Sudan Razes Homes, Relocates Thousands of Squatters to Camps : Urban renewal: People are moved to facilities lacking water, food, shelter outside Khartoum. The country is already heavily taxed by hunger and hardship.

Moses Adugegn stood in the middle of a vast sea of rubble that once was a bustling neighborhood of mud-brick homes of squatter families. One was his.

Mile after mile of houses have been summarily razed by government bulldozers under an urban-renewal plan that has forced nearly half a million people from their homes over the last year.

The new urban refugees are being relocated to ill-equipped camps outside the city, mostly without adequate water, food or shelter, creating what foreign aid officials describe as a new--and unnecessary--humanitarian crisis in a country already heavily taxed by hunger and hardship.

Khartoum state’s minister of housing and public utilities, Sharaf Eldin Ibrahim Bannaga, who is in charge of the relocation program, defended it largely on environmental grounds, saying the areas inhabited by Khartoum’s estimated 1.8 million squatters were infested with crime and disease and lacked adequate water, sanitation and other services. “They were environmental hazards,” he said, “and we are bound by international treaties that call on us to enhance our environment.”

The United Nations and Western embassies have formally protested to the Sudanese government to stop the evictions. They also accuse the government of blocking most of their efforts to help the displaced.

“It is a humanitarian crisis because of the immense scale and the suddenness with which it was done,” said U.S. Ambassador James Cheek. “There was no preparation for the needs of the people, and assistance has been obstructed after they were unceremoniously dumped in the desert.”

The new settlement to which Adugegn and his family are being moved--along with their belongings, and the roof and wooden poles of their former house--is about 25 miles into the desert from the capital. Like other settlements for the newly displaced, Jebel Awlia lacks basic services and opportunities: water, markets, health clinics, schools, jobs. The precarious situation there threatens to boil over into disaster as the blasting desert heat and sandstorms gain momentum.

“What will happen to us?” asked Adugegn, 25. The relocation will mean that Adugegn will no longer be able to get to his job as a private security guard at a Western embassy. “I don’t want to go. But I have no power to quarrel with the government.”

Adugegn migrated from the south nine years ago because of renewed fighting in Sudan’s long-running civil war. It took him five years to scrape together the funds and material to build a two-room house for his wife, parents and five children in Khartoum’s Kurmuta area. At least 13 people were killed there in December in violent protests against the demolition scheme.

The relocation program has sparked another round of acrimony between the government and the West. The renewed antagonism has surfaced at a time when U.N. officials say Sudan has been increasingly cooperative in relief operations over the last year, with notable success in ferrying aid to conflict areas.

In the past, Western relief workers and diplomats have charged Khartoum with being intractable and unconcerned about human rights, willing to take Draconian measures in the name of “development,” no matter how high the humanitarian cost.

The Sudanese government, however, views criticism by the West in the context of perceived hostility to the fundamentalist Islam it champions.

“There is some barrier between you and us,” Bannaga, a British-educated environmental engineer, said in a recent interview. “You criticize us for the relocation . . . but I think it is really Islam you fear.”

Not so, said Ambassador Cheek: “This has nothing to do with what kind of government they are. . . . This is not an Islamic-Christian question. It is a human question, period.”

“We’re not subjecting them to some foreign standard of behavior,” Cheek said of his and other diplomatic protests over the evictions. “This is a complete violation of the Sudanese tradition of humane treatment and regard for fellow human beings.”

According to aid workers, most of the squatter communities were well-integrated into city life. Some did, as Bannaga said, occupy garbage dumps. But tens of thousands of other evicted families resided in decent housing, by Third World standards. They had access to water, clinics, schools and jobs.

At the Karmuta area, for example, a brick house marked with white numbers for demolition showed lace curtains at its wooden-framed windows and a small garden outside. Not far away was one of 500 new water pumps installed in the area by UNICEF over the last year--with full government cooperation--at a cost of $1 million. They were put there by mistake, Bannaga said; UNICEF was dealing with the wrong government agency.

Bannaga said most of the people evicted were living illegally on land zoned for others. And, he asked, “What would (Londoners) do if Gypsy caravans settled in Hyde Park?”

Squatter families who arrived in Khartoum before the 1984-85 famine will now have “permanent rights” to 2,000-square-foot plots of desert land the government has allocated to them, Bannaga said. Those who arrived after the famine, however, will not be allowed to rebuild permanent structures, according to officials.

In the interview, Bannaga repeatedly cited a World Bank-funded study of Khartoum in defense of the relocations. However, the study recommends relocation only as a last resort. The World Bank has formally dissociated itself from the project and has accused Khartoum of misusing its name.

Most of the areas already leveled, such as Karmuta, were designated in the study for “restructuring and improvement”--not destruction. “Massive relocation is prohibitive because of the immense social and economic costs involved,” the study said. “It should be avoided.”

A European envoy who has monitored the problem said, “Most of these people already live very precariously--it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge. You should handle them delicately, with planning. Instead, the government comes in with a sledgehammer.”