Photo credit: Refugees International/ Sarah Martin
03/14/2006

Canal is a small town marked by a big rusting crane and this bulldozer beached in the middle of the village. The town's name is derived from the canal project that Sudan and Egypt launched in the 1980s to excavate Jonglei canal to deliver water to Egypt. The project, initiated by the central government in Khartoum with little regard for the environmental or economic impact on the south, infuriated the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, and they kidnapped canal company workers and started fighting around Malakal in 1983. Now the town is filled with internally displaced persons who fled the fighting further inland and have settled by the river.