Looking forward to peace

Just about everyone in Yei, a sprawling rural town in southwestern Sudan, is talking about prospects for peace these days. You can scarcely walk through the town’s bombed-out streets without overhearing vendors, for example, discussing their hopes for an agreement at ongoing peace talks in Nairobi, Kenya, between representatives of Sudan’s government and rebels. “We are really so happy about this peace deal,” says Johnson Okut, who sells grilled cassava at a roadside stall. “If there’s a final agreement I will be able to go back to my homeland in Bahr al Ghazal for the first time in 20 years. I’m ready to go; I’m just waiting for them to finish this thing.” If all goes to plan Okut and the more than 4.5 million other Sudanese displaced by Africa’s longest running civil war (including 570,000 refugees) could be about to get the peace and stability which some of them have been dreaming about for nearly 50 years. The war between Sudan’s military regime and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) has cost an estimated two million lives and plunged the bulk of the country’s 38 million inhabitants below the poverty line. If a hoped-for deal between president Umar al-Bashir and SPLA leader Dr John Garang is concluded, Sudan stands its best chance of becoming a stable nation since independence from Anglo-Egyptian rule in 1956. The picture is fragile – not least because of insecurity in western Sudan’s Darfur province, currently the biggest threat to the vision of a peaceful Sudan. Nevertheless, for the first time in 20 years, Sudanese are talking about lasting peace as something possible. TIMID HOPE Despite the general optimism, the mood in south Sudan is not euphoric. It is much more sober – the mood of a people who are tired of war yet uncertain about peace and, even if they get that, faced with the tall order of rebuilding a devastated country. Natalino Losuba Mana, a southerner who runs the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) operation in Yei county, says the Sudanese will be waiting to see concrete results from the peace deal. “No one is celebrating yet,” he says. “We’ll wait to see these promises of peace fulfilled rather than living on hope. We still fear they will make a very good agreement that will never get beyond the paper.” If the deal does make it beyond the paper, it will in principle release some US$200 million from the United States for reconstruction. Other donors are also likely to contribute. But it is not yet clear how the money is to be spent, nor is it clear how much it will cost to rehabilitate the south – which, neglected under colonial rule and at war for most of the time since, has suffered underdevelopment for over 100 years. According to Dr George Leju Lugor, senior development officer for the non-governmental Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in the south, “even in the event of peace, the people here are visibly traumatised by the war. And after all the signing and celebrating the new deal, now for the hard part: the challenge of starting development. We have somehow to rebuild ordinary life”. Perhaps the most daunting aspect of that challenge is that few people have an ordinary life left to go back to. “I fear our next war will be against redundancy,” says Lugor, “the hard part is finding things that can give the southern Sudanese a living. We are talking about hundreds or thousands of us who joined the struggle and have only known war. They don’t know what else to do.” In Yei, a town with a population swollen by the displaced to around 70,000 people, that redundancy is visible. Hundreds of bored-looking youths take shade under the rows of mango and palm nut trees. What makes it all the more frustrating, say stakeholders, is that the area has such potential. Lush and well watered, Yei’s fertile land could become the bread basket of Sudan if it is developed, some people say. But reaching that stage means reversing the near total devastation of the south’s economy. “People in these areas have got used to living on their basic coping mechanisms, doing the bare minimum to survive,” says Mac Maika, NPA coordinator for Yei and Juba counties. “That’s the trauma of war: there is no point in producing an excess for trade because tomorrow you might be fleeing again”. DEVELOPING THE LAND The NPA – ever keen to distance itself from what World Food Programme (WPF) boss James Morris calls the “quick fix, band aid mentality” – has already invested a lot in improving food production skills with long-term agricultural training programmes. Ladis-Laus Ongaro, an agriculturalist working on a training project with NPA for farmers in Yei, says the biggest challenge is finding a market for farmers’ goods. “There are a number of farmers producing a surplus in this part of the south. They are looking for a market but can’t find one because of all the insecurity and poor infrastructure”, he says, “they urgently need a reliable trading structure – obviously they will only be persuaded to grow an excess if it fetches money”. Ultimately, development workers say, southern Sudan will only become self-sufficient in food production and distribution if key features of its infrastructure are repaired. Top of the list are the country’s transport links. ROAD BLOCKS TO GROWTH A frequently made complaint of the southern Sudanese about the neglect of their region is the state of the roads. Poorly built and un-maintained, they are regarded as one of the biggest impediments to reviving the region’s economy. The road from the Ugandan border to Yei, for example, covers a stretch of barely 80 km, yet the journey takes over three hours in a sturdy Toyota land cruiser. “This stretch of the road we call the ‘disco sections’ ”, quips an NPA driver, as his vehicle judders along the appalling dirt track linking Yei with Uganda’s West Nile district. “We call them that because they force everyone in the car to dance along with the bumps”. Yet the impact of southern Sudan’s bumpy roads on its struggling economy is no joke. It cuts the area off from valuable trade with other regions and countries, as would-be freighters focus on easier, more profitable routes. This renders the few goods that do pass into south Sudan from Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo extremely expensive. “Any truck drivers or cross-border traders are going to be asking themselves: Do I bother driving goods into Sudan, where I waste so much time and my vehicle gets damaged?” Maika says. Projects for grading roads are underway, however, and international organisations operating in the county say the time it takes to travel from the Ugandan border to Yei town, for instance, has already been cut by almost half (it apparently used to take five hours) because a section of the route was recently overhauled. EDUCATION, PLEASE But more than the roads, the south Sudanese complain about education. They often talk of having been deprived of the education which, they say, people in other African nations have enjoyed. They also describe a feeling of being disconnected from the wider world, partly because of the lack of education but also because of an absence of information media tailored to southern Sudanese. Many southern Sudanese, of all ages, are keen to return to studies as soon as things settle down. Ely Dada, a part-time casual security guard for senior SPLM figures, says he urgently wants to go back to school. “We have lost a lot in terms of education from this war. Schools closed and some of us dropped out to join the struggle – I dropped out of senior 1 in 1982. For me that is the most significant thing about this peace deal - it means that we can now start our education all over again”, he says. But Paul Mac, the SPLA commander who controls Yei and Juba counties in the extreme south of Sudan, claims that the SPLM are addressing the urgent need for more schools in southern Sudan. “In Yei county alone we now have five primary and two secondary schools governed by SPLM using the Ugandan English-speaking curriculum. Before the SPLA took the town in 1997, there were no schools – so you can see the progress slowly being made. We are just awaiting funding to build more when the deal is signed”. Much will depend on just how generous that funding turns out be. If substantial development money is released on the back of the peace deal, schools could for the first time be part of ordinary life in south Sudan. SELF-DETERMINATION For many of the south Sudanese, the solution to decades of neglect is clear: they want the right to determine how their area is to be built and run, something to which the Khartoum government has agreed in principle at the peace talks. Silvanos Yokosu, journalist for the Sudan Mirror, a newspaper in southern Sudan, feels many southerners are likely to want a separate state. However, none of the people IRIN interviewed in Yei dismissed the idea of a united Sudan after a six-year interim period after which, under the terms of the draft peace accord being hammered out in Nairobi, the relationship between the south and the north is to be decided by referendum. What does the future hold? No one knows but many are guardedly hopeful. “It is always possible this war could end in a happy marriage,” says Yokosu, “but that will require a big change in attitude – on both sides”.