Left behind: Sudan’s forgotten refugees
By David Chanoff/Boston Globe
By now many people know of the Lost Boys, the refugee children from Sudan’s civil war who trekked from southern Sudan to Ethiopia, then back to Sudan and to Kenya.
When the survivors of this exodus were admitted to the United States last year, it was an event unique in the history of America’s refugee program. Never before had such a group of unaccompanied minors been accorded refugee status, with all the unusual resettlement challenges this posed.
But their story was so compelling that the US State Department felt obliged to act. Orphaned boys surviving alone through unimaginable trials, living communally, intent on winning a future, engaged the sympathy and admiration of almost everyone who became aware of them. The Globe wrote a prominent series on them.
”60 Minutes II” called their experience ”`The Lord of the Flies’ in reverse.” But as in all true stories that say something archetypal about human nature, the popular telling left out much of the complexity. In particular it left out the Lost Girls.
The 20,000 to 25,000 young boys who fled the destruction of their families and villages in 1987 did not go alone. Many adults were in that stream of the dispossessed and displaced.
So were perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 parentless girls. And while the boys attracted the world’s attention (and have settled in America), the girls have been concealed and silenced, often abused, kept as servants or slaves in the United Nations’ Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, or sold into forced marriages.
They have fallen through the cracks in this resettlement initiative and have been mostly hidden from the UN Office of High Commissioner for Refugees and the State Department’s efforts. Of course, there are strong cultural and economic reasons for this double standard, but these don’t constitute justification.
With almost 4,000 male survivors of the original exodus now in the United States, it’s time for their sisters to join them. One reason that ignoring the girls has been easy is that their numbers are inconspicuous. In the columns of exhausted, stick-legged children who emerged from the Sudanese wastes into Ethiopia, boys outnumbered girls by 10 or 20 to 1.
That was largely because many more young boys than girls were tending cattle in up-country camps when disaster struck their villages in the form of Khartoum’s army and militias. Secondly, women and girls were far more likely to be abducted and enslaved by the attackers.
Once in Ethiopia the boys were placed in ”group care,” which meant living in village-like clusters of mud huts with only a few adult caretakers to look after hundreds or even thousands of them. Culturally, though, girls were not allowed to live alone, so they were placed in ”foster care” with whatever distant relatives or other adults from their tribe or region might have been available.
These living arrangements were duplicated after the children were driven out of Ethiopia in 1991 and finally given refuge in the Kakuma camp. Living communally, the boys were an obvious, distinct population. Incorporated into family units, the girls were not.
As the children grew older, the divide between the boys and girls became more distinct, and for the girls life grew more oppressive. Families with girls had ready-made captive workers. Girls in their teens were also a prized economic commodity.
In the southern Sudanese tribal cultures, men pay a ”bride price” to their wives’ families. Traditionally this takes the form of cows. In Kakuma, with no cattle available, it is a money equivalent. ”Bridewealth” was a mainstay of tribal life, in which families loved and cared for their daughters.
But for the Lost Girls of Kakuma there is no such protection. Girls are married off against their will in return for payment. ”Sold off” is the more accurate term.
Of the small number of girls who did make it onto the resettlement lists, names had to be blacked out to prevent abduction and/or detention by guardians or distant relatives. The United States is one of very few countries that brings in refugees on humanitarian grounds alone.
It is one of our indisputable claims to being what President Bush has called us – a ”good people.” We have done this for the neediest of the needy, the most oppressed of the oppressed – Cambodians, Kosovars, Tutsis. Nowhere are American ideals more critical or relevant than in our commitment to the equality of men and women. We have every reason to care just as much for lost girls as we do for lost boys.
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