naturalfeature:nile valley

What it means to be a ‘refugee’ in South Sudan and Uganda

After decades of armed conflict in South Sudan and Uganda, labels of ‘refugee’ and ‘internally displaced person’ fail to reflect the complex realities of the people they refer to. Leben Moro examines the history of movement across the region’s borders, and argues refugees are not the passive recipients of aid as often presented by humanitarian initiatives.

Since independence from British colonial rule, large numbers of South Sudanese and Ugandans have repeatedly crossed the shared border to escape civil wars. These forced movements of large populations have created shifting labels of ‘refugees’ and ‘internally displaced persons’ (IDPs), with tremendous social, economic and political repercussions for the persons to which these labels are applied.

In August 1955, months before Sudan’s independence, the largely Christian Southern Sudanese took up arms against Muslim rulers in the North to achieve a vision of greater regional autonomy, which sparked a mass flight of people from their homes. By the end of the First Sudanese Civil War in 1972, the Sudanese government estimated that 500,000 people had hidden in the bush, and another 180,000 had crossed into neighbouring countries, with 74,000 settling in four official camps (Onigo, Agago, Acholpii and Nakapiripirit) in northern Uganda. Many of the displaced persons, including my own family members, self-settled in other parts of Uganda, mainly near cotton ginning mills and other businesses operated by Ugandans of Indian origin, who employed them as casual labourers.

My own family members settled near Gulu, the largest town in northern Uganda, among the Acholi ethnic group. Some South Sudanese journeyed southwards to Bwelye in the centre of Uganda, where there was plentiful fertile land and jobs in Indian enterprises. Others travelled further south into the heartland of the Baganda, the largest tribe in the country, to work in sugar plantations and different enterprises, including fields where locals grew coffee, bananas and other crops.

Over time, many newcomers acquired land with their earnings and became poll taxpayers. Their receipt documentation allowed them to move across land in relative safety. In general, however, life was hard as they lacked citizenship and were vulnerable to exploitation and harassment.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) coordinated a programme of official repatriation, supported by public authorities in Sudan and Uganda, including a mandate that supported Sudan’s IDPs. Many people, however, chose not to leave.

In 1979, Uganda became embroiled in a bitter civil war following the overthrow of President Idi Amin Dada, forcing Southern Sudanese, including my own family members, and many Ugandans from the north of the country, to flee into the relatively peaceful Southern Sudan. The UNHCR and other humanitarian organisations as well as public authorities in Sudan helped settle many refugees in camps, but some Ugandans settled among local people, initially without external support.

The relative peace in Southern Sudan was disrupted in 1983 when the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) was founded to lead another armed struggle against Sudan’s newly declared Islamic state under President Gaafar Nimeiry – which came to be known as the Second Sudanese Civil War. The violence forced Ugandan peoples living in Southern Sudan back into Uganda and many Southern Sudanese also made the crossing. Some of the refugees returned to locations they had lived in during the first civil war or joined relatives or friends who had remained in Uganda. People used their established networks.

The new wave of refugees received generous assistance from the UNHCR and the Ugandan government, whose policy was the settlement of refugees in camps and dedicated areas. Effectively, the policy redefined a refugee as ‘someone receiving assistance and living in a camp’. Many displaced Southern Sudanese avoided encampment, with its associated restrictions of movement, by self-settling among locals or dividing their family members or time between camps and outside locations.

As in the first civil war, many displaced persons in Southern Sudan did not cross international borders, but remained behind in dire circumstances. Their plight forced the United Nations to launch another initiative, Operation Lifeline Sudan, in the 1980s to assist those trapped in the war zone. This suffering formally ceased in 2005 with the conclusion of the much-lauded Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Sudanese government and the SPLM/A, enabling the return of the IDPs to their original homes and refugees back to the country.

In 2011, Southern Sudan seceded from Sudan. About two years later, the world’s newest country relapsed into a vicious civil war. Sparked by divisions among the country’s key leaders, ethnic identities were subsequently exploited to mobilise fighters with devastating consequences for national unity and the wellbeing of civilians.

During the conflict, many Nuer people, an ethnic group primarily inhabiting South Sudan’s Nile Valley, fled into areas created on UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) bases, called Protection of Civilians Sites (PoCs), to escape killing by members of the Dinka, the largest ethnic group, who had effectively taken over the country with the support of Ugandan soldiers. Nuer fighters retaliated against Dinka civilians, forcing many to flee to the Uganda border and other locations.

Many South Sudanese headed north into the new Republic of Sudan, where public authorities labelled them ’arrivals’, a new term with no precedent in refugee policy or literature, and confined them to ‘waiting stations’. Uganda also received a large number of displaced persons, among them refugees placed in settlements with international assistance. Many displaced persons settled among locals without external assistance, thus avoiding the label of ‘refugee’.

What it means to be ‘refugees’ in Uganda

The 1951 Refugee Convention states a person becomes a refugee after crossing an internationally recognised border in search of protection, recognition and status by public authorities in the asylum country or the UNHCR. When the circumstances that forced the person to seek refuge cease to exist, the refugee re-avails themselves of the country’s protection they had fled. Thus defined concrete international borders are characterised as integral to becoming a refugee or ending refuge.

For South Sudanese displaced persons, the border between their country and Uganda is not a clearly defined line separating two jurisdictions. Many parts of the border are contested by ordinary people and public authorities on both sides. Consequently, people inhabiting locations along these contested areas are not always on peaceful terms despite often belonging to the same ethnic groups, such as the Acholi of South Sudan and Uganda.

Different ethnic groups that have seen clashes over contested territories have also been forced into settling in areas of close proximity following unrest in their respective homelands. My own research reveals the Kuku of Kajokeji in South Sudan were so suspicious of the Madi in the Ugandan Moyo district that, when they settled in the latter’s region, they avoided treatment in the Moyo hospital for fear of maltreatment by Madi medical personnel. The history of conflict over certain borders has a direct bearing on the welfare of refugees in the present.

Armed groups and criminals also operate along the border, posing serious security problems, with some people losing their lives at the hands of unknown gunmen. Despite this danger, refugees and other South Sudanese cross in and out of South Sudan for matters of family and livelihoods, such as to harvest crops in their old fields due to food shortages in their new home. Others return their deceased kin to bury them decently on their old compounds and, further, trips are made to the national capital, Juba, to visit relatives or deal with administrative issues.

These movements defy the legal meaning of ‘refugee’, who is supposed to return home when the threat of persecution that caused the flight is over. They demonstrate that refugees are not the passive and docile recipients of aid, as often presented, but active individuals who exercise agency. Studies remind us that were refugees only to eat the ‘food which is distributed to them, they would die’.

What it means to stay behind as an IDP

Because IDPs are citizens living in their native county they are entitled to the same rights and legal protections as fellow citizens as stipulated by the constitution. In reality, IDPs do not always enjoy citizenship rights because those in power consider them enemies or supporters of enemies.

During the second civil war, the Sudanese government branded IDPs as rebel supporters and subjected them to all kinds of punitive measures, including starvation and denial of basic services. Many IDPs consequently starved to death or died due to deadly diseases, such as kala azar, as the already rudimentary healthcare system in pre-war Southern Sudan was destroyed by repeated military bombardments as well as frequent obstructions of international humanitarian access.

When South Sudan gained independence and descended into civil war, IDPs did not fare any better. Following shocking atrocities and the continued risk of further violence, many Nuer civilians remain in PoCs on UNMISS bases under the protection of peacekeepers in refugee-like situations. Deprived of state protection, their situation has become worse than most refugees in South Sudan, deprioritised over the dominant Dinka.

The labels of ‘refugee’ and ‘internally displaced person’ do not reflect the experiences of most South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, and IDPs within South Sudan. These terms present refugees and IDPs as powerless recipients of aid when, in reality, refugees and IDPs are active agents in efforts to improve their situation. In some cases, they creatively manipulate borders and the systems in place to satisfy their basic needs.

It has been expressed that South Sudanese refugees have shown an extraordinary creativity and resourcefulness that can form a blueprint for future refugee assistance programmes. When ‘official legal categories rarely match realities on the ground’, aid workers should now appreciate and encourage the active involvement of refugees and IDPs to address the challenges that confront them.

▻https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/05/28/what-it-means-to-be-a-refugee-in-south-sudan-and-uganda
#réfugiés #IDPs #déplacés_internes #Soudan_du_Sud #Ouganda #histoire #histoire

The Egyptian Egg Ovens Considered More Wondrous Than the Pyramids - Gastro Obscura
▻https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/egypt-egg-ovens

https://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/64061/image.jpg

Many aspects of Egyptian culture impressed the ancient Greeks, including their mathematics, papyrus-making, art, and egg-hatching. Aristotle was the first to mention that last innovation, writing that in Egypt, eggs “are hatched spontaneously in the ground, by being buried in dung heaps.” But 200 years later, the historian Diodorus Siculus cast Egyptian egg-hatching as wondrous. In his forty-book-long historical compendium Library of History, he wrote:

The most astonishing fact is that, by reason of their unusual application to such matters, the men [in Egypt] who have charge of poultry and geese, in addition to producing them in the natural way known to all mankind, raise them by their own hands, by virtue of a skill peculiar to them, in numbers beyond telling.

Aristotle and Diodorus were referring to Egyptian egg incubators, an ingenious system of mud ovens designed to replicate the conditions under a broody hen. With lots of heat, moisture, and periodical egg-turning, an egg oven could hatch as many as 4,500 fertilized eggs in two to three weeks, a volume that impressed foreigners for centuries. Western travelers mentioned the wondrous structures constantly in their writings about Egypt. In 1750, French entomologist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur visited an egg incubator and declared that “Egypt ought to be prouder of them than her pyramids.”
Ancient Egyptian mural depicting food offerings (1422-1411 B.C.). Chicken did not become a feature of Egyptian diets until the fourth century B.C.
Ancient Egyptian mural depicting food offerings (1422-1411 B.C.). Chicken did not become a feature of Egyptian diets until the fourth century B.C. Public Domain

Egg incubators were quite a late invention, considering Egypt’s long history. According to Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, chickens were not a native bird of the Nile valley. They probably came from Asia—where they were domesticated from wild fowls 10,000 years ago—through Mesopotamia, or perhaps via trade ships that sailed to East Africa. It was only during the Ptolemaic dynasty, which lasted from 323 to 30 B.C., that chicken became a staple feature of Egyptian diets, says Ikram. In order to have a regular supply of chicken meat, Egyptians developed the first egg incubators.

From the outside, many incubators looked like smaller, more rounded versions of the pyramids. They sat upon rectangular brick foundations, and had conic-shaped chimneys with a circular opening at the top. That thousands of eggs could be hatched in a single oven was an impressive feat, considering that a broody hen can only hatch up to 15 eggs at a time. Incubator hatching also meant that hens could spend more time laying eggs.

.:Middle East Online:: :.
▻http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=86522

With 96 million inhabitants — and 9.4 million expatriates — the Arab world’s most populous country adds 1.6 million people every year to its population.

At the current rate, Egypt’s population will reach 119 million in 2030, according to a May report by the United Nations Population Fund.

With 95 percent of Egypt’s land uninhabitable desert, the population is concentrated around the narrow Nile valley and Nile Delta, with smaller numbers along the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts.

A fall in mortality rates in the early 1970s further boosted the population growth.

In Cairo, a megalopolis of nearly 20 million inhabitants, the population density is around 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometre, or nearly 10 times that of London.

#Egypte #démographie

The Armed Forces and Egypt’s land | Mada Masr
▻http://www.madamasr.com/sections/economy/armed-forces-and-egypts-land

In February, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issued a decree to direct the Armed Forces Land Projects Agency (AFLPA) to oversee construction of two of Egypt’s mega-projects to be built on 16,000 acres under military control: the new capital city and Sheikh Zeyad’s new urban community. The decree granted AFLPA the power to form joint ventures.

The move is indicative of the political direction increasingly taken by Egypt’s authorities to expand the Armed Forces’ involvement in the economy. This military involvement does not only take the form of oversight and contractual management, but increasingly is articulated through the formation of joint venture investments wherein the military allocates desert land under its control – land whose value is expected to appreciate markedly – to companies affiliated with the Armed Forces, as a capital investment.

Does allowing the AFLPA to form joint ventures signal a major transformation in the military’s role in Egypt’s economy?

“This Land is their Land” : Egypt’s Military and the Economy
▻http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/23671/%E2%80%9Cthis-land-is-their-land%E2%80%9D_egypt%E2%80%99s-military-and-th

Cet article extrêmement documenté est remarquable sur la réalité et la nature du pouvoir économique et politique des militaires en Egypte
@alaingresh

contrary to popular thinking, the army’s share in Egypt’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is relatively small. Though limited, hard data shows that it is present in many sectors but does not occupy a commanding position in any, and indeed has no presence in a range of crucial economic sectors. There is little empirical evidence that the private sector has been crowded out by the military at all, with the possible exception of government contracts for new mega-projects in the post-June 2013 period.

The Egyptian military’s economic model is based on rent extraction. Through its broad legal and effective control of public assets, namely public lands that constitute around 94 per cent of Egypt’s total surface area, the military translates its regulatory mandate into an economic return. The military also wields considerable, if less formal influence through the large number of former officers who hold high level posts in the civil service, particularly in public land management. Public land is crucial for economic growth and for the development of essential sectors, including urban development, manufacturing, tourism, and agriculture—which, together, constitute the bulk of Egypt’s economy. More than any other factor, the chokehold on land use is costly for the economy. The complexity and opacity of the regulatory environment affecting access to it moreover adds to the inefficiency of the private sector. This results in significant opportunity costs for potential growth and urban expansion—in an overcrowded country that needs to expand settlement into the vast tracts of desert land to the east and west of the densely populated Nile Valley.