WORLD BRIDGE BLOG

When Valentino Achak Deng, the subject of Dave Egger’s best selling novel What is the What speaks, he allows long pauses between sentences during which you can almost hear his audience holding their breath. On Tuesday night, Refugees International’s Washington Circle featured Valentino as part of a panel discussion on “The Year of Sudan: What Lies Ahead” at the Mexican Cultural Institute. The standing-room only audience was captivated as they listened to him describe fleeing the village where he grew up in southern Sudan.

Valentino told the room that it took four months of walking to reach a refugee camp in Ethiopia, and he made the journey barefoot and empty handed, without as much as a blanket. He was seven years old. “I thought the journey would be a few days,” he said, “But I was separated from my family for seventeen years.” After several years spent in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, Valentino came to the United States in 2001. His story, as told in What is the What, puts a human face on the massive civilian toll of the 21-year civil war in Sudan, which finally ended when the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005.

At Refugees International, we are calling 2010 “The year of Sudan.” This is the year that Sudan faces its first national elections in twenty-four years and prepares for a referendum in January 2011. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement dictated that this referendum will allow southern Sudanese to decide whether they want to secede from the north and declare independence.

Michael Gerson, a columnist for the Washington Post and former official in George W. Bush’s administration, also participated in Tuesday night’s panel and warned of a possible resurgence of violence and instability during this volatile time. He argued that international pressure is essential to maintaining relative peace and that this is going to require “a certain policy boldness” in Congress and foreign capitals. Eileen Shields-West, Refugees International’s Vice-Chair and moderator of the panel, asked Mr. Gerson how we can bring about these policies. “We’ve seen that advocacy makes a difference,” Gerson answered.

This is where Refugees International comes in. Senior Advocate Melanie Teff, who was the evening’s third panelist just returned from southern Sudan where she had been looking at how international agencies were planning for the future. “We hope that the elections and referendum will go well, but it’s important to plan in case they don’t,” she argued. In her recent trip, Melanie found that while the UN has started making contingency plans in the South, few people are looking at the areas located at the border of north and south Sudan. These areas are most at risk of violence flaring up, but the people there are falling through the cracks. Refugees International will be working to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Valentino spoke about these same risks, and put them in terms not often used in policy papers or field reports. “What is happening in Sudan has cost so many lives. We lost more than 2.5 million people, four million displaced inside their country, and one million fled the country, me included.” He noted that only if people have faith in their own security, will they return home and begin to rebuild the structures and institutions necessary for an independent South. Most importantly, Valentino argued passionately for continued support for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

“In south Sudan, you can see that the Comprehensive Peace Agreement has brought hope,” he said. “It should be supported and sustained. Families have returned home and need services. I see hope in south Sudan.”