Sudan by Jok Madut Jok

Author:Jok Madut Jok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2011-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

INTERNALLY DISPLACED PERSONS AND THE STATE

In the north, outside the conflict zone, where hundreds of thousands of women and children had sought refuge, the demolition of IDPs’ spontaneous settlements without compensation and the relocation of the populations involved, often with little or no advance warning, continue to be a major source of disruption. Here the displaced, most of them female-headed households, are at the mercy of the army and security agents. Because the activities that put them in this situation were part of a concerted government effort to render people helpless, they had nowhere to file complaints. Once they are dependent on the government’s meager assistance with handouts, the policy of cultural Jihad can proceed unhindered.153 For example, humanitarian assistance, where available, was distributed in coordination with Islamic relief organizations that required conversion to Islam in exchange for relief goods. Most displaced people objected to such blackmail. Those who accepted such conditional aid did so at the cost of their pride, apparent humiliation and loss of face: those who have objected to this practice have tried their own survival techniques which are exercised under harsh conditions of harassment. The Islamist government, for instance, abhors the fact that most female-headed households rely on low-level income-generating activities such as brewing alcohol to make ends meet instead of the ‘food-for-faith’ policy that is adopted by Islamic aid agencies. To counter this displaced persons’ effort to ensure their economic independence, and because brewing alcohol is illegal according to the Islamic constitution, large numbers of women were sent to jail without due course of the law. Where such legal procedures existed, the women did not have legal defense and the sentencing was often summarily carried out. Those who protested this kind of treatment were labeled fifth columnists and supporters of the opposition: they were either jailed or relocated to desert settlements in the peripheries of Khartoum where there were no services whatsoever and mortality rates were appalling. The harassment of the displaced suggests that even those civilians who had sought refuge in government centers continued to suffer from lack of protection and constant mobility as the government periodically bulldozed housing sites and relocated the IDPs to new sites without consulting them beforehand. Any popular resistance to these removals was ruthlessly suppressed by government security forces. Following demolition, the residents of these shanty towns are either left to fend for themselves or loaded into trucks at gunpoint and moved to a fluctuating series of camps far from the economic heartlands of the capital. Mortality rates at these new settlements are reportedly even more abysmal, especially those of young children, pregnant women, and the elderly. The United States Ambassador to Khartoum, Donald Patterson, explained that this treatment of the IDPs by a government that was supposed to protect them was one of the many reasons why the US government began to single out Sudan as a major human rights abuser. Patterson enumerated the ‘factors putting Sudan in such a bad light,’ including the military takeover in 1989

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