Date: 5th February 2007
JUBA, Sudan, Feb. 14 (Gurtong) – Afloat on the Rive Nile women and children shriek or laugh and grab for a handhold as the passenger barge slowly yet steadily again smashes into the bank, loosening more black soil into the muddy water.
The travelers are some of thousands of southern Sudanese who were displaced within Sudan during Africa’s longest civil war, and are now returning home with governmental and United Nations assistance following the signing of a north-south peace agreement in Jan 2005.
Like thousands of others she fled the area after the Bor Massacre of 1991, the bloodiest result of a spilt in the southern rebel force that also created a rift between the south’s two largest tribes.
“So many were killed, my brother was killed, my husband was killed and they took all our cattle, I ran with my co-wife and our children” explained Debora.
She and Elizabeth lived for a few years on UN rations before beginning subsistence farming in Western Equatoria, in an area that suffered from the presence of the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
“We lived together all these years, eating from the same plate, usually there is the stronger and the weaker wife but since the time of our husband’s death we have been equals and our lives have been one,” explained Debora, who said that the two of them had been hoping to return home for the last three years, but did not have the funds.
The barge is run by the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration and returned some 3,000 vulnerable IDPs last year a UN official said. The group of 325 that traveled in the first week of February with Debora and Elizabeth were preceded by 263 in January. Some 10,000 other returns from Equatoria to the Bor area are planned for 2007.
UN has promised to assist another 188,000 people return from one part of Sudan to another this year.
But homecoming will be a bitter sweet. UN officials acknowledge that there is not one county in the south that has enough health, water or education services to match up to international standards of receiving conditions.
While in Equatoria Elizabeth and Debora lived with their children in a wider group of other displaced members of the Dinka Bor tribe.
“We were surprised to find that the authorities will scatter us, our group will be separated according to clans and we will have no way to find each other,” said Debora.
While she talks, Elizabeth fondles her Dinka hymn book. During the two day journey to Bor, the two story blue barge constantly burst into song and prayer, a floating church in the endless yellow and green flat of Sudan. They would rather all stay in Bor and receive ongoing assistance from the UN, as in the years of war.
“I have only been away two years. There is nothing. We eat leaves,” said one woman.
Moses Bul Deng from the southern government’s humanitarian wing, the Southern Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, like the returnees, spends much of the two day journey looking at the slow river. Aside from the occasional crowd of moving horns and temporary huts of a cattle camp, the view is mostly monotonous and empty.
Deng emphasizes that while a policy is being adopted that all should return to their original place to begin their lives rather than stay in tow