southern Sudan, the tall 17-year-old has learned to read and write Arabic and English, and his school director praised his progress.
But Peter just glared into the dusty distance. “This is not my home. Why should I be happy?” he snapped, abruptly walking away.
Most in Jebel Aulia share his feelings – anger at being made homeless and impatient for peace between the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army on ending a north-south civil war that has split Africa’s largest country since 1983.
Negotiations resume Dec. 5, with hopes of an agreement ready for ratification by late December or early January – and, eventually, stability.
“We want peace so we can go back home,” said Henry Sabit Mauro, 43, restless in the shade of his family’s hut.
Mauro and his wife, Rosina Ernest, were medical technicians in Equatoria province before making the journey north 15 years ago. Now unemployed, they are struggling to raise eight children.
“You do your best. One day you find food, one day not,” said Ernest, 49, with a smile that she said was just a facade. “We survive only. That is all.”
The United Nations estimates that 3.5 million people from Sudan’s predominantly Muslim north – about a tenth of Sudan’s population – have fled to the Christian, animist-dominated south, while another 570,000 have sought refuge abroad, most in neighboring Kenya and Uganda.
Khartoum’s population of some 8 million now includes 2 million refugees, most of them in Jebel Aulia and three other massive camps outside the city, according to the government Humanitarian Aid Commission.
Jebel Aulia consists of thousands of squat, mud-and-straw huts that almost blend into the flat, brown earth. Bright blue shutters on a few huts are the only glimpse of color in the camp. The small homes must be shored up after rainfall.
Women and children are the majority. Many husbands and fathers were killed in the war or stayed behind to fight.
Some of the few males find work at nearby farms; others make the hot 28-mile commute to Khartoum on the few buses that service the area. Some women go to neighboring areas to clean homes or wash clothes.
The newcomers’ most striking contribution to Khartoum life is the Kwoto dance troupe, whose highly popular performances cater to every tribal and ethnic group north and south.
Performing for a laughing, applauding audience, girls in brown print skirts and boys in leopard-print sashes sing to drums and a massive xylophone.
“Northerners thought we had no culture in the south, and we formed the group to show them otherwise,” said El-Fatih Atem, co-director of the troupe. “It serves as a bridge between the north and south.”
There are schools – though not enough, camp officials say – churches and mosques, and some shops. Water pumps provided by UNICEF are spaced a few hundred yards apart.
John Yak, a camp section head, said he suspects the patchy services and food supplies are deliberate – to keep the refugees from becoming permanent residents.
“If a person has no place to call home, nothing worth staying for, no jobs, schools, then when peace comes, they’ll move out and go back to the south,” Yak said.
“People back home have cattle, land, a way to make a living and feed themselves. We have nothing here,” he said.
Khaled Mohammed Faraj, director of the emergency department at the Humanitarian Aid Commission, said the country is too poor to do more, and that some camps have better food, water and medical treatment than parts of Khartoum.
“For most of us, when you have a room, four walls, that’s enough,” he said.
While they wait to return home, life goes on. A church choir sings from a mud-brick church, young girls in colorful dresses draw water from a pump, children laugh as they fly homemade kites above a dusty field.
Mary Nyaluk Chol, 42, says she longs for the home in Akobo province that she and her five children fled in 1991.
“How can’t I miss it? Look at how I’m living,” she said, gesturing at her two beds, battered cooking pots and clothes heaped on a mattress.
“Peace is the soul of everyone,” Nyaluk Chol said. “I believe peace will come from God. At whatever time it comes, I will go home.”