Panel# 3:
"Refugee Camps & Border Crossing"
We Kept Running Eastward”: Unaccompanied Sudanese Minors in East
Africa
Dianna J. Shandy,
Department of Anthropology
Macalester College
Crossing borders is central to the refugee definition, as it is in the
act of traversing an international border that refugees become visible to
the international community. Yet, the process of migration, as opposed
to the outcome of migration, is challenging to research and poorly documented
in the literature. This paper draws on several dozen essays written
by unaccompanied Sudanese minors (better known as “The Lost Boys of Sudan”),
who were resident in Kakuma Camp, Kenya, to better understand how they saw
and experienced the journey across borders in East Africa. These
texts are analyzed within a larger framework of ongoing ethnographic research
with refugees from Sudan who have been resettled in the United States.
Finding “Lost Boys”?: Sudanese Refugees in an UNHCR Camp
James Schechter,
University of Colorado at Boulder
Bereft of family and estranged from their “homeland,”
the “Lost Boys of Sudan” captured the imagination of international media
and refugee advocates. Fleeing the civil war in South Sudan in the 1980s,
a group of 10,500 boys trekked from Sudan to Ethiopia to Kenya. This trope’s
currency is most evident in the resettlement of 3,000 young, Sudanese men
from the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees’ (UNHCR) Kakuma Refugee
Camp in northern Kenya to the United States over the last three years. Unfortunately,
thousands of young men remain behind and just marked the ten-year anniversary
of their arrival in the camp. I spent the last year with young men from
Dinka, Nuer and Equatorial Sudanese communities in the camp exploring: How
refugee youth fortify themselves against a hostile environment, as they
term it, through the production of meaningful identities?; How do they respond
to humanitarian organizations’ governance of their social lives, as represented
in programming that targets youth?; and, How do they reconcile transnational
influences (i.e., relationships with a multi-ethnic camp population, connections
with the Diaspora outside of Africa, exposure to pastoral organizations,
etc.) with ethnic allegiances and a desire for an autonomous, New Sudan.
My paper, therefore, questions the effects of camp governance and related
administrative technologies on non-Western populations who occupy a unique
space because they are refugees. In so doing, it details how young, Sudanese
men are produced as, what they term, “modern” individuals through their insertion
in a particular, disciplinary structure: the refugee camp.
Sudanese Refugee Camps in Northern Uganda: Sanctuaries
or Battlegrounds?
Leben Nelson Moro,
Office of African Studies
The American University in Cairo, Egypt.
The current phase of the Sudanese war, which has been raging on for the
past twenty years, forced thousands of people into Uganda. However, these
refugees have not felt secure despite crossing the international border. The
parties to Sudanese conflict continued to cause suffering to Sudanese in
Uganda through direct attacks or actions of their proxies. The Lord’s
Resistance Army, which was supplied by the Sudanese government, continued
to ravage camps for Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda, forcing many of
them on flight. Some of the refugees were compelled to return to southern
Sudan, which is a battle zone. Hence, Sudanese are forced to cross the border
repeatedly, but without gaining the security they crave. This paper will investigate
the role of the main parties to the Sudanese conflict and their proxy rebel
groups in imperiling the security of Sudanese refugees in Uganda. It will
be based mainly on field studies of Sudanese refugees in Adjumani, Uganda,
in 1996 and 2000.
Crossing Borders: Sudan, Ethiopia and Israel
Alice Moore-Harell
One of the major issues in the relations between Sudan and Ethiopia in
the 1980’s was the refugee influx that crossed the border between these
countries. The paper will discuss one aspect of the Ethiopian-Eritrean refugees
in the Sudan. These were settled in camps erected by various international
organizations along the eastern border of the Sudan. Among them were thousands
of Ethiopian Jews, who fled not only from civil war and starvation, but
also from persecutions and abuses by their neighbors. The Israeli government
looked for ways to bring them to Israel. It faced a major problem, not only
had that country no diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, but also the Sudan
was a Muslim country that held Israel as an enemy. At first, some of them
were taken out of the Sudan by clandestine means. Later, it was done with
the collaboration of the Sudanese government. The paper will analyze
the causes that influenced the Sudanese government to cooperate with a declared
enemy, and the influence it had on Sudanese domestic politics.
Blue Nile South: A Hundred Years on from Major Gwynn's Border
Survey
Wendy James
University of Oxford
The central section of the Sudan-Ethiopian border from the Blue Nile to
the Baro was finalized in 1902-3 on the basis of a survey on the ground by
Major C.W. Gwynn. Some of the decisions about the course of the line
had already been made at a higher level. Other decisions were made
on the ground and Gwynn has accounted for these in detail. He could
not have possibly anticipated the enormous significance later to be given
to the international border, or indeed to the internal line between 'northern'
and 'southern' Sudan which (despite some variations over time) meets the
international frontier in this region. The whole zone had been a relative
backwater, and has sometimes been described as a 'no-man's land'. However,
the repeated pattern of international and civil struggle in this frontier
zone during the hundred years or so since the border was drawn has transformed
this 'quiet' area into a hotly contested one, and a region dangerous for
the very survival of its local populations.
A recent book devoted to ‘border identities’ draws
attention to the ‘dialectical relationships between borders and their states’
(Wilson and Donnan 1998: 3). In the present paper, I show how Gwynn's
border has transformed the lives of local people several times during the
sequence of struggles which have contributed to the formation of the modern
states on either side. The story is of course still an unfinished one.