U.S. Committee for Refugees World Refugee Survey 2004 - Sudan

Nearly 5.5 million Sudanese were uprooted at the end of 2003, including an estimated 5 million internally displaced persons and some 600,000 Sudanese who lived as refugees and asylum seekers.

Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers included about 198,000 in Uganda, 115,000 in Chad, some 95,000 in Ethiopia, 75,000 in Congo-Kinshasa, 60,000 in Kenya, 37,000 in Central African Republic (CAR), 15,000 in Egypt, 1,000 in Eritrea, and 4,000 Sudanese asylum seekers in Western industrialized countries. One million or more Sudanese became newly uprooted during 2003, according to various estimates.

More than 285,000 refugees from other countries lived in Sudan at year's end, including some 270,000 from Eritrea, 8,000 from Uganda, and about 2,000 from Ethiopia. An additional 10,000 Ethiopians lived in Sudan in refugee-like circumstances although they lacked official refugee status.

Pre-2003 Events

Civil war has raged in Sudan for 20 years. Rebel armies in southern Sudan have continued to fight against government forces and pro-government militia in a bid for political autonomy or independence for southern Sudan and its estimated 5 million population.

Ethnic and military divisions among southerners have complicated the civil war and produced additional bloodshed. Rivalries have also surfaced in the north, where some groups opposed to the government have formed a military alliance with southern rebels. The long war has taken on religious and cultural overtones, including disagreements over efforts to impose Islamic law on non-Muslims. Most southern Sudanese are black Christians or adherents of local traditional religions, while northern Sudanese are predominantly Arab Muslims.

The civil war has left an estimated 2 million or more persons dead in southern and central Sudan since 1983. The combination of war and drought has produced chronic food shortages in many areas of the south, resulting in famines in 1988, 1992, and 1998. Sudan has ranked as one of the world's leading producers of uprooted people since the mid-1980s.

In mid 2002, the Sudanese government and the southern rebel forces known as the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), signed a general framework for eventual peace, known as the Machakos Protocol, which acknowledged the southern population's right to self-determination. In late 2002, both parties signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), agreeing to end hostilities and grant unimpeded humanitarian access to millions of suffering Sudanese.

War and Negotiations in 2003

Despite continued progress toward peace between the Sudanese government and the SPLA, warfare, violence, and human rights violations continued and a major new conflict erupted during 2003.

Government troops and pro-government militias launched several military offensives in southern Sudan, particularly in heavily populated areas of the oil-rich Western and Eastern Upper Nile Provinces. SPLA attacks and internal conflicts in southern Sudan displaced thousands of civilians. As in previous years, both sides killed civilians and violated basic human rights.

New violence in western Sudan's Darfur region uprooted nearly 1 million residents. International observers reported that the bloodshed, which continued throughout the year, disrupted the lives and further isolated more than half of the Darfur region's estimated 6 million residents (see below).

Despite the ongoing violence, peace negotiations appeared to gain momentum during 2003, due in part to pressure exerted by the international community, including the United States. In late 2003 in Naivasha, Kenya, the Sudanese government and the rebel negotiators signed agreements to integrate their forces into one national army, institute an interim power-sharing government, and hold national elections in 2009. The major issues of how to control and distribute southern Sudan's oil resources, the status of the three disputed areas of Nuba Mountains, Abyei, and Southern Blue Nile, and the adoption of Islamic Shari law remained unresolved at year's end.

Although military activities appeared to decline in southern and eastern Sudan during late 2003, violence persisted in some areas, primarily in the Darfur region, and the outcome of peace negotiations remained in doubt.

Uprooted Sudanese

While most of the newly uprooted sought refuge within Sudan during the year, some 100,000 new Sudanese refugees fled the country, mostly to Chad. The U.S. government continued to grant Temporary Protected Status to about 500 Sudanese. In addition, there were more than 2,000 Sudanese asylum seekers in the United States.

The worst violence occurred in western Sudan's Darfur region where at least 800,000 black Muslim civilians fled their homes during the year, according to estimates by relief agencies. In early 2003, tensions between a government-supported western nomadic tribe, the Janjaweed, and Darfurian civilians escalated into violence and spawned the creation of two anti-government militias, the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). Halting peace negotiations between the government and the new militias failed in April. Violence escalated in June when government coordinated military offensives and militia raids against residents throughout the Darfur region forced hundreds of thousands of people from hundreds of towns, villages, and other populated areas. SLA and JEM retaliatory attacks added to the massive displacement. After a tentative agreement to end hostilities failed in September, violence in the region resumed and expanded through year's end. International observers suggested that the Sudanese government's brutal tactics against Fur, Masaalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups in Darfur, which included targeted killings, mass rapes, razing of villages and food stocks, and the contamination of water supplies, was ethnic cleansing.

Nearly 400,000 Darfurians remained in some 20-displacement camps in Northern, Western, and Southern Darfur States at year's end. An estimated 300,000 Darfurians remained displaced in the region's remote mountains, in the desert near the Sudan-Chad border, and with relatives in host communities.

Poor security and Sudanese government-imposed travel restrictions to the Darfur States during the year prevented humanitarian assistance agencies from determining the extent of the crisis and the precise number and needs of displaced persons in the region. While no accurate estimates of the number of civilian deaths materialized, various sources suggest that the yearlong violence killed between 10,000 to 30,000 people.

"The government's response to solve the Darfur issue by resorting to Special Courts, group trials, death sentences and cruel and inhumane punishment such as cross amputation, are totally inadequate and resulted in serious human rights abuses," the UN reported in March.

In January, a government and government-supported militia offensive against SPLA forces in the Western Upper Nile areas of Lara, Tam, Nhialdou, and Leel uprooted thousands of people. Also in January, clashes between government forces and the SPLA in and around the village of Liech, northern Western Upper Nile, pushed some 50,000 people from their homes. In March, a SPLA attack in Eastern Upper Nile region displaced some 8,000 civilians and killed at least 12 people.

Sudan's civil war was not the only cause of displacement. A Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), supported by the Sudanese government, roamed through southern Sudan looting villages and massacring civilians. The presence of LRA fighters in Eastern Equatoria Province impeded humanitarian operations in the region during 2003, including containing an outbreak of Yellow Fever. The LRA has reportedly abducted some 8,000 people, and raped, killed, and mutilated countless others in Eastern Equatoria and Bahr Al Jebel Provinces since 2002, according to the UN. Some 120,000 Sudanese remained internally displaced in Eastern Equatoria and Bahr Al Jebel Provinces at year's end.

The new population movements during 2003, did not substantially alter the general pattern of displacement in Sudan, with the exception of the estimated between 800,000 to 1 million people who were newly uprooted and remained internally displaced in western Sudan at year's end. Between 1.5 million and 2 million persons remained internally displaced in the south, including about 300,000 in government-held towns. Some 1.5 million to 2 million remained displaced in and around Khartoum, the capital, most of them southerners who had fled or migrated northward because of the war. Other areas of Sudan contained an additional 500,000 uprooted people.

The new displacement in the Darfur region and violence in southern and eastern Sudan in early 2003 pushed the country's total displaced population to a new high of nearly 5.5 million, or one out of eight Sudanese. Sudan's massive size, poor security, government-restricted access to displaced populations, made precise estimates impossible.

Despite progress toward peace and hope for large-scale repatriation and reintegration of millions of Sudanese uprooted for two decades, insignificant numbers of displaced person returned home during 2003.

Humanitarian Conditions

Humanitarian conditions in Sudan remained among the worst in the world. Two decades of war and government neglect have left most of southern Sudan's health clinics, schools, roads, places of worship, and markets in ruins. Pervasive violence in the south has repeatedly uprooted already displaced families. Most uprooted people continued to live in destitute conditions. While a relative decrease in hostilities in some areas of the Nuba Mountains, Blue Nile, and Western Upper Nile regions enabled humanitarian agencies to access an additional 1 million people in need during 2003, millions of others remained out of reach of assistance programs.

More than 670,000 children died of treatable illnesses during the year, UN humanitarian officials estimated. Health surveys conducted in mid 2003 found child malnutrition rates as high as 40 percent among populations in conflict areas in the south. Child under the age of five suffered from malaria or an acute respiratory infection four to six times during the year, according to UN agencies. In some areas of southern Sudan, nearly 40 percent of children under the age of five suffered from diarrhea. More than 50 percent of rural households did not have access to potable water.

A consortium of relief agencies known as Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) delivered tens of thousands of tons of food to needy populations during the year, primarily by air because of poor or nonexistent roads.

International donors provided $181 million dollars for humanitarian and development programs during the year, but ignored aid officials' request for more than $75 million more. Health, agriculture, and development programs received less than 40 percent of the funds requested.

Refugees from Eritrea

Eritrean refugees fled to Sudan as early as 1967 during Eritrea's war for independence from Ethiopia. Additional hundreds of thousands arrived during the 1970s and 1980s as the independence war continued until 1991. Thousands more fled to Sudan in the late 1990s to escape a border war between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced in February 2002 that conditions that originally caused refugees to flee Eritrea had largely disappeared. UNHCR stated that, effective December 31, 2002, Eritreans living in Sudan would no longer receive prima facie refugee status and would either have to repatriate, file individualized asylum claims to remain in Sudan as refugees, or take steps to become permanent legal residents of Sudan.

In January, some 36,000 Eritrean refugees registered to repatriate with UNHCR assistance. However, Sudan's border with Eritrea, which Sudanese officials closed in October 2002 after accusing Eritrean authorities of supporting rebel incursions into eastern Sudan, remained closed. In late 2003, both governments agreed to open their respective borders only to create a humanitarian corridor, enabling UNHCR to recommence repatriation operations. Heavy seasonal rains suspended the exercise from July to October. By year's end, some 9,000 Eritreans repatriated from Sudan. UNHCR provided returnees with blankets, water containers, agricultural tools, materials to construct traditional homes, and mosquito nets to each returnee family. The World Food Programme (WFP) provided a one-year food supply. Some 27,000 Eritrean refugees who had registered to go home were unable to do so because of the border closure.

Nearly 30,000 refugee families chose to apply for continued refugee status in Sudan. Many claimed that Eritrean authorities would persecute them because of their political or religious beliefs, or because they were married to Ethiopians. The Sudanese government reviewed nearly 50 percent of the asylum applications by year's end, granting refugee status to some 7,000 Eritreans.

The estimated 270,000 Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers remaining at year's end lived in camps and settlements in northeastern Sudan, as well as in urban areas such as Khartoum, the capital, Kassala, Gedaref, and Port Sudan. The nearly 110,000 Eritrean refugees who received assistance from UNHCR resided in twelve camps and two settlements in eastern Sudan at year's end. UNHCR and its partners provided camp- and settlement-based refugees with basic health, education, sanitation, and water services. WFP provided monthly food rations.

The government's Commissioner for Refugees (COR) office continued to oversee Sudan's refugee policies and operate programs with UNHCR financial support despite a long history of alleged corruption.

Other Refugees

Most of the 8,000 Ugandan refugees in Sudan lived in Khartoum and the country's war-torn southern region. Little information was available about their living conditions.

About 2,000 Ethiopian refugees who fled their country during the 1980s continued to live in Sudan. UNHCR declared in 2000 that Ethiopian refugees who fled their country before 1991 no longer qualified for automatic refugee status and should either return home, become permanent legal residents of Sudan, or apply for individualized refugee status. Thousands of Ethiopians in Sudan chose to apply for refugee status, but government officials refused the vast majority of claims.

Because some asylum applicants voiced concern that the high refusal rate indicated possible unfairness in the government's refugee screening process, the U.S. Committee for Refugees estimated that about 10,000 Ethiopians were living in refugee-like circumstances in Sudan without official refugee status. UNHCR provided limited humanitarian assistance to fewer than 1,000 Ethiopian refugees during 2003.