Southerners register to return home

Peter Albino held his baby daughter on his lap, ignoring the bickering of his three other young children, as he concentrated on the interviewer registering him to return to Upper Nile State, southern Sudan.

One of four million southerners displaced by Sudan’s 21-year civil war, Albino was an early candidate for return under a plan to repatriate 150,000 people to their villages in the south by the end of 2008.

Organised by the government of Sudan with the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), registration began over the weekend of potential returnees around the capital city, Khartoum, where two million of the displaced southerners live.

“It is my land,” Albino says of his decision to return. “I was born there. There are so many difficulties here [in Khartoum].”

He has not seen his village for 21 years, having fled in 1985 after the killing of his parents in the prolonged civil war that pitted Sudan’s Arab Muslim north against the African, largely Christian, south. Analysts say the war was rooted in struggles over religion and resources, including the south’s vast, untapped oil reserves.

The bloody conflict ended in January 2005, when the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the government of Sudan.

Despite the obstacles they will face upon their return and ongoing tensions in their home areas, many southerners say life in the north is worse. Aid workers say 75 percent of those in Khartoum State have indicated they want to go home, and 45 percent of those say they would like to return this year.

But the returnees will face immense difficulties in the south, aid workers say, as the infrastructure has been destroyed and basic services, such as electricity and water, are unavailable.

“Conditions in the south are extremely difficult,” said Bob Turner, who heads the UNMIS returns, rehabilitation and reintegration unit. “The most important thing is that before people get on a truck, they have up-to-date information about what they are going to find when they get there.”

Undeterred by the concerns of aid workers, the registration of displaced people keen to return home went on at Soba Aradi camp this week.

Home to about 64,000 displaced people from southern Sudan and Darfur, the camp is a dusty ghetto of plastic shacks and mud-brick huts. A communal toilet near the registration site is little more than a ramshackle structure covered by a dirty sheet.

Seminarian Justin Kidro, who appeared unsettled as he applied to return to a village he did not remember, said: “I came here when I was young, but I learned that [the village] is called Magui.”

“That’s in eastern Equatoria,” interviewer Susan Yubu Kenyi said, noting his details.

“Ok,” said Kidro, sounding more confident. “That is right."

According to aid workers, priority return will be give to those who can help build the infrastructure of the south, including teachers and health workers. Birgit Hussfeld of the IOM said the first group would be seen as a test case for tens of thousands of others. “They will be watched very closely by the IDPs [internally displaced persons] around here,” Hussfeld said.

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