Southern Sudanese in Khartoum now face a choice: leave or stay

With the secession of South Sudan, many people who consider themselves South Sudanese are having difficulty choosing whether to leave Khartoum or to stay. While it has been declared that there will be no dual citizenship, many have created lives for themselves in the Sudan’s capital and find it difficult to choose whether to leave or to stay.-NS

Forced to choose between Sudans

By James Copnall
BBC News, Khartoum

Makwaj Adol Malek has a problem – and it’s one shared by hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese living in the north.

Their region has become an independent country – and they face losing their Sudanese nationality, and maybe much more, because of the split.

“South Sudan’s independence has created problems for me,” Mr Malek says.

“I feel I am in danger. When I take public transport people tell me ‘your brothers have left – what are you doing here?’”

“But I tell them I have a pension and rights here.”

Mr Malek was born in Khartoum around half a century ago and worked as a teacher and a soldier.

He speaks Arabic, not English, the new official language of South Sudan.

All the same, he is one of thousands of South Sudanese gathered at a train station in the Khartoum suburbs, waiting for a ride home.
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Despite having U.N. peacekeepers, Sudan is still being attacked.

To get you caught up- Abyei is an area of Sudan that both the North and (newly seceded) South are fighting for the ownership title. In the past few weeks the Sudanese government from the North attacked Abyei causing an reported 96,000 citizens have already been displaced. The Southern Sudanese are now questioning the legitimacy of the protection the U.N. is supposed to be bringing. Rebecca Hamilton sheds more light on the situation below. -LE

Video: Let Us Be Free

Watch this powerful and moving video from Discover the Journey. -JF

Arrow boys get aid from Yambio chiefs

Arrow boys get aid from Yambio chiefs

April 30, 2011 (YAMBIO) – The paramount chief of Yambio county who is also the chairperson of traditional authorities in Western Equatoria’s ministry of local government Chief Wilson Peni disclosed that, 25 April he received donations from chiefs of Yambio County as humanitarian aid support.

Chiefs in Yambio county have resorted to taking contributions to support the home guards commonly known as the arrow boys or village vigilantes to boost their operations against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA is a militia originally from northern Uganda. They have been the scourge of the region for many years, mutilating, raping, murdering and abducting citizens.

Arrow boys are local militias who have taken up arms to defend their communities from the LRA. Peni said that “chiefs of Yambio have so far collected over 21,000 Sudanese pounds [US$7,860] from communities of Yambio county, 89 buckets of maize corn, 108 buckets of dura [sorghum], 150 buckets of cassava flour, 129 buckets of groundnuts [peanuts], 19 bottles of termite oil, 10 packets of table salt, and 18 bottles of honey.”

Village chiefs conducted the exercise of small donations over a three week period. He added that “the contribution comes as a result of the failure of the Government of Southern Sudan [GOSS] to release the 5 million Sudanese pounds which was approved by the South Sudan legislative assembly to the arrow boys.” The chief mentioned that as it is time for cultivation, the home guards have vowed to provide protections to their communities to enable them cultivate this year to bolster food supply. “The small contribution will assist increase the morale of the home guards to comb the bush in new tactics that they have devised against the LRA” he said.

Read more here.

Article: ONE – Hope and hardship: Returning home to South Sudan

Hope and hardship: Returning home to South Sudan

March 3rd, 2011 | By Rosanne Dennery 

In Northern Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan, people are returning home from the north. Along a main thoroughfare transporting returnees from Khartoum, the air is heavy with clouds of dust and teetering buses. In them carry the remnants of a life of hardship left behind -– jerry cans, suitcases, bed frames and trunks, old fans and hookah pipes. Returnees are making their way back to a place that has remained alive in their hearts, though memories of the details have become diluted and blurred after years of war and survival, and burdened life in the north.

As I move through what are now becoming makeshift camp communities, people are eager to share their stories. Their pilgrimages home are highlighted by joy and relief, though marred by the reality of what is — or rather what isn’t- available for them here.

Arak towers over the others at a water point. She wears a pale pink hat and a smile that envelopes her face. She has a sense of dignity about her, her black and white dress flows around her as she fills her jerry can. She summons me over as she stands nearthe tap. “When I left for Khartoum I was young. There was a famine here, and my mother way dying. Her last wish was that my brother and I would leave, to get far away from the rebels.” She scoops up her small daughter, who is tugging at her dress. The daughter appears so small and vulnerable in this place, lost among the crowds of women and young girls trying to gather their water. There is sense of anxiety in the air that the water will run out. My instinct is to sweep her away from here. She rests her dust-stained face on her mother’s shoulder.

Meanwhile Arak continues “Now that I am back, her memory is all around me. Sometimes I imagine my mother here, walking toward me. This is my mother’s homeland. It is good to be back, we are supposed to be here. But my items were looted along the way. They never made it here…” her voice trails off as she looks at the piles of personal belongings that others have already received. “Work is hard to come by. We worked in Khartoum, but here, I am not sure what we will do. And water,” she says as she points to the pump. “It is a big problem. There is not enough. I walked through the night to get this water.”

Others join in, crouching down and shouting out their own stories of the lengths they went to in order to fill their buckets and jerry cans this hot morning. The sun is high, and temperatures are over 40 C. It’s dry with winds that burn like fire against your skin. It is hard to explain the desperation of the search for water in a barren area of southern Sudan until you here, experiencing it with all of your senses. Every thought, every breath, revolves around the search for water.

Samaritan’s Purse is the only organization working north of here, in an undefined area called Lanager, drilling wells and installing hand pumps. This region is particularly harsh and dry, yet returnees have resettled back here. While we were visiting a church we heard of an issue at a water pump nearby that wasn’t working. Women were crying in front of it after walking hours only to find it dry.

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Video: One millon bones – Join the movement

The world said, “Never again.” Never again would we let another genocide blemish the face of humanity. But the truth is, it’s been happening right before our eyes in Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, DR Congo, Pakistan, and Burma. Our friends at One Million Bones are creating a visible movement to increase global awareness of these atrocities while raising funds needed to protect and aid survivors. Watch this video from One Million Bones and join the movement. – Jordan

Al Jazeera: The LRA and South Sudan’s referendum

Al Jazeera, if you’re not familiar, is Qatar’s top news station. They are funded by the oil rich government in an attempt to lead the world as the best news source, competing directly with BBC News and CNN. They do a pretty good job. Here is a great report they just made about the LRA and their potential to upset the secession of Southern Sudan from the North. – Jedidiah

Child soldiers on their way home

This morning, The Sudan People’s Liberation Army informed the world that they have released almost 200,000 children from their army. Not only are they sending these children home, but they will now be providing them with an education, as they have come to understand that these children are the ones who will control the future of Sudan. By the end of this year, no more children will serve in the SPLA. This reminds us that when enough international pressure and attention is directed towards an issue, it is possible for corruption to change its direction.  -Braden

From SOS Children’s Villages:

Sep 01, 2010 01:40 PM

The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) has promised to demobilise all its child soldiers by the year end.

According to the UN children’s agency, there were more than 200,000 children in the SPLA ranks, but these numbers have reduced to around 900 today. The SPLA chief of staff has pledged that any remaining children will now be schooled and supported, stating “our future lies with the children”.

A peace agreement in 2005 ended decades of civil war between North and South Sudan. Five years on and South Sudan is to hold a referendum on independence in January. It hopes to become Africa’s first new country in almost twenty years.

The long civil war left much destruction, but there is a new atmosphere of hope. The southerners, who mostly belong to Christian or other religions compared to the largely Muslim and Arab population of the North, are hoping that all will go peacefully with the vote. 2 million people returned to South Sudan after the end of the war and another 1.5 million are expected to repatriate ahead of the referendum. Some 12,200 southerners are currently living in Egypt and the government hopes to encourage them home on trains and buses and boats down the River Nile.

Other groups occupy refugee camps in neighbouring African countries. One such camp lies in Kenya, where thousands of Sudanese remain. Recently, one of the most famous and successful of Sudan’s many exiles went to visit this camp. Given a British passport, Luol Deng came to Britain with his family and then went on to become a multi-millionaire in the United States playing basketball for the Chicago Bulls. The BBC followed Luol as he came back to help the British basketball team for the Olympics. In a moving statement Luol said “England has just done so much for me and my family….[but] England has everything. The only way I can give back is through basketball.”

Meeting his fellow Sudanese in the Kenyan camp, Luol was able to bestow something much more important as a symbol of success and hope for the future. From Kenya, Luol then journeyed over the border to Juba in southern Sudan, where he has founded schools. Addressing the children at one of his schools, Luol told them “every one of you guys is capable of being somebody special. Maybe you’ll be the president of this country and one day you’ll lead us. And we’re going to have a great country.”

South Sudan still has a long way to go in overcoming all its troubles. There are still extreme tensions with the north and the country is also facing increased attacks from the Lord’s Resistance Army, who have crossed the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo to take harvests from villagers, forcing over 25,000 people to flee their homes. But despite all the many hurdles faced by this troubled region, the southern Sudanese seem determined to build a better country for their children.

TIME: LRA is a guerrilla movement that won’t die

From TIME:

By ALAN BOSWELL / NZARA, SOUTH SUDAN

The night began like any other. Sarah John was busy preparing the evening fire at her village, when suddenly, seven armed men appeared from among the shadows. “They were dirty and smelly, had ragged clothes and hair unlike any normal human being,” she says now, three weeks after the incident. The uninivited visitors began ransacking her place, destroying whatever they could not carry away. When the intruder assigned to guard her stepped away to relieve himself, she escaped.

Her story may sound like the stock opening to a bad western movie — but this version is horribly true, and no cowboy arrives to save the day. The camp for displaced people that the elderly woman now calls home, in Southern Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, is swarming with survivors of recent attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a guerrilla movement that arose in Uganda in the late 1980s under mystic warlord Joseph Kony. Kony’s guerrillas thrive in what this area has best — a rich, magical soil, in which almost anything grows, and grows tall. Wandering amid the dense grass and makeshift huts here are displaced fathers now without sons, daughters with lost grandmothers. Their lives have been turned upside down, and to make matters worse, most cannot even explain why: their attackers speak a foreign tongue, fighting a war outside their control, and they are pursued chiefly by an Ugandan — not a Sudanese — army. The confusion of the South Sudanese is not unique, and it’s certainly not new — the LRA has spent more than two decades baffling a world shocked by its brutality. But since the end of 2008, when the LRA dispersed from its forested Congolese base after a failed U.S.-backed Ugandan military strike, the rebels have begun a new chapter few pretend to fully understand.

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10 billion bucks for animal-shaped cities in South Sudan

Blueprints for Rhino City

The government of South Sudan just revealed that it wants to remake different capital cities into the shapes of things found on its state flags—mainly animals.  The project will cost an estimated $10,000,000,000 US dollars (yeah, count the zeros—that’s 10 billion).  Juba, a city just a few hours north of us here in Gulu, will be turned into the shape of a rhino.

The paragraph below from the Huffington Post article says it best:

The $10 billion concept will take decades to carry out, officials concede, though it may never escape the planning stages. The southern government’s own 2010 budget was only $1.9 billion, and the U.N. says more than 90 percent of Southern Sudan’s population lives on less than $1 a day.

–Andrew