Makpandu Refugee Camp, Southern Sudan

Living at the geographic intersection of the region’s most complex and violent realities, thousands of Congolese refugees have recently fled into southern Sudan’s Western Equatoria State. They had escaped attacks staged by LRA rebels on their communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo early last year.

Operating in southern Sudan, eastern Congo, and northern Uganda, the LRA wages guerrilla warfare against the government in Uganda, but civilians have borne the brunt of their attacks. LRA rebels have murdered over twenty thousand people and abducted tens of thousands of children in the last twenty years. In mid-December 2008, the Ugandan army launched a US-backed attack against the LRA in an attempt to eliminate its entire senior leadership. The operation was a spectacular failure and resulted in the dispersal of the LRA across northeastern Congo. On the 24th of December, the LRA conducted simultaneous raids on villages across the Doruma region in northeastern Congo, targeting Christmas celebrations. At least 850 people died in these “Christmas massacres.” By mid-January 2009, 8,000 Congolese refugees had arrived in South Sudan.

Over 2,700 of these Congolese refugees are currently sheltering in Makpandu, a camp established by the U.N. to move them safely away from the border and the LRA’s occasional incursions into Sudan.

The Enough Project recently documented the stories of Francoise and Monique*, two refugees living in Makpandu:

People from around the area fled, as the LRA attacked multiple villages. As she ran toward Sudan, Francoise learned that her own village was targeted too.  The militia had corralled her husband and some of the other older people into a house and burned it down.

When our conversation shifted to life before the LRA threat, Francoise brightened. She spoke lovingly of her husband, a high school teacher who taught geography and French. The pair had met when Francoise was 15 years old, and they married soon after. Francoise was also a teacher; she taught in a nursery school in their town…

“As soon as I harvest my groundnuts, I’m going to go home,” she said… We asked when the groundnuts would be ready for harvest. The end of December, Francoise said. She will only be here a couple more weeks.

As she spoke softly in her native Zande language, Monique, an 18-year-old Congolese refugee and orphan living in Makpandu refugee camp in southern Sudan, kept picking at her skirt as if trying to brush off some unseen dirt or thread… “When I was abducted, I wasn’t married,” she said without emotion. “But the tonton [LRA] made me take a soldier as my husband.” Five months later, Monique escaped during the commotion caused by a clash between the LRA and the southern Sudanese army.

Monique said she is hopeful that her mother and siblings are still at their home in the village of Kiriwo, but she hasn’t had any contact with them. At Makpandu, Monique is classified as an orphan because there was no one she knew who could take her in.

*Name has been changed.

Posted By: Ariana Berengaut WiW | January 19, 2010 | Comments (0)

“Below is a guest post from the Enough Project‘s southern Sudan field researcher, Maggie Fick, who is based in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan.”

JUBA, Southern Sudan—“We can’t always judge a student as ‘traumatized,’” said Mother Jina, the headmistress of Usratuna Basic Education School, a Catholic primary school in Juba, the capital of southern Sudan. “But their behavior—active, quiet, stubborn—is sometimes difficult for teachers to deal with.” Mother Jina spoke to me about the students at her school who were orphaned during the devastating civil war between Sudan’s North and South, which ended in 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

Usratuna opened in 1989, when Juba was a garrison town for the North’s army, the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF. The school remained opened through the most brutal periods of the war, when U.N. planes attempting to bring relief supplies into Juba were shot at regularly by the southern army, or the SPLA, troops surrounding the town. Today, Usratuna has 1,000 students, and is known as one of the best primary schools in Juba.

Despite its strong reputation, the school faces many constraints such as overcrowded classes (between 50 and 85 students per class) and a dearth of resources—the school has no library, few textbooks, and Mother Jina lamented that it can be dangerous for the children to run around the open schoolyard because of soil erosion, poor irrigation, and large ditches in the school’s grounds.

Posted on trees in the schoolyard are wooden painted signs with messages to encourage and advise the students: “Pray Always,” “God Loves You,” “Do Your Homework,” “Don’t Cheat on Exams.” The most meaningful sign to me was one that spoke to the history of the place where these students come from: “Be Educated for a Better Future.”

At first glance, this sign is not out of the ordinary. It could appear on any poster printed by the U.N. or by a development or education organization supporting the message of education and empowerment in any number of countries. But the message struck me as particularly significant in this school in this part of the world. As Mother Jina said, many of her school’s students are clearly traumatized by the direct or indirect effects of the civil war, by decades of conflict and violence in southern Sudan. Even those children whose families fled the South during the war—and who were perhaps born in a refugee camp in neighboring Ethiopia, Uganda, or Congo, or in a hospital in Nairobi, Kenya, if they were lucky—are living with the reality of their country’s history. It is not an exaggeration or an insult to say that this history is tortured, painful, and traumatic. However, despite this history, and often even because of this struggle, the people of southern Sudan are also proud. They are hopeful for a better future and they are working towards it.

When I asked a southern army general recently how he felt about the challenges of the current, critical period in the run-up to the nationwide elections and southern self-determination referendum, he said, “A freedom fighter is always hopeful.” This hope is evident in the eyes of some people I have met in Juba, like Mother Jina, who works hard every day to make her school a safe and positive environment for her students. Sadly, some of her students’ young faces seem less hopeful. These children have already witnessed enough of war and its effects to lose hope. It may well take years of peace to change these faces and bring hope back into them.

A special thanks to Mother Jina for her assistance in editing this blog post.

Posted By: Michael Graham | November 16, 2009 | Comments (0)

This guest post was written by Enough Project staffer Ledio Cakaj.  Read more posts about Sudan at Enough’s blog, Enough Said.

“Tell them about our suffering here,” said the Bishop of Yambio of the Sudanese Episcopal Church. “The LRA is killing, raping and looting in our communities and the world does not know about it,” he added.

Bishop Peter’s words came at the end of a meeting I had with Episcopalian pastors from various Western Equatorian districts in South Sudan. Packed in the All Saints Church in Yambio, the capital of Western Equatoria State, or WES, I heard many hours-worth of testimony from people who had been victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, most of them in the past two months.

The village of Yubu, for instance, which is 4 km away from Yambio, was attacked at the end of September. Many people were abducted, some were released but at least six were killed. The remnants of their bodies were collected only a few days before my visit. These events have become common in WES. A report by the U.N. coordination agency estimated 202 LRA related deaths and 131 abductions in September alone.

LRA attacks on the civilian population have been particularly brutal and frequent in and around Ezo, a town close to Sudan’s border with Congo, where the LRA attackers are coming from. As a result, many people have been internally displaced, moving to areas as far as Yambio – a 7 to 10 day trek on foot – trying to escape the LRA.

The displaced people I spoke to in Yambio described how the LRA had destroyed most of their villages around Ezo in search of food. Stories of killings, rape, and looting are again, all too common. There are at least 1,500 displaced people around Yambio living in squalid conditions without much help. An estimated 25,000 people in WES are displaced and most are thought to have fled LRA attacks.

The number of refugees from Congo and Central African Republic are also on the rise. The refugee camp of Makpandu, 45 km northeast of Yambio town, currently houses over 2,500 refugees, and at least 50 people arrive each week, according to the U.N. refugee agency. At least 3,000 refugees are stuck in Ezo town where food distribution is rare due to LRA attacks, but relocation of these refugees to the Makpandu site is on hold until the security situation improves.

In the meantime, LRA attacks in Western Equatoria continue. On October 7, the LRA attacked the village of Nimba near Yambio town. Two women were mutilated and killed.

The attacks have prompted more displacement, misery, and hunger. Food supplies for the local population and the displaced are dwindling because of the looting and destruction. On Wednesday, Governor Jemma Nunu Kumba of Western Equatoria appealed on Radio Miraya FM for swift humanitarian aid to the people of WES. The governor’s plea echoed the words of the director of the Sudanese Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Committee in our meeting: “We had never had people dying of starvation in Western Equatoria until the LRA came.”

Posted By: Michael Graham | October 26, 2009 | Comments (0)

Rebecca Feeley is a research consultant based in Goma, DR Congo. She has lived in the Great Lakes region for nearly four years, previously working for African Rights, the Clinton Foundation, Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research International, and the Enough Project.

With a hardened face and chiseled features, Mathias looked older than his age of 23.  Born to a farming family in Muramvya—a town on the route between Bujumbura and Gitega—Mathias grew up extremely poor.  This hardship limited his ability to attend school and so Mathias devised another way to work his way up and out: he joined the National Liberation Forces, or FNL, in 2005 in the hopes that someday members of the rebel forces would be integrated into the Burundian army where, he explained, he wanted to be an officer. 

But his plan didn’t completely deliver.  While he was given the chance to integrate into Burundian army, he was only offered the rank of corporal. He refused and chose instead to demobilize.  He had been a captain in the FNL, he explained to me.  I asked him if he was disappointed.  He hunched his shoulders and unclasped his hands as if to say, “obviously.”

Having previously worked in eastern DR Congo—a place where armed groups proliferate by the day and there seem to be more officers than foot soldiers—I knew Mathias’ attempt at trading up through integration was not unusual.  He explained his story to me with a mix of indifference and exhaustion , and I assumed he was too depleted or too apathetic about the future to have thought of another plan.  I was wrong.  He told me that he wanted to go to school and eventually own and run a small business. “But not in Burundi,” he added. “There are no jobs here. I want to go to school in Tanzania where I could get a job after finishing my studies.” I asked him what kind of small business he wanted to own. He didn’t know, adding only “not in Burundi.”

Posted By: Michael Graham | October 21, 2009 | Comments (0)

During the group interview, Joseph was quiet and appeared introverted. But when I asked the group of former combatants if there was anyone who would like to talk to me individually, Joseph was the first to raise his hand.

He seemed timid but when he laughed his smile was large and easy. He sat with his hands between his legs, and looked off into the distance while he told me the facts: He was 26 years old and had joined the FNL in 1993 when he was just 10 years old.  After his parents had been killed in Bujumbura in 1993, Joseph and his brother were cared for by nuns. While his brother wanted to stay with the nuns, Joseph had other ideas: to avenge the death of his parents by joining the FNL. “Wow,” I said, “so you have been with the FNL for 16 years?” He was slow to respond, sighing “I left the FNL a year after joining to study mechanics under a friend. But then my friend was killed, so I went back to the FNL.”

Joseph didn’t give many details about his life as a combatant except for when he explained—so softly I could barely hear—that he still has nightmares about the time when he was forced to kill his best friend who had raped a woman.  Not raping is one of the many FNL rules that are strictly enforced by officers of the rebel force.  Joseph was chosen to administer the ultimate punishment by shooting his friend. His gaze focused on the ground.

I asked him what he wanted to do in the future.  He gave a small grin and started to describe the ‘video salon’ he wanted to open in his village. Joseph imagined his neighbors coming to his place to watch movies.  From the glimmer in his eye, I could tell he had been dreaming of it for quite some time.  All he needed now was a piece of land and a TV.

Posted By: Michael Graham | October 13, 2009 | Comments (0)