Fleeing Drought
Hassan Ali has a canteen of water slung over one shoulder, in his right hand he holds a walking stick, and in his left, a blackened kettle. A scarf is draped over his head to protect him from the midday sun, he stands in thin, cracked flip-flops, and wears a blue, short-sleeved shirt over polo-shirt, with a Somali wrap-around skirt around his waist. This is all he has left.
With the sun beating over-head, he pours a little water from his kettle over his feet to wash them, ablutions before the dhuhr (noon) prayers.
Hassan is forty-two years old, and fifteen days ago he left his home in Dinsour, Somalia, his livelihood destroyed by the drought that has ravaged Somalia. Two kilometres behind him stands the Somali-Kenyan border, and ahead of him lies the Dadaab refugee complex - the largest refugee camp in the world.
This is where Hassan and his five compatriots are heading. Hassan’s wife and children left Dinsour for Dadaab several weeks previously, whilst he stayed on to try and struggle through the drought, to save his home and land. Now he is walking to join them, a small family amongst 380,000 refugees.
When he arrives, Hassan will register with the camp authorities, and try to locate his family. The camp is already several times over capacity, and it can take days to register, and weeks to receive a refugee—and therefore ration—card.
But before he can do that, Hassan has over one hundred kilometres across the hot sands ahead of him, with little respite. The few, small villages en-route are themselves suffering from the drought, and have already seen so many refugees heading to Dadaab.
Dadaab & Drought
The bus bounded over pot-holed roads, heading north-east from Nairobi into the arid scrubland towards the Somali border. We were seven, crammed into the back seat of this behemoth, thrown upwards out of our seats on some of the nastier bumps, my head once hitting the roof.
Past Garissa, all that lay ahead of us was the Somali border—an unruly frontier—and Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp.
The three camps that comprise the Dadaab refugee complex, and which are already over-capacity, have swelled in recent months, their numbers growing due to the drought (and subsequent famine) ravaging Somalia.
I began working on the drought back in May, covering the drought-displaced in Mogadishu. Conditions were terrible back then, and people were arriving into the war-torn capital in a deplorable state. I had never seen malnutrition this bad.
This did not prepare me, however, for what I would encounter in Dadaab. The size of the place is overwhelming; the sheer number of people living here, as refugees from a war-torn country, many for over a decade. The camps are overwhelmed by the number of people arriving, unable to process that many (over 1000) people each day. And in the hospitals, the severity of the malnutrition was unlike anything I had encountered, neither in eastern Sudan, South Sudan nor Mogadishu.
When I was in Mogadishu, it seemed like no-one was covering the drought, it took over a month for the pictures to appear on the Guardian website. Now, half of the Juba independence press corps. The drought is all over the international news, and rightly so. Through a proper response, political will and, admittedly, with cooperation from al-Shebab, much of this could have been prevented.
» For more coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa, see my portfolio
Arriving in the Nuba Mountains
It’s hard to get to the Nuba mountains right now. It’s even harder to get out.
Sudanese Armed Forces’ (SAF) Antonov planes have been bombing the area for weeks. Reports of ethnic cleansing have been seeping out of the provincial capital, Kadugli; the UN peace-keepers there seemingly having done nothing to protect the people of South Kordofan. Aid groups have been banned, and journalists forbidden from going there; Al-Jazeera bravely tried, but were stopped. A few Nuba have escaped it to Juba, where colleagues have interviewed them—gathering eye-witness reports—and written their stories.
It started back in May when Ahmed Haroun—wanted by the International Criminal Court for charges of war crimes committed in Darfur—won the provincial elections. The Nuba, the majority people there, claim that the vote was rigged, and that their own candidate, Abdulaziz Al-Hilu, had won. SAF forces moved into the region to disarm Al-Hilu’s followers.
Within half an hour of arriving, we heard the sound of bombs detonating and the whining of a plane overhead. The vehicles hid under the cover of trees, their bodywork smeared with diesel and mud to camoflage them in the bush. And a line of people walked, bags in hand, trying to find a way out.
A return to war?
The vast, green grasslands stretch across the impossibly flat plains, a few hazy trees pockmarking the stretched horizon. Every now and then, a small pocket of tokuls, the traditional Sudanese mud and thatched huts, pop-up alongside the dirt road that leads to Pariang, at the heart of Sudan.
Pariang lies in the north of South Sudan’s Unity State, a name that seems rather odd considering the impending independence of the south. In January’s referendum, citizens were asked to vote for either unity or secession; the latter was chosen with nearly 99% of the vote.
It is at the northern-most tip of Unity state that Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the north’s army, have been bombing the town of Jau, lying right on the north-south border-to-be. This lakeside town has been attacked several times by the SAF’s infamous Antonov bombers, which reaped fear amongst the southerners during the bitter, decades-long civil war. The International Organisation for Migration has said that 3700 have so far fled, and many more have “run to the bush”.
The first bombs fell on Jau on June 10th, and the town has been hit several times since. “Antonovs bombed the area and killed my son” said Thrab Deng, a woman who fled Jau. She spent a day walking through the mud to Pariang, the capital of the county, where she has been for the past week. “We don’t have food here” she says, “I go and beg from people”.
The community in Pariang is doing their best to support the displaced, but have little resources with which to do so. Much of Unity State relies on road links from the north to stock their markets, but these roads have been closed for the past three months. According to market surveys conducted in Bentiu, the state capital, by the World Food Programme, the price of sorghum, a staple for the Sudanese, have doubled in recent weeks. Fuel prices have also rocketed, limiting the transport available to these remote regions, as well as raising commodity prices. Add to that no tarmac roads linking Bentiu and Pariang, the dirt road becomes all but impassable when the rains come. As I drove back from Pariang to Bentiu after an afternoon of rain, one of the two lorries we passed en-route was stuck in the mud. The second, up on axles, changing a blown-out tyre amidst the thick mud.
Thrab is not alone in being short of food, far from home. Taking shelter in a building on the outskirts of town, the fifty or so families staying here all came with virtually nothing, fleeing the bombs. They carried their children during the day-long walk through the mud from Jau to Pariang. “Today we don’t know what we will eat” says Martha, another mother staying there. “We have yet to get assistance from the government or NGOs.”
The World Food Programme, in association with World Vision, an NGO working in Unity State, will soon start distributing food to the most vulnerable, but in this town of little, many will lay claim to that title.
Unity is also the southern state that has received the most returnees from the north, in the build-up to independence, further stretching already limited resources. From late October 2010 to June 21st of this year, nearly 78,000 South Sudanese have come to the state. And over 45,000 are displaced this year in Unity.
But for those fleeing Jau, they live amongst the fear of further bombing from the North. Local officials here say that they can hear the bombing from Pariang, and have seen planes flying over Panyang, a village fifteen kilometres further north. “I am worried that Antonovs will follow us here and bomb Pariang town” says Ayak, a mother of three. Her husband stayed behind in Jau when she fled, and she says that she has not heard from him since she left. “I am worried that my husband may not be alive” she adds.
Col. Mabek Lang Mading, the Commissioner for Pariang County says “I appeal to the international community to condemn the attacks”, asking also for international intervention. The South Sudanese army, the SPLA, has hitherto been relatively restrained in their response to the bombings, possibly fearing that any retaliation could jeopardise their chance for secession come July 9th, the day the South will officially declare independence. Thereafter, this restraint could change. Col. Mading says that “if the SAF are still bombing Jau after 9th July, then we will definitely respond”, reiterating that “we have the right to respond and we must protect it”. This would mean a return to war, but this time between two sovereign nations.
Some, such as Thrab, wish to remain here in Pariang. “I will not go back, no way” she says. But many want to return to their homes, and reunite their families. “When there is no more fighting, I can go back to Jau to see if my husband is still alive” says Ayak. For that to happen, there needs to be an end to the fighting. “We cannot go back to Jau unless there is security there” says Abdullah Ibrahim Suleiman. But with continued bombing, and two states on the verge of war, this security could be a long way off, with many more yet to suffer.
