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Children of Sudan: Realizing Children's Rights

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Children of Sudan: Realizing Children's Rights

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Realizing Children's Rights in Sudan

In Sudan, two long civil wars have left millions dead, internally displaced persons and refugees. For the children of Sudan, the primary victims of the conflict, there have been drastic consequences for their education, health and wellbeing.

Main problems faced by children in Sudan:

Sudan is one of the world's poorest countries. 40% of its population live below the poverty line and the majority of Sudanese are destitute and living in terrible conditions. A harsh climate and a lack of natural resources are primarily responsible for the prevailing poverty, but political instability and internal conflict have aggravated the situation. Denying them even their basic needs, extreme poverty is robbing Sudanese children of their childhoods.

Access to healthcare and safe drinking water is limited in Sudan. According to UNICEF statistics, 40% of the population has no access to safe drinking water.

Medical resources are very limited and are drained still further by the country's internal conflicts. In Darfur, for example, a large majority of hospitals are currently under reconstruction. There is a desperate lack of medical supplies and facilities, and existing facilities are ill-equipped to deal with the vast numbers of children, principally newborns who are suffering serious illnesses often caused by malnutrition and dehydration.

The conflicts which have ravaged Sudan over decades, combined with harsh climatic conditions such as floods and droughts, have led to severe food shortages. Unable to rely wholly on their own crops, the Sudanese people are still largely dependent on food aid.

Children are particularly at risk from food shortages, and the rate of infant mortality is especially high as 30% of babies are underweight at birth.

Almost half of Sudan's children are not in school. Although education in Sudan is in theory compulsory, the reality is quite different. Children fail to attend or finish school usually due to poverty, instability and lack of security. Girls, in particular, face many obstacles preventing them access to education, including child marriage in some areas and a lack of community awareness about the importance of educating girls.

In order to reduce school dropout rates, the Ministry of Education and the World Food Programme have joined forces to provide lunches to all pupils. Parents are now more willing to send their children to school, knowing that they will be fed.

Sudan, like South Sudan, has recruited many children to its armed forces. According to UNICEF, there are about 6,000 child soldiers in Darfur alone. Official reports show that the youngest soldiers are only 11 years of age and that girl soldiers are often the victims of sexual abuse against which they receive no protection.

In addition, the conflict between Chad and Sudan, which is closely linked to the Darfur conflict and has been ongoing for years, has led to the recruitment of many child soldiers within Sudan. Sudanese youths who have fled to Chad to escape civil war in their own country, have also at times been forcibly recruited from within refugee camps by the Chadian militia, to fight against Sudan.
Displaced and refugee children
Sudan has the largest number of internally displaced people in the world. In the face of violence because of the conflict, many families are forced to flee their homes to escape a gloomy fate. The journey to camps can be long and perilous and many fail to make the journey alive.

Once having reached the camps, food, health and physical security are still not assured. Armed groups are known to target civilian areas to amplify the effects of their attacks and living conditions within the camps are poor. Humanitarian organisations concerned to help the refugees are not always able assist as they are at times unable to reach the camps.

In Sudan, 12.4% of girls are forced to marry before the age of 15. Marriage is governed by a Sharia-based law introduced in 1991 by the Islamist regime of President Omar Ali Bashir. According to this law, marriage is legal from the age of tamyeez, the age at which a child is able to distinguish between right and wrong, which is determined to be the age of 10.

The practice of child marriages is very harmful to young girls and their health. At such a young age, girls' bodies are not fully developed and are therefore not equipped for pregnancy or labour.
Female Genital Mutilations (FGM)
Sudan ranks second for the number of female genital mutilations in Africa. 90% of female Sudanese have their genitals mutilated before they reach the age of ten. Sudan practises the most severe form of FGM: infibulation, which involves the complete removal of the clitoris and the cutting away and stitching of the labia.

This practice is justified on numerous grounds. The justification most often cited is that mutilation is a symbol of decency, dignity and fertility for young girls of marrying age. The socio-economic security that marriage affords women means that there is significant social pressure placed on girls by their families, both to marry and to undergo FGM.

The practice of FGM is extremely painful as it is performed without anaesthetic, is a risk to health and to life, and represents a terrible violation of the girls' rights. It runs risks for the girls' health and their lives as they can easily develop infections.

Children in minority groups in Sudan have been particularly affected by unrest. Following the independence of the largely Christian South Sudan, non-Muslims in the rest of Sudan now constitute a minority and are vulnerable to victimisation. The Nuba peoples, made up of several different African tribes who live mostly in the mountains in the south of Sudan, are a good example.

In 2011, the NGO Sudan Democracy First Group produced a report accusing government forces of numerous crimes and violations against human rights, principally committed against the Nuba populations in South Kordofan. Nuba children are currently directly threatened and they receive no protection from authorities.

According to a report of Amnesty International, children have recently been sentenced to death and are currently being held on death row in Sudan.

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In Sudan, two long civil wars have left millions dead, internally displaced persons and refugees. For the children of Sudan, the primary victims of the conflict, there have been drastic consequences for their education, health and wellbeing. Sudan is one of the world's poorest countries.

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South Sudanese Children seek Families They've Lost

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South Sudanese Children seek Families They've Lost

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Children mill around as a storm brews over the Bidi Bidi refugee camp in northern Uganda, which is home to 280,000 refugees from South Sudan, more than half of them children. Credit Credit Tommy Trenchard

PALORINYA, Uganda - On a pale dirt road in the Palorinya refugee camp in northern Uganda, Raida Ijo clung to her 16-year-old son, Charles Abu. They sobbed quietly into each other's shoulder. They had been separated for 19 months, since the day that fighting broke out between rebels and government troops in their village in South Sudan.

Charles was halfway through a math class in their village, Andasire, in South Sudan's Central Equatoria state, when the shooting started. He ran for the bush, and after a sleepless night in hiding, set off for the Ugandan border with his younger brother, Seme, 14.

Their mother, Mrs. Ijo, feeling unwell, had checked herself into a hospital that morning. The boys knew that to try to find her would be too dangerous.

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The two brothers are among 17,600 minors who have crossed the border into Uganda without their parents since the outbreak of South Sudan's civil war in 2013, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Over the last year, the pace of the conflict and the flow of refugees have slowed, but aid workers say it will take years to reunite splintered families.

"When it's already tough just to survive, and you don't even know if your loved ones are alive, that adds a lot to the burden," said Joane Holliger, a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross to a program in Uganda, Restoring Family Links. "There are a lot of protection concerns for unaccompanied children - child labor, teenage pregnancy, prostitution, child-headed families - so the quicker we can trace their parents, the better."

Over the last two years, 433 unaccompanied minors have been reunited with their parents in Uganda. Worldwide, the International Committee of the Red Cross has opened 99,342 cases as it tries to reunite families.

In Uganda, the bulk of the work is done by Red Cross volunteers, called tracers, who work weekdays hoping to find missing family members in their allocated section of the camp.

Agustin Soroba, 27, who was himself separated from his family for five months after being kidnapped, beaten and pressed into labor as an ammunition porter by South Sudanese soldiers, has been working as a tracer since February 2017.

His area of operation is a series of blocks in Bidi Bidi camp - now Africa's largest with around 280,000 refugees. On a recent Wednesday, he was doing the rounds of unaccompanied children in his area whose cases were still in progress, and checking on families who had been reunified.

One visit was to a small mud-built home where Margaret Sitima, 18, has been waiting for over a year to reconnect with her mother, last seen on her way to the hospital in the Ugandan town of Arua, after being badly beaten by soldiers on her journey out of South Sudan.

Mr. Soroba pressed her for any more details she might have, and told her he would try his best.

His colleagues urge people to report missing family members. They also hang posters of the missing and run a hotline that allows refugees to phone separated family members.

One old man called his wife - the first time they had spoken in 14 months - to let her know that he was in Bidi Bidi and that he missed her. A woman in a yellow T-shirt called relatives in South Sudan with the news that her son had been sick but was recovering.

Many of the unaccompanied children have witnessed extreme violence, adding urgency to the challenge of reunifying them with their families.

"Many of them are extremely disturbed," said Richard Talish, 33, an employee of the World Vision charity, who runs a safe space for children in Bidi Bidi camp. "We try to keep them busy, so they're not always thinking about the past."

Mr. Talish said that in art sessions, many children draw scenes of violence.

Tracing can take time. The Abu brothers' case illustrates the obstacles to reuniting families split by South Sudan's war. The boys had no idea of their mother's whereabouts and whether she was alive. They said their mother did not know her age and could not spell her name, making it harder to locate her. Like many rural South Sudanese, she has never owned a mobile phone or a Facebook account.

When one of South Sudan's three cellphone networks was taken offline in March over unpaid license fees, thousands lost their only means of contact.

The tracing challenges are exacerbated by the lack of access to a centralized database of refugees in Uganda. A combination of confusion and corruption during refugee registrations, in the early months of the crisis, produced incomplete or erroneous records. Some refugees were registered more than once; others, not at all. Names were misspelled. Some records do not list a specific location within the camps, which sprawl for nearly 100 square miles of northern Uganda scrubland.

Uganda is carrying out biometric registrations to clarify the number of refugees, following a scandal over inflated figures. Several government officials were suspended.

Until their parents have been located, unaccompanied children live with foster families in the camps. Some are connected by charitable organizations, such as World Vision, which runs a database of potential foster caregivers, who must be matched by ethnicity and language with the child. Other children live with families they encountered on the road, or at reception areas near the border. Extended families and clans try to fill the gap.

Florence Knight, 14, was one of six unaccompanied children taken in by a passing refugee family who found them hiding by the roadside near the burning remains of the truck that had taken them toward the border. The vehicle had been ambushed and most of its occupants killed.

"They're like my own children now," said Ms. Knight's new foster mother, Betty Leila, 32, who now has 13 children, stepchildren or foster children. Many cry at night because of bad dreams.

A few blocks away, another teenage girl, Betty Abau, is living with a family who found her crying and alone beside a river on their journey to the Ugandan border. She looked down at the floor, wringing her hands as she talked. She had been at school when violence erupted and forced her to flee without her parents.

"I don't know if they are alive or dead," said Ms. Abau.

She said she had provided all the details she could recall to a tracing officer over a year ago, but had not received any updates. According to Lilias Diria, 32, Betty's new foster mother, she is one of six unaccompanied children living just in this cluster of half a dozen homes.

The breakthrough in the Abu brothers' case finally came after a tip from a man who had recognized one of their relatives in the Palorinya camp, a scattered settlement of 180,000 refugees. Red Cross representatives asked the prime minister's office - which oversees the refugee program in partnership with the United Nations refugee agency - to run a check for their mother. The search revealed nine people with similar names. A Red Cross tracer then set out to locate each woman, one by one, and found the correct Raida Ijo on the fifth attempt.

On June 29, more than a year and a half after they last saw their mother, the boys packed their few possessions - clothes, cooking pots, jerrycans, a single rolled-up mattress, three live rabbits - into a Red Cross vehicle and set off on the two-hour drive from their foster home in Rhino camp, to their mother's ramshackle shelter of sticks, mud and thatch in Palorinya.

"For a mother not to know where her children are is so hard," said an overjoyed Mrs. Ijo, who had spent days sitting in an open sided tarpaulin shelter worrying about her missing sons since fleeing to Uganda during a second round of violence in February 2017. "They came from my body. I brought them up. I love them. I didn't know if I would ever see them again."

Correction:

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the 99,342 cases opened by the Red Cross as it tries to reunite families. That refers to the total number of tracing cases currently open, including efforts to trace adults, not just minors.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Reuniting Broken Families in Uganda's Refugee Camps. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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In Uganda's Refugee Camps, South Sudanese Children Seek the Families They've Lost

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PALORINYA, Uganda - On a pale dirt road in the Palorinya refugee camp in northern Uganda, Raida Ijo clung to her 16-year-old son, Charles Abu. They sobbed quietly into each other's shoulder. They had been separated for 19 months, since the day that fighting broke out between rebels and government troops in their village in South Sudan.

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Newsela | "A Long Walk to Water" By Linda Sue Park

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