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Sudan, in Mud Brick and Marble
Soba Aradi is one of a dozen camps housing 2 million displaced people on the fringes of Khartoum. The city's boom "benefits probably 1 percent or less" of its people, one critic said.
(Stephanie Mccrummen - Twp)
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In Soba Aradi, people see little difference between the conflict in southern Sudan, the current conflict in Darfur and their own treatment in Khartoum.
Though the war in southern Sudan had a religious dimension in that it involved an attempt by the government to impose Islamic law on a population that is about 30 percent Christian, the primary grievances of the rebel movement there had more to do with access to resources and power. The conflict in Darfur also largely comes down to a struggle for resources.
"It's all the same because it's the same government," said Emmanuel Agrey Lado, a physician's assistant from southern Sudan whose home has been bulldozed twice in two years.
U.S. diplomats, however, have mostly treated southern Sudan and the conflict in Darfur separately.
After intense engagement by the Bush administration, the Sudanese government in 2005 signed a U.S.-backed peace agreement creating a semiautonomous region in southern Sudan, just as government troops were intensifying their onslaught in Darfur.
Last year, the government signed a separate peace agreement with one Darfur rebel group, but fighting between government-sponsored militias and an increasingly fragmented rebel movement has continued.
Since the conflict in Darfur began, as many as 450,000 people have died there from disease and violence and 2.5 million have fled to camps in the area or across the border in Chad.
In recent months, the humanitarian situation in Darfur has worsened, as aid workers have been targeted in the violence and many relief groups have pulled out, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without food, medicine or clean water. President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has consistently rejected a proposal to send in a force of several thousand United Nations peacekeepers to supplement a beleaguered African Union force of 7,000 troops currently deployed in Darfur.
Meanwhile, the peace agreement in the south is faltering, with southern Sudanese officials accusing the government of shortchanging them on oil revenue and failing to implement power-sharing arrangements.
Increasingly, leaders in the south say the fate of their region is very much intertwined with that of Darfur, a notion that hearkens back to the vision of John Garang, the widely popular and iconic leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) who died in a helicopter crash in 2005.
Under his leadership, the SPLM had strong ties to rebel groups not only in Darfur, but also in the north and the east, as Garang came to realize that the suffering extended beyond his own region and that the only way to achieve a more just order in Sudan was through a unified movement. After his death, those relationships languished.
In recent weeks, however, the current president of southern Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit, has been reaching out to Darfur rebel leaders.
