Letter #1 from Juba, Torit, Bor and Kapaeta - Southern Sudan
Friends,
I am currently in Bor, Jonglei State, Southern Sudan, observing the voter registration process for national Sudanese elections scheduled for early April 2010. The voter registration campaign lasts for one month, opening on the 1st of November and closing on the 30th. (Subsequently, it has been extended for 7 days, until December 7) I am here under the auspices of The Carter Center’s Democracy Program (TCC), as a medium term observer (MTO). MTO, as opposed to a long term observer (LTO) who is here for 9 months, or a short term observer (STO) who will come for a 10 day period over the election. I will leave Sudanon 13 December.
I arrived in Khartoum on November 28 and was put up in the Al Salam Rotana Hotel, a Middle Eastern chain on the Hilton/Marriot level. I hadn’t anticipated such a multiple star hotel from TCC. It sounds good, but a hamburger is $25, or you have to walk on a very busy road for a mile to find an Egyptian restaurant which has good, affordable food. We had two days of security briefings and hearing the philosophy of the CC s election observation activities. I barely had time to leave the hotel. The level of detail for the current voter registration campaign was not very rigorous, however. Apparently, TCC started the preparation for this election rather late, and has not particularized their methodology to the Sudanese environment. Some of the first technical documents we had to work with were from a previous CC observation mission in Bolivia.
Initially, I was of five MTOs out of an anticipated team of 20. The CC had problems obtaining visas and other formalities for the remaining MTOs. Ten, 2 member teams were to be strategically placed around the country in order to gather information about the progress and quality of the registration process. The remaining MTOs finally arrived a week later.
My colleagues so far have been a young American/Palestinian woman, a young Egyptian man, a Kenyan from Londonand a Congolese/ Kenyan who works in South Africa. I was initially assigned to work in Juba, the capitol of southern Sudan, and my first partner was the London Kenyan. He had worked in Juba previously with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a UN agency. We flew to Juba
early morning on the 31st, and began our observation activities the next day, Sunday, November 1, the first day of the 30 day registration period. We observed about 25 registration centers in Juba town during the first week. The actual observation was not strenuous. It consisted of ticking about 30 questions on a CC form. The questions ranged from “Did the center open on time (0830)?” “Did the registrars ask the full four names for each registrant?” “Were there security police present and were the inhibiting the registration process in any way?” “How many people had registered at the time of our arrival and how many totals for that center to date?” And so forth. The difficulty was that the three member registration teams were often difficult to find since they were mobile, unmarked and there are no street names in SSudan. We spend hours driving in the neighborhoods, asking people where the registration centers were.
The registration got off to a very slow start. Not enough registrars had been trained, many didn’t know their tasks, registration centers were not available and the teams had to set up under trees, and they had not been paid the £SD1000 ($500) for their work. The biggest deficiency, however, was that there had not been any public education or public awareness campaign concerning the registration. The public not only was unaware that a registration campaign had begun, but it was unaware what voter registration was. Rumors circulated that it was for a tax list, and that people had to have IDs to register (which scared many women from registering because they didn’t have any form of identification). Because of these and a number of other problems, the registration has been quite disappointing in numbers, particularly in comparison to the number of expected registrants, drawn from census data collected last year. In Juba, the largest town in S. Sudan, (between 500,000 and a million people) some centers registered only 50 people in 5 days.
The registration campaign is of considerable importance for Sudan not only because it is the precursor of the April elections, but also because the elections were mandated in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) which ended a 22 year civil war between northern Sudanand southern Sudan. This war killed and displaced millions of people and has been the object of great international humanitarian relief efforts over the years. A general election was scheduled to take place two years after the signing of the CPA, but has been delayed and postponed until April 2010. The election is for candidates on six levels: the President of the Republic of the Sudan; the President of the Government of Southern Sudan; 25 State Governors; the National Assembly; the southern Sudan Legislative Assembly; and 25 State Assemblies. It is obviously too complex to work, especially in a country where the literacy rate is 20% at most. There will be hundreds of candidates. I don’t think that anyone has much of a clue yet about how it will be conducted so as to have much credibility. The UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) Electoral Administration has the unenviable responsibility for assisting the National Election Commission (NEC) to conduct the elections.
More important that the April election, though, is the CPA mandated referendum in 2011. This referendum is to decide if the south shall remain in a unified Sudan or if it will choose to separate and become autonomous or independent. There seems to be no doubt the south will choose separation and independence by a large majority. The issue then becomes how quickly this separation takes place, is it drawn out in some orderly fashion, or is it brutal, next day independence, a la E. Timor? I strongly suspect it will be the latter, and that another conflict will break out between the northern Sudan and the New Sudan (which it may be called).
The primary basis of this conflict will be which country receives the revenue from the oil reserves lying between two regions. It seems that much of the reserves are in the south, but the refineries, pipelines and port are in the north. The Chinese have developed these oil fields and are buying the oil, enriching the north and providing funds for weapons to use in Darfurand eventually against the New Sudan. One of the key factors in the peace process was that the North should share the oil revenue with the South which it clearly has not done.
I got a new partner on the 11th. His name is Bill and he looks and acts a lot like Michael Moore. Even though he is in his 50s, he is good with slang, so his response to everything is “cool”. The Sudanese are clueless as to what this means. He is in charge of the team comms—he calls the Juba HQ twice a day on his phone and tells them that we are safe and secure. He was in Juba previously, but only in the USAID/USconsulate compound. Bill is a personal friend of Jimmy’s, and has all kinds of stories about his stays in the White House, outings with Chip, and Amy’s wedding.
Surprisingly, wherever we have stayed there has been relatively high speed internet and cable TV. It has been an interesting experience for me to be connected so well in Africa. Usually there is much time to read, but here, I read email and do reporting by computer. A far cry from my little Olivetti portable typewriter and carbon copies of the past. Every evening there are groups of Sudanese in the dinning room of the hotel watching World Cup Football matches between Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal etc. There is also a very popular Ghanaian produced soap show which features various marriages between Ghanaians who want to get married and those who don’t and whose family patriarch forbids it. Both men and women are fixated on this show every day.
Bill and I traveled together first to Eastern Equitoria State and stayed some nights in Torit, the state capitol. We stayed in a guest accommodation maintained by the Swiss Caritas organization, where we slept in large tents, and ate in a common mess hall. Food in S. Sudan is quite standardized for travelers, and consists of Nescafe/tea, boiled eggs, and some kind of fried biscuits for breakfast; rice, pasta, meat, beans and greens for lunch; and the same thing for dinner. It is quite adequate and cuts down on sweets and sugar, and on making decisions from long menus.
We visited the headquarters (HQ) of the state NEC in Eastern Equitoria and found it to be quite disorganized and confused. There is not one computer in the office, not even a typewriter, for that matter. People are taking notes with Bic pens and notebooks. The Chairman of the NEC said that they had registered some 189,000 people so far (out of an estimated 453,000 eligible voters over 18). Somehow these names must be made into the master voters list for exhibition the week after the registration centers close. It isn’t going to happen. In each constituency, a geographical/ population based electoral unit, there are two mobile teams of three people and one static team of three. The static team stays in one place, and the mobile teams roams the constituency registering people. We observed the three teams in Torit, and then went to Ekotos (a place of a few corrugated tin buildings and grass tukuls) to the south and visited the three teams there, coming within a kilometer of the Ugandan border. Ekotos was about three hours drive from Torit, over roads I have traveled on before, hot, dry, dusty and rutted. One can go only 10 miles an hour or less. The biggest difference for me was that all the vehicles are air conditioned now. Back in the days of real men and women, the windows of the vehicles had to be open to get air, but they also sucked in the dust of passing trucks and cars so that one was covered in dust at the end of the journey.
The countryside is bush, in all directions. Tall, dry grass with a few acacia trees sticking up, for as far as one can see. In the distance there were huge, worn rocks which people called mountains. From time to time, one could see cattle grazing in the grass, since this is the area par excellence of the East African cattle complex. In this part of E. Equitoria the Toposa are the major ethnic group. The road is frequently completely filled with 100s of great, long horned cows moving to new pastures. These cows were quite well fed, much better than I have been used to seeing in West Africa. The herders were generally 17-25 year old boys with some piece or pieces of military garb and AK-47 slung over their shoulder, in the same fashion their fathers used to sling spears over their shoulders. A cow is probably worth from $500 to $1000 Thus a herd can represent a lot of money, and these boys are the security guards. In fact, as in the past, cattle raiding goes on frequently and often holds up trade and travel in an area because of the insecurity these raids create. Unfortunately, there is a big difference between the past and present cattle raiding—only one person at a time could be wounded or killed with a spear, while with an AK-47 dozens of people can be killed, and often are. In fact, disarmament is a major problem for the government of south Sudan, and thus are has proved to be insoluble. As soon as one group is disarmed, it is attacked by another group and people are killed and cattle are stolen. The disarmed group then seeks arms as security, and to raid the other group.
We next went farther east to Kapaeta. Kapaeta is hardly a town. There is a cluster old administrative buildings dating from the 1950s when the British were the administrators in the Anglo-Egyptian Condomium. The rest of the town consisted of small, corrugated metal shacks which housed restaurants, shops for soap, cigarettes, some hardware, and other necessities, most of which were manufactured in China, Uganda or Kenya. Most of the goods come from Sudan’s neighbors to the south. Nearly all of the educated people in the town and in this part of the Sudan have spent time in either Uganda or Kenya, some as refugees during the war and many as students. One can always find someone who can speak English well enough to help you find what you need or the direction to go. All of these people are also strongly Christian. Kapaeta is also growing daily with an influx of Toposa people. This is the second year in a row that the rains have not come, and people are feeling hunger and women and children are moving towards the towns in hope of getting some humanitarian food assistance.
In the mornings, the roads into Kapaeta are filled with women carrying sticks and wood to sell as firewood in the market, and in the evening the same women are streaming out of Kapaeta with small sacks of maize (corn) that they have been able to buy with the money they made. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much chance to mingle in the market, but it is filled with the tallest, thinnest, blackest women you can imagine, wearing all kinds of magnificent beads and necklaces, and tiny babies at their breasts, hoping to sell something for a few pounds. The men are deep in the bush trying to keep their herds alive. They can live on milk from the cows and some bush meat. All their lives are incredibly difficult.
We drove from Kapaeta to Torit in about 4 and a half hours, spent the night in Caritas and left the next morning for another 4.5 hours of road beating to Juba. After 2 days of R&R in Jubaand doing the CC accounting, we flew to Bor on a 20 seat plane, where we have been since the 25th. Bor is burgeoning. There are two new buildings with 2 stories, but the rest of the town is like Kapaeta, filled with corrugated iron shacks and many, many traditional grass tukuls, often covered with blue UNHCR tarps that people brought with them from IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps. The town is hot, dusty and dry, yet bustling with traffic, bicycles, donkey carts, small, three wheeled Indian vehicles and pedestrians carrying on the things of life—schools, business and any other kind of work that is available. In fact, there is almost no work outside of government work in Bor.
We are staying at Freedom Hotel, which expresses the owner’s political sentiments towards the 2011 referendum. It is the only place in town to stay and also includes three meals in the rate. It is rather fascinating because all kinds of people turn up here to use the bar, satellite TV, and internet facility. I have met one young man who is a student at the U of Michigan studying telecommunications and is home visiting his family in Bor. He was so happy to meet an American. I have also met a graduate of the University of Arizona and his brother who graduated from Utah State. All three of these men are Dinka and close to 7 feet tall. We can have a normal conversation when we sit down because they slouch in their chairs, but when we stand, it seems like I am staring at their belt buckles. One of these guys is/was one of the Lost Boys whose story I will have to read about when I get home. I have not asked any of them the first question that comes to an American’s mind “You must play basketball?”
Our registration work in and around Bor has been somewhat limited because there are no adequate vehicles for hire capable of leaving town. This is an oversight by the CC. We have an old Toyota truck which barely makes it around town. The driver is an old Dinka man who speaks only Arabic and Dinka. I have to look for someone walking in the street who speaks English and ask them to tell our driver where we want to go. Actually it is great fun, since I am practicing a few Arabic words. Unfortunately, I don’t risk taking this high performance vehicle out of Bor. So we are here probably until the 5th or 6th then to Juba, and one night back in Torit to see if the NEC has started data entry of 200,000 + names for the display list. I doubt it.
After some kind of debriefing in Khartoum, on the 11th or 12th I leave on the 13th for Washington. It is always nice to get home. I’ve already been asked if I would come back in April as an STO for the election. That is off in the future yet. I do have to go to Liberia in January for a short evaluation for the World Bank. After that, I’ll see what happens.
