Building Lives on the Edge of War

Moyo District in Uganda is the first place most people reach when they flee Sudan on foot, and in many ways it is charming. The wide and mist-covered Nile curves through marshes and farmland. The land is a rich green, threaded with the yellow of elephant grass across lowland plains.

In another time, Moyo could attract tourists. But this region has been at war for most of the past fifty years, and many of the people here have come because they have no choice.

Several families of new arrivals waited outside the base camp for the local refugee settlements. The women in the group were thin, their ripped dresses draped over bony bodies with so little shape that they looked much older than their years. The children tried to play soccer with a half-inflated ball.

The families were waiting for transport to a reception center where they would be registered and sorted to refugee settlements in the Moyo and Adjumani districts. Most of them were cattle-herding people from the Dinka tribe. They had been bombed out of their homes in Sudan, their herds killed. For many arriving in Uganda, this was their second time on the run. After fleeing the Bor region for Bentiu, Sudan, they had been driven out once again by Sudanese government bombing. A few spoke some English. When asked about his home, one man said, “We are from here now.”

Since winning its independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan has had little respite from war. A sixteen-year-long civil war ended in 1972, but peace lasted only eleven years. The current civil war between the government and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which says it wants greater autonomy for the South, is now twenty years old. This war has killed two million people and displaced millions more. Uganda and Sudan share a border in one of the most impoverished and unstable regions in the world. The border, like most in Africa, was drawn by Europeans, with Sudan to the north and Uganda to the south. Ethnic groups and guerrilla armies straddle the line, often welcomed on one side and hunted on the other. Many of the people living in Moyo and Adjumani, main cities in Northern Uganda, are refugees from the war in southern Sudan.

The Moyo refugee settlements look flimsy and transient. Tukul homes are made of straw and can be taken down or rebuilt quickly. Crops can be harvested or abandoned. The few permanent structures have wood roofs with support pillars but no walls, like American picnic shelters. But the campsite-like appearance is an illusion. Around these limited structures, people organize entire lives. Shelters serve as schools. Dirt clearings become markets. And, though true peace in Sudan might empty these settlements within a few growing seasons, the refugees are largely stuck in one place until that moment comes.

Many people have lived in the camps for more than a decade, and some for only days. When new refugees arrive, they do not know how long they will stay. Refugee settlements are not just transition points on the way to the next place; they are entire communities of people in limbo. In the Palestinian refugee crisis, the longest and largest in the world, refugees who thought they were leaving for just a few days or weeks are still in exile more than fifty years later.

There is great optimism that a peace deal in Sudan is close. Peace talks between the Sudanese government and rebels, promoted in part by the United States, began in August 2001 and have produced a tentative framework for ending the war. In January 2003, the plan was set back when each side accused the other of violating an agreed-upon ceasefire. Since then, a series of partial agreements have renewed optimism. If true peace comes, the newly arrived Dinka families may not stay long. For the time being, new arrivals will join Sudanese refugees who have been in Uganda since the war began.

Most Sudanese refugees in Uganda have settled on rural plots of land where they are expected to farm. In December 2001, the Ugandan government and the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) formally launched a “Self-Reliance Strategy” for refugees, integrating policies and practices that had been evolving for years. In order to support themselves, refugees must “dig”–a euphemism for planting crops in the ground.

Humanitarian agencies give food and supplies to new arrivals, but this is a short-term service. UNHCR and some humanitarian organizations offer long-term health services and schools. The government says it provides security.

“I have no money for food for them, but we give them land,” said Peter Iko Dolo, the Moyo council chairman. Iko Dolo complained that the Ugandan government, a fifteen-hour bus ride away in the capital of Kampala, ignores the needs of refugees in his district. He said that he felt obligated to open the local hospital to refugees, who now represent a third of the patients, although the government only provides money to treat locals.

Ugandan officials claim that refugees are free to move out of the camps, though they are required to request permission first. But rights groups argue that, in practice, refugees are often forced to stay. Ugandan officials say that refugees can sell surplus crops in the markets, that they can even get jobs at local farms.

Such a simple act of movement is more difficult than it sounds.

Few motor vehicles can be seen on the one-hour trip from Moyo Town, the center of the area, to the camps. The route travels over uneven dirt roads so eroded that in parts they seem more like hiking trails. Most of the cars carry supplies for aid agencies. The refugees walk or, if lucky, ride bicycles. A visitor needs to have his own transport or else will be limited to the destinations of official vehicles.

In the rainy season, the sky can turn from bright sun to gray to dark storms in minutes. Mud is more troublesome than distance. Even travel within the refugee area from the base camp to the more remote settlements often proves impossible. Many central dirt roads are completely submerged by muddy pools. I saw a front wheel of a UNHCR truck sunk one foot into mud, spinning the truck to the side. Full of newly arrived Dinka refugees, the truck blocked the entire road, squeezed between thick plants so that not even a motorcycle could pass. Refugee men were trying to dig the truck out but they had few tools. Until the truck could be dislodged, the road to remote Moyo settlements, these refugees’ new homes, was blocked.

Isolation feeds almost all of the problems in the camps. Most settlements lack health clinics. Medicine is miles away and poorly supplied. An ambulance would have trouble with the mud if a person in need were able to call for one. One woman in the Alere II settlement boiled lavender herbs to help her sick infant son. She said she wanted modern medicines, but could not get them. She hoped the traditional remedy would work.

Communications often fail. There are no telephone facilities in most settlements. One man in Adjumani said that when he has a problem, he tells his elected camp chairman, who then travels to tell the Adjumani commandant, who chooses whether to take action or to relay the message to a humanitarian organization, to UNHCR, or to the central government. The only systematic and direct form of communication is postal delivery.

The most immediate concern for refugees at camps in Adjumani is safety. Humanitarian organizations report that the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has killed dozens of Sudanese refugees since August 2002. The LRA attacked an outlying refugee camp in Adjumani late that month, abducting nineteen refugees and wounding one woman. They attacked Adjumani again on October 3. Even in Moyo, thought to be safer than the other side of the river, refugees report that armed bandits loot and rob them on isolated paths at night.

Many of the refugees in Adjumani must choose between hunger and danger. Most residents of Alere II were farmers in Sudan, but have not been able to farm successfully in their Uganda settlement. Alere II sits on a rocky hillside, more like the mountainous terrain of Lebanon than the lush equatorial farmland in much of Uganda. Grasses and weeds struggle to grow among boulders. Unable to raise crops, residents make traditional alcohol to sell in a small market at the base of the hill and consume some of it themselves. Alcohol is their main source of cash. Refugees say they are struggling more and more, dependent on monthly rations from UNHCR. But even so, residents of more fertile outlying camps have moved to Alere II because its central location keeps it safer from rebel attacks.

The ethnic conflicts that have torn apart the region also plague the refugee camps. Moyo District Commandant Mawa Bashir, the Ugandan government’s highest authority for refugees in the area, said that he often deals with cultural conflicts. An array of ethnic groups with different lifestyles populates southern Sudan. Some, like the Madi, Kuku, and Bari, traditionally raise crops. Others, like the nomadic Dinka and Nuer, herd cattle. Bashir said these groups resist being told to dig. All of the refugee groups include teachers and professionals who have spent more time in cities than on farms. The Ugandan refugee policy expects all of them to raise crops.

Every year, some Sudanese refugees find new homes in the U.S., including many I worked with in Egypt. But those are the lucky few. This year, the quota of refugees allowed to resettle to the U.S. is 70,000. That figure–for all refugees from around the world–is less than half the number of Sudanese refugees in Uganda alone.

It was difficult for me to see any difference in condition between the long-time residents and the newcomers. Among both, clothes were dirty and ripped, barely covering the protruding bones under the stretched skin of adult men and women. About one in three of the children had bloated bellies and spindly legs, a sign of malnutrition or parasites.

“War did this to us,” one man told me, and continued walking along a muddy path.