Advertisement

Ethnic Tensions, Official Hostility : Sudan Refugees’ Plight Symbolizes Nation’s Disorder

Share
Times Staff Writer

Here, not long ago, one blanket cost eight lives.

A nighttime riot had convulsed the vast collection of mud huts and wood-and-plastic shacks erected by 200,000 refugees from civil war in the south. As relief workers who found the victims pieced the stories together the next day, the violence began when the Sudanese Red Crescent sent youths to give out blankets to refugees from the Dinka and Nuer tribes.

“When the boys distributing the blankets realized they had too few, they just threw them into the crowd, and whoever caught one, kept it,” a relief worker explained later. “One was caught by both a Dinka and a Nuer.”

What started as a tug of war escalated that night into a refugee camp version of tribal warfare, exacerbated by longstanding Dinka-Nuer grievances.

Advertisement

Falling Value of Life

The eight deaths at this camp south of the capital of Khartoum underscores the falling value of human life in Sudan, where disintegration of conditions in the countryside has come home to the city.

But eventually the dispute at Hillat Shook cost more: It became so difficult to keep peace here that local relief agencies had to shut several health clinics and cancel health training sessions.

To many, the collapse of order in the camp is hardly remarkable, given the harsh conditions and the state in which people arrive, generally after cramped, dusty train or truck rides that take several days. Here, they are strangers in their own land, divorced from the village or tribal life that customarily lent order to their daily routines.

“The people here are used to a tribal structure at home, and here it’s gone,” says Mohammed Ibrahim Osman, head of emergency services for the Sudanese Red Crescent, the local arm of the International Red Cross. “That creates tension between different tribes that at home was solved by the chiefs.”

Many of the estimated 20,000 children now roaming the capital’s rubbled streets, cadging cigarettes and panhandling, come from the camps that form a great ring around the triple cities of Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman, at the confluence of the Blue Nile and White Nile. Tribal chiefs who moved north with their own villagers complain that they can no longer keep order among their people.

“The people acquire new ways of life,” Osman said. “We notice that when the displaced persons first came to be served, they were very organized. Someone from the group would help. After a few weeks the people are a mob, restless--they don’t listen. People are not confident that if they wait they will be served. The chiefs say that’s the effect of people coming into Khartoum.”

Advertisement

The refugees have placed an additional burden on local commodities and government services in the cities, increasing the discontent felt over the government’s costly military, economic and religious policies.

“It’s very clear that this is putting a lot of pressure on the deteriorating water and food of Khartoum,” Osman said.

Symbols of Nation’s Woes

About 2 million refugees from within Sudan have reached these camps, staggering symbols of the nation’s myriad plagues. Although most are fleeing the vicious civil war that has been waged in the south for five years, the other three corners of Sudan are also represented--by those escaping tribal war in the west, famine and floods in the north and an influx of Ethiopian refugees that have strained resources in the east.

Once here, they face another of Sudan’s plagues: hostility from the government of Prime Minister Sadek Mahdi, which adheres to Islamic law.

“The government’s been very resistant,” says Priscilla Joseph, a Dinka physician who is chief of medical services for the Sudan Council of Churches. “They say these are illegal residential areas and they won’t extend services to them. In nothing does the government feel concern.”

Periodically, the government moves in and burns one of the camps to the ground, often after a fight or after someone has been found brewing date wine or merisa, another alcoholic beverage. Under Islamic law, alcohol is forbidden.

But the most important result of this official hostility is a severe scarcity of water. The government charge of illegal residency prohibits the boring of wells that could make fresh water easily available to all residents.

Advertisement

Thus, the refugees are at the mercy of middlemen, who ply the camps in donkey carts fitted with 10-gallon water cans and make several trips a day between the camps and the nearest government water well. A family here might pay more than $10 a month for pure water--while homeowners in Khartoum’s toniest districts pay $4.

“Some families can afford to pay the middlemen, but not enough of them for a general hygienic improvement,” Joseph said.

Not surprisingly, health in the camps is appreciably worse than in neighboring cities. About 23% of the children are malnourished, according to a survey by the Council of Churches, and disease rates are roughly twice that of the urban population.

Measles and diarrhea kill hundreds of children a year, because even families who can afford fresh water carry the water in contaminated containers.

The government position also left the camps adrift during disastrous floods that struck the Khartoum region last August. Remains of thousands of mud huts that dissolved in the wash can still be seen in the dusty landscape.

“The government has nothing for us here,” says Samiya Hassan, whose house and meager belongings were washed away in the flood and who now lives in a plastic-covered shed in Umm Baddah, a camp north of Omdurman.

Advertisement

But the government’s hand has not been invisible. Over the last few weeks, refugees and relief officials say, the government has been intensively pressing displaced men into teams to help with the spring harvest of sorghum, perhaps Sudan’s most important grain crop.

“This year we’ve heard that 15,000 men have been taken,” one relief official said.

The forced recruitment means a further trauma for many of these families, about 30% of which arrive without any men in the first place. “The ones that are left lose their men as protection,” Joseph said.

Once the men are taken away, families and officials have no way of learning whether they are being well treated, fed or paid their promised wage of up to $3.30 a day.

The record is not encouraging. In 1986, Joseph recalled, 150 men were taken from one camp to an agricultural area in the central region--and never returned.

“We only heard stories about them,” she said. “That they weren’t paid, they were given rotten food, and died.”

Advertisement