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Census Headaches

SUDAN: Census headaches

 

The numbers of Southerners displaced in the North is one of the aspects dogging the census

JUBA, 29 April 2008 (IRIN) - Almost halfway into Sudan’s crucial national census, security problems, lingering mistrust between Northern and Southern authorities, logistics and heavy rain continue to beset the exercise across states in the South.

 

While the census commission insisted these challenges would have a minimal impact on the final results, observers and aid workers in Upper Nile and Central Equatoria States said the 22 April to 6 May count was unlikely to achieve complete success.

 

“Our objective is to cover 100 percent of South Sudan,” Isaiah Chol Aruai, chairman of the Southern Sudan Commission for Census, Statistics and Evaluation, said in the Southern capital of Juba. “We are everywhere; there is no place we have not deployed enumerators.”

 

Yet the much-delayed census got off to a rocky start. In areas north of Rumbek, counting was delayed by clashes between two communities in Lakes State. At least 100 people were killed, houses burnt and census materials destroyed. A curfew was later imposed.

 

Security problems were also reported in the oil-rich Abyei region, in the Nuba mountains and in Western Equatoria State. According to the chairman of the Southern census security committee, Brig Peter Wal, the problem was exacerbated because the government in Khartoum did not release money for early deployment of security personnel.

 

Later, the Southern government stepped in, releasing US$6 million for the census security arrangements.

 

“It was just a raid and the situation has returned to normal,” Chol told IRIN on 27 April - almost a week after the start of the count. “Security forces were deployed and the enumerators have returned to the area,” he added, downplaying continuing tensions in the state.

 

Asked if the delay in releasing money for security arrangements had affected preparations, Chol said: “The forces were supposed to be deployed in advance, for them to be on standby. But the money was not available until this week.”

 

In South Kordofan, deputy state governor Daniel Kodi had called a boycott, citing inadequate resources, the border problems between North and South, the fact that an estimated two million Southerners were still displaced in the North, and the use of questionnaires in Arabic, viewed as the language of the North. Counting eventually began once some of these issues were resolved.

 

The census questionnaire

Another source of tension was the Northern government’s apparently unilateral and unannounced deployment of 170 supervisors to all 78 counties in the South. Juba viewed the move as an infringement of its autonomy, and sent the supervisors home. Once back in Khartoum, the supervisors told journalists they had been expelled.

 

Rain stops play

 

There have also been complaints of inadequate logistics. Walking in mud thrown up by torrential rains in Malakal town in Upper Nile State, one enumerator told IRIN that few of his colleagues had been provided with suitable transport, a claim backed up by an international monitor in the town, who added, however, that it was “going as well as it could in the circumstances”. At least some counting was going on.

 

Journalists at the UN-run Radio Miraya also spoke of organisational problems. In Western Equatoria’s Mundri County, for example, one enumerator was covering, on foot, households 20km apart.

 

Chol insisted preparations had been adequate. “People think all people must be facilitated with cars; that is impossible,” he said. “We have assigned each county a vehicle, motorcycles and bicycles. And we have delivered enough materials - except the Arabic language questionnaires which we received but have retrieved and returned to Khartoum.

 

“If these logistics are not enough, then the enumerators must be prepared to make a sacrifice … there is nothing more we can do.”

 

But according to one aid worker in Juba: “Given the problems that the census is facing, including the fact that the rainy season has started, I estimate that they will only cover 60 percent of the work.”

 

The census was provided for under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended more than two decades of war between South and North Sudan. It is an important step in the preparations for elections in 2009 and a referendum in 2011, when Southern Sudan will decide whether or not to form a separate state.

 

However, fears among some southern politicians that the census will have a bearing on who is eligible to vote in the referendum are unfounded, according to a well-placed UN official who asked not to be named. But under the terms of the CPA, the results of the census could be used to adjust the distribution of wealth and power between the north and south agreed after lengthy negotiations.

 

Several thousand internally displaced and refugees returned to Southern Sudan in time to be counted

The count is also important for Sudan’s development partners, which expect that it will give them a more precise idea of demographic trends in the country. This is especially important in post-conflict South, where major population displacements occurred during the war.

 

But the exercise has been dogged by controversy from the beginning - including disagreements over questions of ethnicity and religion, and the presence of many displaced Southerners in the North. There were also issues of timing, with some Southern leaders saying it should be delayed until after the rainy season.

 

Days before it was due to start, the government of Southern Sudan again called for a boycott. It later changed its mind but insisted it would not be bound by the outcome of the census.

 

According to the UN Population Fund, which with the UN Mission in Sudan and various other UN agencies, donors and international organisations have supported the count, preliminary results are expected within four to six months.

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