A Cry for Respect in a Sudan Camp

Driven to Desperation, Children Took Aid Workers Hostage

Nagla Zakaria, 30, a Darfurian painter, displays some images she has encouraged children in Kalma camp to draw as therapy. (Emily Wax - Twp)

KALMA CAMP, Sudan -- Boys in tattered clothes were waiting in food lines, girls were hauling water on donkeys, crippled orphans were begging on crutches. Suddenly, a call went out across this vast camp of stick-and-rag huts filled with civilians displaced by the conflict in Darfur. Abandoning their routines, thousands of children converged at key spots.

There, teenage leaders rallied the crowds. They spoke of the persistent lice, the filthy latrines, the longing for home among the camp's 90,000 inhabitants. They described a humiliating incident that morning in which a camp leader had been beaten and dragged off by Sudanese troops amid contradictory explanations.

And then they made a proposal that both shocked and exhilarated the gathered adolescents: that they kidnap humanitarian aid workers to protest their miserable conditions.

"It was a scary idea," said Nazira Sulliman, 12, who attended one of the rallies. "Many of us had never done anything that wrong. But it also made us feel strong."

Abdullah Mussa Issa, 16, was one of the youths who goaded the others to action. "Our fathers are dead. Our mothers are humiliated. Our animals and properties are stolen," he said he told his friends. "Can we let this stuff keep happening to us?"

On that afternoon two months ago, mobs of angry youths surrounded a health post, waving knives and sticks and chanting, "Revenge!" Inside were at least 32 Sudanese and international aid workers.

Several youth leaders told them they would be held hostage there until the government released the detained camp leader, Sheik Suliman Ahmed Taha, participants recounted. "No one really wanted to hurt the aid workers. We just wanted someone to pay attention to us," Issa said. Taha's detention also triggered separate violence between angry camp residents and security forces, including some civilians in the camp who fired gunshots in the air, aid workers and participants said later.

After three days of negotiations, the hostages were released unharmed, and so was Taha, though he was later detained again and is still in jail.

But the unprecedented armed threat from the children of Darfur illustrated how a passive, victimized generation of young people, driven from their villages and confined in camps, could suddenly became a dangerous mob.

"Okay, it wasn't really the so-called 'right thing to do,' " said Al Tieb Mohammed Adam, 27, a charismatic youth leader in Kalma. "But here we are living in this horrid camp with no money, no hope for marriage, no security to go home. The jobless youth of Darfur are angry. We are sick and we are rising."

'Animals in a Cage'

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Across Africa, an estimated 18 million children are growing up in impoverished camps like Kalma. They are refugees from fighting in parts of Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Congo as well as Sudan, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

The Darfur conflict has driven nearly 2 million people into camps since 2003, when groups of mostly African rebels launched an uprising, protesting discrimination by the Arab-dominated government. Authorities responded by bombing villages and arming Arab militiamen, known as Janjaweed, who looted and burned villages.