Julie Flint takes up Hamdab : The Obsever

Quote: Villagers in Sudan fight dam dictators The ambitious government project has left thousands homeless and starving Julie Flint Sunday July 24, 2005 The Observer They are selling their cows because they can no longer afford to feed them. The land they have been given is so infertile, and growing anything so hard, that children are being kept out of school to help in the fields. They were promised prosperity, but are now victims of fear, destitution and dependency. The peasant farmers of the Hamadab tribe, resettled in the desert of northern Sudan from one of the most fertile stretches of the River Nile, are the first casualties of a project that the Sudanese government is promoting as one of its most important poverty alleviation programmes since its civil war with southern rebels officially ended in January. By the time it is completed, the £1 billion Merowe dam - Africa's largest hydropower project, second in size only to the Aswan high dam - will displace more than 50,000 people. The 10,000 who have already been resettled have suffered rapid and dramatic impoverishment. Most of those who remain face an even grimmer future in a site described by those who know it as 'a dustbowl... hell on earth'. Sudan is littered with the relics of grand projects that became white elephants. In the Fifties the Gash Delta irrigation scheme moved the Beja people from their dry-season grazing land and began the organised discontent that now threatens a new conflict in eastern Sudan. In the Sixties, Sudanese displaced by the Aswan dam were resettled on a cotton irrigation scheme that was overwhelmed by problems. Then came the biggest problem - the Jonglei Canal, a monster of a project designed to divert the Nile past the swamps of the Sudd, through a channel cut by the world's largest land-based moving object - a huge circular blade. Begun in the Seventies, it soon ran into local opposition. Sudan's then Vice-President, Abel Alier, famously said: 'If we have to drive our people to paradise with sticks, we will do it.' Instead, discontent among herdsmen who feared losing their pastures fuelled the first attacks of the civil war. The canal was never completed, its digger cut up to make spears and saucepans. 'Ever since colonial days, the government has felt it can move people about at will,' says Alex de Waal, of Justice Africa. 'After the first civil war ended in 1972, Khartoum's rulers and their international donors went for a headlong rush for growth through mega-projects without consulting the people first, and sowed the seeds for a second war 10 years later.' No one questions the need for electricity: Sudan's present generating capacity serves only 700,000 people in a population of almost 40 million. But many question whether the Merowe project, which will double Sudan's power-generating capacity, is the right idea. The dam will be in the hottest part of Sudan, in a zone susceptible to seismic activity, and 8 per cent of Sudan's share of Nile water will be lost through evaporation. In a report to be published next month, two NGOs - The Corner House and the International Rivers Network - argue that the project violates World Bank safeguard policies on 63 accounts. 'The project does not come close to meeting international standards,' says The Corner House's Nicholas Hildyard. 'The environmental impact assessment has not been approved under Sudanese law. The resettlement is a scandal - people were dumped in the desert with much of the land uncleared.' The dam will create a lake about 100 miles long in a narrow valley where the Nile makes a huge U-bend 200 miles north of Khartoum. It was always thought that the major trade routes of ancient times bypassed the bend, but a frantic archaeological rescue operation has uncovered evidence of 3,000 years of continuous habitation by the forerunners of the three tribes now being uprooted - the Hamadab, Amri and Manasir. The living are being treated with far less respect than the dead. Villagers are not refusing to be moved; they want consultation, and construction suspended so that problems can be addressed. But the government refuses to recognise their committee. Instead a 13-man committee formed by presidential decree includes four regime stalwarts as 'representatives' of the affected people: Lieutenant-General Osman Khalifa, a friend and colleague of the Interior Minister; Mohamed Suleiman Godabi, a senior regional official and former recruiter for the paramilitary Popular Defence Forces in Nile State; and two well-known supporters of the National Islamic Front. Peaceful protest has been met with force. When the first villagers were moved, security forces opened fire on women and children in one village, Korgheli, seriously wounding five. In the past six months, 12 opponents of the resettlement plan have been arrested. Energy Minister Awad al-Jaz has said they will be freed if villagers accept the plans. 'These 12 people are basically being held as hostages,' says Ali Askouri, an activist whose village will be submerged. 'But the government would be mistaken to think people will drop their demands. It is unlikely that Sudan will find peace without a change in policy and approach towards issues like these.' [/QUOTE http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1535049,00.html]