Sudanese Abroad

IWPR reports on Sudanese living in Iraq. According to the article, most of them were guest workers who went in the late 1980's to help rebuilt after the war, but are refugees in the sense that they are afraid to return to Sudan even though they might want to. Now, unfortunately, they're caught in the middle of the growing Iraqi civil war.

The fear of returning home is something I also ran into among Sudanese in Egypt. When I get time I'm going to do one final write-up of that trip, including Sudanese refugees and the Muslim Brotherhood protest, but for now let me just say that one person I talked to was a little afraid of the UNHCR, as they were taking the position that as the peace deal had ended the war, everyone could go home again. This young man was convinced that peace was only temporary. Unfortunately, as the aftermath of the death of John Garang shows, he was probably right. Let's hope the eerie parallels to the death of Rwanda's Juvenal Habyarimana end here.