DANIEL: Hello I’m Zoe Daniel and this is the White Nile in the heart of Sudan. After 20 years of war, the south of this country is experiencing a rare phenomenon – peace.
For the millions displaced in the south over the last quarter of a century, the Nile offers a way home. Many of the roads have been destroyed and there are still thousands of mines yet to be found and exploded so the Nile is a major highway home.
Like a mirage in Southern Sudan, a single barge carries hope and renewal. It’s still a shaky peace. Even so, for the people who fled the war, it’s time to end decades of fear by reclaiming their home.
RETURNEES SINGING ON BARGE: We’re happy to return to the land of Sudan. And thank God our father.
DANIEL: For years the White Nile has served only to take people away from here but now the river is bringing them back. As many as four and a half million may want to come home.
Sudan is the biggest country in Africa and it’s riddled with complex conflicts, the most bloody being the genocide in Darfur. Here in the South the picture is more positive. The twenty year war of independence fought by non Muslims rebelling against the Islamic North is over. The peace deal gives the South more autonomy and promises a share of oil wealth.
DR RIEK MACHAR: [Vice President, Southern Sudan] I want a Sudan that is an open society, a democratic society, a pluralistic society. It will not be for dominance or one group to, over another.
DANIEL: In the crumbling southern capital of Juba, Dr Riek Machar heads the new Southern Government. There’s been war here, off and on for more than fifty years and it shows.
DR RIEK MACHAR: At times one feels like flattening the whole place and rebuilding it from anew.
DANIEL: More than a year after the peace agreement, development is still choked by dust and delays. Southern Sudan’s likely to face the biggest influx of people in the world this year. Most of the money promised from the North has not arrived, yet ready or not the people are coming anyway.
DR RIEK MACHAR: They’re our people. They have a right to be here since there is peace in Southern Sudan they want to come back so we have no choice to say we want x or not. It’s their home.
DANIEL: In a dramatic sign of revival, the people of the Bor Dinka Tribe and their cattle are on the move. Ahead lies a three week trek along the banks of the Nile. While the men are skirting the minefields, women, children and the aged endure a wretched resettlement camp where the temperature’s a crippling forty five degrees. Most of the women have been refugees in their own country for sixteen years or more. All have lost something that can never be regained.
MARTHA AYEN: A lot of people have been killed, including my mother my father and my child. So we all scattered, and I survived alone. We ran until we were rescued by the U.N.
DANIEL: Martha Ayen and four and a half thousand others have been waiting at Lologo camp for two months.
MARTHA AYEN: If God wishes, the government will take us home.
DANIEL: Shelters are crowded and people have only a little food from the U.N. and aid agencies. Most of the children have been born on the run. This baby was released from hospital because there was no medicine. Her mother can only hope and pray that she will survive.
Martha and her children will be on the next boat but she’s uncertain what she’ll find.
MARTHA AYEN: When I arrive in Bor, and the government provides for me I will be happy. I want to be healthy, and will try to settle within six years. I’ll see what I can grow. And I can build a house, settle down and be protected.
DANIEL: In Juba, the Southern flag still flies in the face of unity with the North. Last July, former rebel leader John Garang was killed in a mysterious helicopter crash. Suspicion that he was murdered almost restarted the war. Even now, neither side has put down its guns.
The former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army are more than willing to roll out their tanks for us. Under the peace deal, the former rebel army and government forces are meant over time to unite. Outside the rebel barracks, Northern Government soldiers put on a show of their own.
DR RIEK MACHAR: There are struggles. People who have been enemies who met only in the battlefields or in forums you know negotiating bitterly, working together is not easy. It takes time.
DANIEL: Spend just a little time in the South and you feel the conflicting currents. Optimism for building a new life including schools, roads, hospitals and a sense of community. If the South could get a fair share of the oil wealth, it could be an African success story but the former rebel leaders who run Southern Sudan, know that the future is not in their hands alone. The hardline Islamic Government to the North still holds the power.
In Sudan wealth has always flowed North with the Nile. For centuries, the Arabs of the North have raided the fertile South for slaves, ivory and more recently oil. At the confluence of the blue and white Nile rivers, lies the result of those riches, Sudan’s capital Khartoum.
Southerners resent Khartoum. It represents Muslim control and increasing northern wealth. Libya, seeking influence here, is building this luxury hotel and a venue for the recent African Union summit was built by the Chinese who are driving the oil industry.
The summit brought together a few democrats and rather too many despots. Among them Sudan’s President, Field Marshal Omar al Bashir.
OMAR AL BASHIR: [President of Sudan to Summit] In this war on attrition Sudan has lost both natural and human resources.
DANIEL: President al Bashir promised to maintain the peace but southerners who have borne years of northern oppression remain suspicious. For the past few decades, many have lived in camps for displaced people around Khartoum. They’ve been forced to follow strict Sharia law and the Islamic Government is intolerant of Christians and non believers. Many Arabs still call blacks “abid” or “slaves”.
ELIZA WARRAE: Nothing… this government is giving us nothing – nothing at all. And when you ask for help they say, who are you – you’re just a slave. If you don’t have money, you just die alone.
DANIEL: A few hours from Khartoum, Kosti is the departure point for southerners heading home. For more than thirty years, Eliza Warrae and Ibram Machik squatted in the capital. There they say they were treated like animals.
ELIZA WARRAE: The Arabs say no jobs, no farming. We just stay at home doing nothing. We are beaten, put in jail and fined. So now life is hard. We are suffering, and we have come with nothing to eat.
DANIEL: Like most returnees, Eliza and Abram want to find the home and family they left decades ago and they want a future.
ABRAM MACHIK: I have to go home to farm. You go to the cattle camp and you drink milk for free – you fish for free, mangoes for free, guava for free. Everything is free.
DANIEL: Families are so desperate to move south that they camp at Kosti for weeks, even months, waiting for a barge.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: They come here with many hopes - or let me say, great expectations - that they will find back in the South.
DANIEL: Dr Francis Alcobo from the Federation for African Relief tries to keep them fit for the journey ahead.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: Four months old kid suffering from fever, diagnosed as malaria but her mother is now outside the wharf because she’s going to find food for these kids and for her family.
DANIEL: Dr Alcobo is a Southerner too but his family has split.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: The rest of my brothers are in Sydney Australia there with you. They are there in Sydney, in Melbourne, also scattered there.
DANIEL: Even so, he plans to return South alone.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: I guess I can say I can go back to save my people, to save my lands - to see what’s left for us there as a new generation.
DANIEL: While many wait for river transport, we bypass the ancient barges and take the road. At the town of Renk, we cross the boundary between North and South. To a degree the war was a religious conflict. Southerners who follow Christian and tribal faiths rebelled against the National Islamic Government.
Bishop Daniel Deng Bul is building a new Anglican cathedral to accommodate his growing congregation.
BISHOP DENG BUL: [Bishop of Renk] It is a buffer zone between the two religion, Islam and Christianity. They meet here and they are struggling for inner, for their own propagation.
DANIEL: Do you see this as a battle between Christianity and Islam?
BISHOP DENG BUL: We are not fighting against Islam. We are just trying to win people to Christ so we are not fighting them and they are also struggling to win people to Mohammed.
DANIEL: The Bishop’s been a long time critic of the government and that hasn’t changed with the end of the war.
BISHOP DENG BUL: It is actually the government in the North, because they politicise the Islamisation, the government in the north made it as a point that you have to be forced to become a Muslim so when you try to force a religion on people, I don’t think that it will be acceptable to anybody without accepting it by heart.
DANIEL: Religion is not the only issue creating continuing tension. The other is the exploitation of oil and gas.
JAN PRONK: [U.N. Special Representative for Sudan] People are quite suspicious in the south and the Government should do more to take away that suspicion because one of the important agreements was a 50% of the oil income and the oil resources would go to the South.
DANIEL: Khartoum vows that it is already paying its half share of oil revenue under the peace deal. The Southern Sudan Government rejects the claim.
DR RIEK MACHAR: Well oil is key. It’s key because it is the major resource of the whole Sudan now for getting revenue. So it is key yes.
DANIEL: Well how much revenue have you had?
DR RIEK MACHAR: Very little.
DANIEL: The U.N.’s Jan Pronk says the reason for the confusion is an utter lack of transparency on the part of the National Government.
JAN PRONK: Firstly nobody knows exactly how much oil has been produced last year. There’s no agreement on the price per barrel. Now if you don’t know the quantity and the price you don’t know the income, you don’t know what 50% is.
DANIEL: Bishop Daniel Deng Bul says the National Government’s colluding with foreign oil companies to the detriment of its own people.
BISHOP DENG BUL: This village is called Paloch. Paloch is one of the, some of the villages which has been destroyed when the company came to, to take away the people and the security who wanted to take them away by force, but you could see around here so many installation of the oil fields, so there are wells inside the town here and they want these people to go away but they are saying we cannot go home, we are building another village for us, a nice one.
DANIEL: Villagers have been ordered to vacate the land so that a company jointly owned by the Khartoum Government and a Chinese firm can drill for oil. Community leader James Mallou returned to Paloch only a year ago, just after the peace deal was signed.
JAMES MALLOU: We don’t know anything about peace. If there was peace, nothing would make us leave our villages. This is our great grandfather’s place. We have lived here for a long time. We were born here. And we like it because it is ours.
BISHOP DENG BUL: These people should be given compensation by the company and if that thing is done, that’s what we want. But if they just remove them without compensation, that is very terrible and that shows that there is no justice in the Sudan to our people.
DANIEL: For many Southern Sudanese, justice means compensation – oil money to build better homes and ultimately a new society. At Melut, where the road South ends, we take to the Nile to continue our journey.
It looks like a tropical paradise but in truth it’s one of the least developed places on the globe. Malaria and water borne diseases are rife here. There are virtually no schools or hospitals and in these most fertile of lands, people are going hungry.
From the port of Malakal the United Nations World Food Programme conducts a massive feeding operation on the water. Already at least two million Southerners are entirely dependent on food aid.
The South remains a test case for peace in Sudan and these early returnees will be testing the water too as they board the first barges home. Under the peace deal they can choose to separate from the North at a referendum but that could lead to a new war over Southern oil.
JAN PRONK: People need to understand that they have a future and if they don’t have a future, six years from now when there is a referendum, people will vote against unity and then you get, I am afraid, again a war.
DANIEL: As they finally board the barge home, returnees like Martha Ayen want to believe.
Are you ready for your journey?
MARTHA AYEN: Yes.
[MAN KEEPING RECORD OF THOSE BOARDING]: Martha Ayen with two kids.
DANIEL: Martha knows that peace can’t be guaranteed. Militias, some armed by the Khartoum Government are still creating terror in parts of the South.
This is where Martha Ayen wants to return, the Dinka homeland around Bor. Here armed conflict has for now, been replaced by fighting for fun in the form of traditional wrestling. This is community entertainment like it was before the war.
It’s been a forty hour journey along the Nile from Juba to Bor. For Martha Ayen, it’s the final leg of a sixteen year quest to get home. It would take many hundreds of barges to carry all the Dinka who may want to return.
MARTHA AYEN: I’m very happy because I’ve come home – and I’m happy to see you and kiss you.
DANIEL: All of these families will be starting again with nothing, yet they do it with joy and hope.
For the millions displaced in the south over the last quarter of a century, the Nile offers a way home. Many of the roads have been destroyed and there are still thousands of mines yet to be found and exploded so the Nile is a major highway home.
Like a mirage in Southern Sudan, a single barge carries hope and renewal. It’s still a shaky peace. Even so, for the people who fled the war, it’s time to end decades of fear by reclaiming their home.
RETURNEES SINGING ON BARGE: We’re happy to return to the land of Sudan. And thank God our father.
DANIEL: For years the White Nile has served only to take people away from here but now the river is bringing them back. As many as four and a half million may want to come home.
Sudan is the biggest country in Africa and it’s riddled with complex conflicts, the most bloody being the genocide in Darfur. Here in the South the picture is more positive. The twenty year war of independence fought by non Muslims rebelling against the Islamic North is over. The peace deal gives the South more autonomy and promises a share of oil wealth.
DR RIEK MACHAR: [Vice President, Southern Sudan] I want a Sudan that is an open society, a democratic society, a pluralistic society. It will not be for dominance or one group to, over another.
DANIEL: In the crumbling southern capital of Juba, Dr Riek Machar heads the new Southern Government. There’s been war here, off and on for more than fifty years and it shows.
DR RIEK MACHAR: At times one feels like flattening the whole place and rebuilding it from anew.
DANIEL: More than a year after the peace agreement, development is still choked by dust and delays. Southern Sudan’s likely to face the biggest influx of people in the world this year. Most of the money promised from the North has not arrived, yet ready or not the people are coming anyway.
DR RIEK MACHAR: They’re our people. They have a right to be here since there is peace in Southern Sudan they want to come back so we have no choice to say we want x or not. It’s their home.
DANIEL: In a dramatic sign of revival, the people of the Bor Dinka Tribe and their cattle are on the move. Ahead lies a three week trek along the banks of the Nile. While the men are skirting the minefields, women, children and the aged endure a wretched resettlement camp where the temperature’s a crippling forty five degrees. Most of the women have been refugees in their own country for sixteen years or more. All have lost something that can never be regained.
MARTHA AYEN: A lot of people have been killed, including my mother my father and my child. So we all scattered, and I survived alone. We ran until we were rescued by the U.N.
DANIEL: Martha Ayen and four and a half thousand others have been waiting at Lologo camp for two months.
MARTHA AYEN: If God wishes, the government will take us home.
DANIEL: Shelters are crowded and people have only a little food from the U.N. and aid agencies. Most of the children have been born on the run. This baby was released from hospital because there was no medicine. Her mother can only hope and pray that she will survive.
Martha and her children will be on the next boat but she’s uncertain what she’ll find.
MARTHA AYEN: When I arrive in Bor, and the government provides for me I will be happy. I want to be healthy, and will try to settle within six years. I’ll see what I can grow. And I can build a house, settle down and be protected.
DANIEL: In Juba, the Southern flag still flies in the face of unity with the North. Last July, former rebel leader John Garang was killed in a mysterious helicopter crash. Suspicion that he was murdered almost restarted the war. Even now, neither side has put down its guns.
The former rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army are more than willing to roll out their tanks for us. Under the peace deal, the former rebel army and government forces are meant over time to unite. Outside the rebel barracks, Northern Government soldiers put on a show of their own.
DR RIEK MACHAR: There are struggles. People who have been enemies who met only in the battlefields or in forums you know negotiating bitterly, working together is not easy. It takes time.
DANIEL: Spend just a little time in the South and you feel the conflicting currents. Optimism for building a new life including schools, roads, hospitals and a sense of community. If the South could get a fair share of the oil wealth, it could be an African success story but the former rebel leaders who run Southern Sudan, know that the future is not in their hands alone. The hardline Islamic Government to the North still holds the power.
In Sudan wealth has always flowed North with the Nile. For centuries, the Arabs of the North have raided the fertile South for slaves, ivory and more recently oil. At the confluence of the blue and white Nile rivers, lies the result of those riches, Sudan’s capital Khartoum.
Southerners resent Khartoum. It represents Muslim control and increasing northern wealth. Libya, seeking influence here, is building this luxury hotel and a venue for the recent African Union summit was built by the Chinese who are driving the oil industry.
The summit brought together a few democrats and rather too many despots. Among them Sudan’s President, Field Marshal Omar al Bashir.
OMAR AL BASHIR: [President of Sudan to Summit] In this war on attrition Sudan has lost both natural and human resources.
DANIEL: President al Bashir promised to maintain the peace but southerners who have borne years of northern oppression remain suspicious. For the past few decades, many have lived in camps for displaced people around Khartoum. They’ve been forced to follow strict Sharia law and the Islamic Government is intolerant of Christians and non believers. Many Arabs still call blacks “abid” or “slaves”.
ELIZA WARRAE: Nothing… this government is giving us nothing – nothing at all. And when you ask for help they say, who are you – you’re just a slave. If you don’t have money, you just die alone.
DANIEL: A few hours from Khartoum, Kosti is the departure point for southerners heading home. For more than thirty years, Eliza Warrae and Ibram Machik squatted in the capital. There they say they were treated like animals.
ELIZA WARRAE: The Arabs say no jobs, no farming. We just stay at home doing nothing. We are beaten, put in jail and fined. So now life is hard. We are suffering, and we have come with nothing to eat.
DANIEL: Like most returnees, Eliza and Abram want to find the home and family they left decades ago and they want a future.
ABRAM MACHIK: I have to go home to farm. You go to the cattle camp and you drink milk for free – you fish for free, mangoes for free, guava for free. Everything is free.
DANIEL: Families are so desperate to move south that they camp at Kosti for weeks, even months, waiting for a barge.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: They come here with many hopes - or let me say, great expectations - that they will find back in the South.
DANIEL: Dr Francis Alcobo from the Federation for African Relief tries to keep them fit for the journey ahead.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: Four months old kid suffering from fever, diagnosed as malaria but her mother is now outside the wharf because she’s going to find food for these kids and for her family.
DANIEL: Dr Alcobo is a Southerner too but his family has split.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: The rest of my brothers are in Sydney Australia there with you. They are there in Sydney, in Melbourne, also scattered there.
DANIEL: Even so, he plans to return South alone.
DR FRANCIS ALCOBO: I guess I can say I can go back to save my people, to save my lands - to see what’s left for us there as a new generation.
DANIEL: While many wait for river transport, we bypass the ancient barges and take the road. At the town of Renk, we cross the boundary between North and South. To a degree the war was a religious conflict. Southerners who follow Christian and tribal faiths rebelled against the National Islamic Government.
Bishop Daniel Deng Bul is building a new Anglican cathedral to accommodate his growing congregation.
BISHOP DENG BUL: [Bishop of Renk] It is a buffer zone between the two religion, Islam and Christianity. They meet here and they are struggling for inner, for their own propagation.
DANIEL: Do you see this as a battle between Christianity and Islam?
BISHOP DENG BUL: We are not fighting against Islam. We are just trying to win people to Christ so we are not fighting them and they are also struggling to win people to Mohammed.
DANIEL: The Bishop’s been a long time critic of the government and that hasn’t changed with the end of the war.
BISHOP DENG BUL: It is actually the government in the North, because they politicise the Islamisation, the government in the north made it as a point that you have to be forced to become a Muslim so when you try to force a religion on people, I don’t think that it will be acceptable to anybody without accepting it by heart.
DANIEL: Religion is not the only issue creating continuing tension. The other is the exploitation of oil and gas.
JAN PRONK: [U.N. Special Representative for Sudan] People are quite suspicious in the south and the Government should do more to take away that suspicion because one of the important agreements was a 50% of the oil income and the oil resources would go to the South.
DANIEL: Khartoum vows that it is already paying its half share of oil revenue under the peace deal. The Southern Sudan Government rejects the claim.
DR RIEK MACHAR: Well oil is key. It’s key because it is the major resource of the whole Sudan now for getting revenue. So it is key yes.
DANIEL: Well how much revenue have you had?
DR RIEK MACHAR: Very little.
DANIEL: The U.N.’s Jan Pronk says the reason for the confusion is an utter lack of transparency on the part of the National Government.
JAN PRONK: Firstly nobody knows exactly how much oil has been produced last year. There’s no agreement on the price per barrel. Now if you don’t know the quantity and the price you don’t know the income, you don’t know what 50% is.
DANIEL: Bishop Daniel Deng Bul says the National Government’s colluding with foreign oil companies to the detriment of its own people.
BISHOP DENG BUL: This village is called Paloch. Paloch is one of the, some of the villages which has been destroyed when the company came to, to take away the people and the security who wanted to take them away by force, but you could see around here so many installation of the oil fields, so there are wells inside the town here and they want these people to go away but they are saying we cannot go home, we are building another village for us, a nice one.
DANIEL: Villagers have been ordered to vacate the land so that a company jointly owned by the Khartoum Government and a Chinese firm can drill for oil. Community leader James Mallou returned to Paloch only a year ago, just after the peace deal was signed.
JAMES MALLOU: We don’t know anything about peace. If there was peace, nothing would make us leave our villages. This is our great grandfather’s place. We have lived here for a long time. We were born here. And we like it because it is ours.
BISHOP DENG BUL: These people should be given compensation by the company and if that thing is done, that’s what we want. But if they just remove them without compensation, that is very terrible and that shows that there is no justice in the Sudan to our people.
DANIEL: For many Southern Sudanese, justice means compensation – oil money to build better homes and ultimately a new society. At Melut, where the road South ends, we take to the Nile to continue our journey.
It looks like a tropical paradise but in truth it’s one of the least developed places on the globe. Malaria and water borne diseases are rife here. There are virtually no schools or hospitals and in these most fertile of lands, people are going hungry.
From the port of Malakal the United Nations World Food Programme conducts a massive feeding operation on the water. Already at least two million Southerners are entirely dependent on food aid.
The South remains a test case for peace in Sudan and these early returnees will be testing the water too as they board the first barges home. Under the peace deal they can choose to separate from the North at a referendum but that could lead to a new war over Southern oil.
JAN PRONK: People need to understand that they have a future and if they don’t have a future, six years from now when there is a referendum, people will vote against unity and then you get, I am afraid, again a war.
DANIEL: As they finally board the barge home, returnees like Martha Ayen want to believe.
Are you ready for your journey?
MARTHA AYEN: Yes.
[MAN KEEPING RECORD OF THOSE BOARDING]: Martha Ayen with two kids.
DANIEL: Martha knows that peace can’t be guaranteed. Militias, some armed by the Khartoum Government are still creating terror in parts of the South.
This is where Martha Ayen wants to return, the Dinka homeland around Bor. Here armed conflict has for now, been replaced by fighting for fun in the form of traditional wrestling. This is community entertainment like it was before the war.
It’s been a forty hour journey along the Nile from Juba to Bor. For Martha Ayen, it’s the final leg of a sixteen year quest to get home. It would take many hundreds of barges to carry all the Dinka who may want to return.
MARTHA AYEN: I’m very happy because I’ve come home – and I’m happy to see you and kiss you.
DANIEL: All of these families will be starting again with nothing, yet they do it with joy and hope.