In December 1999, the governments of Sudan and Uganda signed an agreement in Nairobi to normalize their relations, severed four years earlier. Central to the agreement was the cessation of support to hostile groups operating in the other country and the return of children abducted during cross-border raids, particularly by the Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Children have thus been a primary focus of more than two years of subsequent implementation negotiations chaired by the non-governmental Carter Center, and more than 300 former abduuctees have been returned to their homes thus far. While this represents only a small fraction of the children involved in or affected by armed conflict in the area, the Nairobi Agreement process offers some valuable lessons for those concerned about children caught in conflict zones in the Sudan and elsewhere.

This paper attempts to situate Sudan-Uganda relations within the context of current expressions of proxy war in Africa, and to identify some of the ways in which children become implicated in these tragic events. Through a more specific analysis of the Nairobi Agreement, it explores the dual role that children can play in a peace process, as both pawns used to further specific political agendas, and-in part through their immediate identification as symbols of humanity-as catalysts for implementation and progress. The paper also considers the different approaches taken by the LRA and the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in dealing with child soldiers, and closes by suggesting what may lie ahead for children in northern Uganda and southern Sudan.

In the Sudan now, beneath the stratum of current events, there are three major changes with unequal intensity toward one direction.

1- An increase in the North-South mass movement of people due to a natural disaster: desert encroachment. 2- Simultaneously, there is an increase in the South-North human movement because of a human tragedy of the war and famine in the South. 3- and an increase in West-East human due to a combination of human and natural disasters: insecurity (nahub muslah) and desertification.

All three movements have brought new groups whose entry into the mainstream Sudanese society was forced by the elements of war, famine and natural disasters rather than by free choice.

Now, there are two distinctive classes including a very large underclass and a growing number of a new middle class made of Southern and Western Sudanese groups competing for power, wealth and status with other members of the new middle class. The underclass survived a state of "suspended extinction" in early eighties when the authorities continuously bulldozed their shanty houses. Both members of the underclass and new middle class of the west and south are finding opportunities for upward mobility in the North.

These processes are working together with similar processes of widening the private sphere.

Two Conventions are important here:

First: these ongoing social developments represent the threshold toward a process of undercutting the ethnic, cultural and the religious exclusivity of the Sudanese reverian domination and social order.

Second: These developments indicate the passing of the old order of war, cultural imperialism and assimilation. Now, it seems, all the leaders of the Sudanese ancient regime including Garang, al-Turabi and Bashier and those in their camps look provincial, ethnocentric and out of touch of the reality of the situation.

A relatively new development in anthropological literature is one that reflexively examines the fieldwork experience of anthropologists whose children accompanied them and lived in cultures other than their own for extensive periods of time. As an anthropological couple, and as the mother of two small children in the field, Richard and I have contributed to this literature. Articles such as “Josina’s Observations of Sudanese Culture” (Human Organization, 19821) and “Drink from the Nile and You Shall Return: children and fieldwork in Sudan and Egypt” (1987), and “Families, Gender and Methodology” (1986) have been cited as significant in the development of this sub-field in recent methodology texts, such as The Handbook of Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (1998).

Taking the opportunity of the conference theme on children, this paper examines the following: 1) the value of having children in the field 2) the value of a child’s perspective in anthropological fieldwork 3) the long-term effects of these intensive cross-cultural experiences on the grown children. Also, the paper compares the experiences of the children in Sudan and in Egypt, and their respective attitudes as young adults toward these countries and the region in general. While much of the story to be told is anecdotal and personal, the paper seeks to analyze the experiences in toto, and to encourage this scholarly reflection as well as the value of this particular type of cultural exchange for future research in Sudan.

This paper analyzes South Sudanese refugee children adjustment from a parent perspective in terms of how to achieve the necessary attitude towards change and action. It looks first at the ground objectives of such adjustment and then at opportunities for progress. I will comment on possible barriers and briefly identifies the key players in children better adjustment.

The incident reveals a great deal about the social and economic lives of
the Zayyadiyya and Jilaydat, their responses to the drought and famine of
the time, their competition with the Kababish on the Sudan side of the
frontier, their relations with the central government of Dar Fur, and the
pressures which the advance of Anglo-Egyptian forces put on the societies
of the desert and savanna. In addition to letters from Sultan Ali Dinar,
reports from Reginald Davies ( 3rd Inspector, Bara), and the comments of
Slatin-Pasha, the records have also preserved interviews with individual
slaves who accompanied the nomadic Arabs in their flight. The presence of
the nomads and their followers in Kordofan threatened the relationship
between the Sudan Government and Ali Dinar. Allowing them to settle in
Kordofan, would disrupt the local nomads, and anger Ali Dinar. Returning
them to Dar Fur, would be tacit approval of the breach of the security at
the border by the Dar Fur forces who had pursued them, might mean death
for the individuals sent back, and would show the Sudan Government's
hypocritical stance on slavery. After making slavery in the Sudan a
cause celebre in the nineteenth century, and using it as one of the
reasons for fighting the Mahdist forces, the Sudan Government denied its
existence in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. On the other hand, the Government
wished to keep the slavery issue alive as a potential rationale for the
invasion of Dar Fur. When Ali Dinar claimed that some of the herds and
slaves with the Zayyadiyya were his personal property, the situation
became very delicate indeed. Slatin-Pasha was called upon to find a
solution, and managed to defuse the situation.