Sudan: Forgotten Refugees Complain of World's Neglect

From Reuters

Adam Ibrahim was born at this refugee camp 25 years ago, after his parents fled what is now called Eritrea. He never saw his home country and thinks his own children may be born as refugees.

"That is if I survive here in the first place," he said.

Like many other refugees, he believes other more recent humanitarian crises, notably Darfur in western Sudan, have distracted the world's attention from his people's plight.

"The world has forgotten us," he said, clad in a Brazilian soccer jersey and surrounded by scores of refugees who came to complain about the dismal standards of basic services to the visiting head of the United Nations refugees agency.

Wars, famines and worsening human rights situations have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia to eastern Sudan since 1968.

The United Nations says some 133,000 refugees, the majority of them Eritreans with small numbers of Ethiopians and Somalis, live in 12 camps in eastern Sudan. Thousands of them, however, lack proper refugee status, and thus full rights.

They all live in small straw huts in vast areas surrounded by barren lands and bare hills in the province of Kasala, whose leaders say the influx of refugees has depleted the resources of their towns and villages.

"They are forgotten people, both the refugees and the hosting communities," the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said at the Kilo 26 camp on Thursday.

"I think it is important to recognise that the hosting communities have been sharing their very meagre resources in a very generous attitude, and let's be honest, without much support, even from our side," he said.

Aid workers say donors have been less enthusiastic about funding the decades-old humanitarian operation in eastern Sudan, opting to focus more on areas like Darfur, where a four-year-old conflict has displaced some 2.5 million people and where media coverage is more high profile.

Guterres inspected a small compound that passes for a clinic, where patients lie in sweltering heat and drugs for disease like malaria are running short.

Many refugees said health services were dismal.

"Look around you. If all these people are medically tested, I swear to God you will not find a single guy who is healthy," said Ibrahim, standing behind a fence as police barred him and other refugees from meeting Guterres.

Another man, who arrived in 1981 fleeing violence between separatist groups and the Ethiopian occupation, gave a rundown of other problems.

"We suffer from unemployment," he said, giving his name as Mohamed. "In 30 years here, nobody here made it to university." Other refugees around him were shouting "Medicine! Water!"