Sudan ‘Cleanup’ a Hardship for Refugees

The Islamic government here, saying it has undertaken a huge urban cleanup campaign, has forced hundreds of thousands of squatters and refugees from Sudan’s southern civil war into remote desert camps, threatening them with disease, hunger and death as the temperature climbs, international relief workers and diplomats say.

Western officials say that, since last year, more than 450,000 people have been cleared from crowded squatter camps near the heart of the capital; almost half of those displaced have been forced into barren desert camps with little access to jobs, medicine and water.

“This is a humanitarian crisis by any standard . . . , “ said James Cheek, U.S. ambassador in Khartoum. “It’s created a crisis because of the magnitude and the suddenness and the speed with which it was done.”

Sudanese officials say the resettlement program, under which thousands of mud-brick houses were bulldozed and their residents relocated at gunpoint, comes in response to a World Bank-financed study that recommended that the government improve conditions in several dozen urban squatter camps. Those sites were crowded, crime-filled and often in areas subject to flooding.

“We are determined to have development control all over the town, and we are determined to protect and enhance the environment, so we have to do it,” said housing minister Sharaf Eldin Bannaga, who is in charge of the resettlement. “Would you allow anyone to make a hut on Broadway Street in New York?”

But Western officials say they believe that the refugees have been ousted because Sudan’s Islamic government fears civil uprisings. Recent economic measures have sent prices soaring, and there is a history of animosity between the Arab-dominated government and the mostly black African, Christian and animist populations of the south. Those are the people in the squatter camps.

“They see this mass of 1 million, 1 1/2 million black people out there, and they’re fearful of them. This way, you neutralize them in a security sense,” one Western diplomat said.

Sudanese officials say they are providing water and food to the new camps; they believe that conditions for residents eventually will be better than the squalor of their sites in Khartoum. “The services in the Salaam camp are better than the services in Khartoum, although definitely this is according to Sudanese standards, not European standards,” Bannaga said.

But aid workers say a population that had access to jobs, schools and clinics now has grown dependent on relief--and the Sudanese have blocked aid from all non-Sudanese. Further, according to interviews with several Christians in a camp west of Khartoum, the government has required the displaced people to convert to Islam to receive food. “They take advantage to make one Muslim because he’s hungry, because he’s tired? Is that justice?” demanded one Christian aid worker who has secretly taken food into the camps.

At a camp for thousands of displaced southerners 13 miles west of Khartoum, residents are forced to walk 1.8 miles to the nearest water supply. A few weeks ago, the nearest well was six miles away. A relief worker at the Wad Ramli camp said there have been outbreaks of tuberculosis, malaria and dysentery, and there are no medical supplies.

Most of the men and women, who held jobs as day laborers or maids in Khartoum, have been forced to quit their jobs because it is too difficult to get to work. Those who still work usually walk nine miles to catch a bus. Transport to the camp can take half a day’s wages.

And while northern squatters have been allowed to build mud-brick houses, displaced southerners can only put up shelters made of sticks and burlap sacks, on the theory that they eventually will be relocated back to the south.

Sudan’s finance minister, Abdel Rahim Hamdi, said Western officials are overreacting to the resettlement program as a means of attacking Sudan’s Islamic government. Of the displaced southerners, he said: “They have come to the Muslim north, which is supposedly persecuting them. We try to provide for them in a very humble way, and we are accused of bulldozing houses, which they don’t have.”

Bannaga said conditions in the long run will be better for those displaced: “(It’s) like having a broken arm which set in the wrong position. You have to break it again. You will have a lot of pain, but once you do it, you are free.”