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Sudan: since history can remember, this name in Arabic means “land of the black people.” Lately Sudan is not only land to black people but to Arabs as well. The biggest African country has been home to me for three months this year. From Italy, I was asked by my Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop in Sudan a consultancy on the development of programs that could help the Community Based Reintegration of the over 4 million Internally Displaced Persons, including the child soldiers that should be demobilized and rehabilitated into their communities. These people are dispersed all over the country, escaped from a civil war that divided the South from the Northern part of the country mainly through internal conflicts of religious ideology between the Christians and animists in the south and the Muslims in the north.
Now that the two parts of this 20 years old conflict are close to achieving peace, a new humanitarian crisis comes to the attention of hundreds of UN and NGO personnel that have their headquarters in Khartoum: the Arabic Muslim militias called “Janjaweed” and backed by the central military government of Khartoum are killing, raping and torturing thousands of black Muslims in the north-west region of Darfur. In the last few months 1 million refugees fled to the neighbouring country of Chad and in the other regions of Sudan that are already affected by a great number of natural and humanitarian disasters.
The situation is tragic to lots of children, women, and men in the country, as no water and always less food is the result of welfare policy in a country lead by a Muslim dictatorship that applies the Islamic law in its most negative, extremist sense of interpretation.
Few cities in Sudan have electricity: the power sources are poor in one of the African countries that have large oil resources in the continent. This leads to the fact that in Sudan the Digital Divide is something completely unaddressed. Most of the people live in the desert, and do not know that tv, radio, and computers exist. The desert is home to the Nubian people, to the Dinkas, people that in the past have been slaves of the Egyptians when the Pharaohs decided to move to the south of Tebe in order to discover where the water of the Nile was coming from. In the lands that now are the ones of the Khartoum state, a city of three big urban areas known as Khartoum, Omdurman, and Khartoum North, they founded the crossroad of the Two Niles, the Blue Nile, and the White Nile, which together, is the source of the richness of their lands, thanks to the minerals present. Khartoum is a big city - some 10 million people live there, and 2 million of them are refugees that live in camps that are surely impossible to describe in words. But this is something the media, focused daily on the Iraqi situation, will never pay attention to.
In order to seek possible solutions and achieve goals on one of the most important problems that Sudan will face after the beginning of the six year-long transitional period, which will start after the peace agreements that have to be achieved by the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the Sudan People’s Libertation Movement (SPLM) representatives in the city of Naivasha in Kenya - Italy, one of the Observer Member Countries of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), decided to sponsor a consultancy report on the Machakos Protocol that focuses on the return and the rehabilitation of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), the programming of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) of ex-combatants and the study of Children Affiliated with Fighting Forces (CAFF) in the programming of Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Child Soldiers (DRRCS) through the implementation of micro-finance and micro-credit projects.
Those three big issues have been studied before and during the mission of my consultancy in Sudan, and the report has outlined some of the future steps that the involved parties could take after peace will be achieved. The research explained how the consultant sees micro-finance and micro-credit activities as a possible way to settle a better Community Reintegration Program project. It was the opinion of the consultant, during his mission, that trying to use tools of development and focus on the minimal use of emergency tools in the returning program will enable the communities to build up a new social and economic fabric that will give stability and sustainability to the people, as approached by the International Aid Institutions and the International Donors, as well as the Sudanese Government.
Therefore the consultancy report explained today’s situation in Sudan and, in the other chapters, the different approach toward IDPs, and future plans that will lead to the activities in the Community Based Reintegration projects. These activities will enable all community groups to develop together, in order to avoid differences and disparities between them that could lead to new tensions and violences.
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Enzo Maria Le Fevre Cervini
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