Sudanese refugee camps home to "misery beyond imagination" (by Donna Jacobs)

From the "Ottawa Citizen"...

(See also the related item from a week ago.)

Ten days ago, Sudan moved toward renewal of a 21-year civil war.

The Sudan People's Liberation Movement, comprised of Christian and indigenous Africans in autonomous Southern Sudan, said [that] it will pull out of the 2005 peace agreement with the Islamist government in the northern city of Khartoum.

The liberation movement cited Khartoum's failure to share oil profits fairly, and to withdraw hundreds of thousands of troops from Southern Sudan.

Observers say [that] the Khartoum government is very successfully driving native-African Sudanese from the oil-rich south and the western province of Darfur. They say [that] the government is repopulating the area with Arabs.

The object: To prevent Southern Sudan from voting for independence in a 2011 referendum -- and taking its oil fields with it. China, which supports Khartoum, buys 85 per cent of Sudan's oil.

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Within weeks -- he won't say when -- University of Ottawa student Justin Laku will sneak into the dangerous and squalid refugee camps of Sudan.

"I have to take a risk," he says. "I have to find things out on my own."

This Arab-speaking Christian, son of a Sudanese preacher, will disguise himself -- as he did during two clandestine trips in 2005 -- in a traditional white robe and white knit cap.

"The misery of people in the camps is beyond imagination," he says, "Forty degrees C, without food, without water."

Since 2003, 400,000 Sudanese have died and 2.5 million more have been driven from their homes into camps by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's Islamist government and the Arab Janjaweed militia [that] it supports. Janjaweed often arrive on horseback ("Janja" is Arabic for "crazy man", and "weed" for "horse").

Mr. al-Bashir -- backed by the National Islamic Front party -- led a 1989 military coup against the elected government.

In the camps, displaced Sudanese sleep in the dirt, Justin says, or under a shelter of corn stalks, paper boxes or plastic.

Aid agencies give corn, nutritious biscuits, oil, rice, and brown beans. "But they don't provide charcoal, so women without kerosene stoves have to walk 10 to 15 kilometres [in order] to collect firewood in the bush. The Janjaweed capture and rape and kill them."

In Darfur, a region the size of France, more than 125 camps hold 50,000 to 275,000 Sudanese, mostly women and children.

The Janjaweed use rape as a weapon of war, to sow racial and social turmoil, he says.

"They round up the women in the camps and rape them before their children's eyes. It could be 10 or 15 soldiers on one woman, leaving her hemorrhaging and with dislocated hips. Girls of eight or nine are raped.

"Boys as young as three are taken north, indoctrinated, and sent back to kill their own."

Murder, hunger, and thirst combine with malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, skin ailments, dirty water, and lack of sanitation. A thousand people die daily in Darfur.

Camps are guarded by Mr. al-Bashir's police force, Justin says, not the neutral (though unarmed) African Union troops.

Camps in Darfur and around Khartoum are infiltrated by National Intelligence Security officers, he says, craftily put in charge by the al-Bashir government of distributing relief aid. The Sudanese Red Crescent, the Muslim counterpart to the Red Cross, is staffed by intelligence personnel, he says, from director to workers.

Intelligence officers withhold water or food, beat, or even kill those who criticize the camps to international visitors, he says. "And they say to the displaced Sudanese: 'You become Muslim, we'll give you the food.' I saw this with my own eyes in Southern Sudan, in Darfur, in [the Nuba] Mountains."

While food piles up in government warehouses, he says, "people line up, but are told to come tomorrow at 9 a.m. And they line up again for the whole day, and you see them stand with the sun on their heads, and go back home empty-handed."

Despite international condemnation and billions of international aid dollars -- $450 million from the governments of Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, and Stephen Harper -- Justin says [that] more people die, and [that] some of the unmonitored money is stolen, wasted, or misdirected.

Half of the food aid -- which the al-Bashir government commandeers from NGOs -- goes to markets, he says. "I saw, myself, cooking oil stamped 'World Food Program,' rice, corn."

Founder of the Ottawa-based Canadian Friends of Sudan (cfofsudan@gmail.com), Justin has recruited doctors and collected medical equipment -- with the help of the charities Canadian Food for the Hungry International, International Health Studies [sic], and Humanitarian Mobility International.

Canadian Friends of Sudan is sending four shipping containers of microscopes, X-ray machines, 500 wheelchairs from a U.S. businessman, and 2,500 medical books and journals from University of Ottawa students.

Justin recruited four doctors: his own family doctor, a retired U of O [i.e., University of Ottawa] medical professor, a program director for the Ottawa-based Canadian Society for International Health and a retired Ottawa family physician -- along with six fourth-year U of O nursing students.

The third week of December, they will arrive at Justin's home town of Juba, southern Sudan's capital, to work at the hospital, medical school, and health institute -- and perhaps secretly at refugee camps.

Jason Kenney, the secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, will speak at a Nov. 14 dinner at the National Press Theatre, 165 Sparks St., 6-9:30 p.m., [in order] to raise money for the Sudan Health Project, including airfare for the volunteers.

Saskatchewan Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott, who has visited camps around Khartoum and Southern Sudan, helped end the partnership between the Alberta-based oil company Talisman and the al-Bashir government. He has been instrumental in the health project, and his constituency office doubled as a medical-supply storage room.

Justin says [that] Canada's UN ambassador, John McNee, should table a resolution for the UN to put an urgent deadline of next month on its open-ended resolution calling for a 26,000-strong contingent of peacekeepers, police and engineers in Darfur. Justin says [that] they should be Africans and non-Africans. (Canada now has 45 military observers and advisers in Sudan.)

He wants Canada to push for a no-fly zone in Darfur, patrolled from neighbouring Chad. And he wants Mr. al-Bashir and 51 government ministers tried for crimes against humanity.

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Justin is a part-time health-sciences student at the U of O and full-time master's student in public ethics at Saint Paul University. He was assistant junior adviser to David Kilgour, Edmonton MP and secretary of state for Latin America and Africa, who left the Liberal party in 2005, partly in protest over then-prime minister Martin's inaction on Darfur.

Justin, a former Sudanese-military-school student, still keeps that regime, rising at 6 a.m., running for 30 to 60 minutes, lifting weights in the gym, and playing soccer two or three times a week. And, he smiles: "I stay away from the ladies."

He fits in public speaking. Three weeks ago, he addressed 5,000 people at a Save Darfur rally in Columbia, South Carolina.

Walk into his cramped apartment and you are face-to-face with a large photo of Nelson Mandela, next to bookshelves with Mr. Mandela's and Mahatma Gandhi's writings. He says: "They remind me to stay in the fight non-violently as long as I can."

Donna Jacobs is an Ottawa writer; her e-mail address is donnabjacobs@hotmail.com.