Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 20:11:29 +0100 To: revs@csf.colorado.edu From: slein@e1m147.mpibpc.gwdg.de (Stephan Leineweber) Subject: Sudan - Recent Background Reports -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sudan: Conflict and minorities The situation in Sudan today is critical. A devastating civil war continues and the Sudanese people are subject to gross human rights abuses, political and religious intolerance, forced relocations and hunger. The war is often portrayed as a battle between the Muslim North and Christian South. As MRG's timely Report demonstrates, this over-simplification dangerously obscures the real causes and nature of the conflict. It distorts Sudan's political history, inhibits an understanding of the plight of its peoples and hides the position of minority groups and women. 'Sudan: Conflict and minorities' provides a comprehensive understanding of the background and course of the civil war in Sudan. It closely examines the position of the country's minorities, including the discrimination faced by the Copts and the massacres of the Dinka and peoples of the Nuba Mountains. The Report places this repression within a clear, often neglected, historical context. MRG's Report discusses the potential for an end to the conflict. It makes a series of recommendations to be enacted immediately if Sudan and its peoples are to move towards a peaceful future. Series: Minority Rights Group Reports, ISSN 0305 6252, ISBN 1 897693 65 6 Publication Date: August 1995, A4, wirebound, 44pp Price: £5.40 - (£5.95/US$9.50 outside UK/Eire) Incl. P&P Contact: Minority Rights Group 379 Brixton Road, London SW9 7DE, United Kingdom Fax: +44(0)171 738 6265 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Children of Sudan - Slaves, Street Children and Child Soldiers - The children of Sudan - especially those living in the Southern Sudan and Nuba regions where civil war rages - rare frequently denied their basic rights. A child found running errands alone on a city street can be picked up without parental notification and placed for years in one of several closed government camps. In these camps, the state has assigned Arab names to non-Arab children, denying their right to identity, and it has forced labor, children captured in military raids have been used as household slaves where they are physically punished, forced to work long hours without pay, eat inferior food, and sleep on the floor. The army and government militias forcibly recruit underage boys, and the non-Muslims among them undergo involuntary religious training. The rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) has not cooperated with the United Nations Children's Fund family reunification project and continues to recruit minors. The rebel Southern Sudan Independence Army (SSIA) cooperated in family reunification, but did not stop underage recruitment, luring hundreds of boys long distances on the pretext of schooling. What they received instead was military training. When they were released and sent to a UN relief site, forty-seven boys died in late 1994, in part because SSIA soldiers stole their food rations. The report calls on the government of Sudan, the SPLA and the SSIA to cease underage recruitment and cooperate with family reunification programs. We also call on the government to undertake a rigorous national campaign to stamp out slavery and forced labor, and to end the practice of holding children in government camps. Published Date: September 1995, 111pp Price: £6.99 / US$10 (15% p&p UK and 25% p&p Europe and overseas) Contact: Human Rights Watch 33 Islington High Street, London N1 9LH, United Kingdom Fax: (0)171 713 1800 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------