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Hundreds of Sudanese refugees from the U.S. and abroad gathered in Council Bluffs this week to talk about helping the war-torn country they left behind, as well as adjusting to their adopted homeland.
They came to the Mid-America Center from more than 15 U.S. states, Africa and Australia for a two-day convention of the Nuer Community Development Services USA. The Nuer are the second-largest ethnic group in southern Sudan, after the Dinka. Metropolitan Omaha is home to the largest Sudanese refugee population in the United States.
Started in Minnesota in 1999, Nuer Community Development Services seeks to help Sudanese in diaspora, and to foster peace and development in southern Sudan, said Brown Both Bol of Worthington, Minn., president of the group. The group also wants to keep the U.S. government’s eyes and influence on Sudan.
That’s especially important now, with elections pending under a 2005 peace deal that brought a measure of calm to Sudan after 23 years of civil war, Bol said.
Sudan may be unable to hold credible elections in coming months because the ruling party and opposition cannot agree on ground rules for the polls, the U.S. State Department said on Friday.
At the end of a trip to Sudan by President Barack Obama’s special envoy Scott Gration, the State Department said it saw little movement on issues such as voter registration and border delineation between the northern capital, Khartoum, and the semi-autonomous South, the Reuters news service reported. The disagreement could endanger plans for national elections in April and a referendum on southern secession in 2011.
Nuer Community Development Services is closely tied to the Government of Southern Sudan, as it is called. In Council Bluffs, Bol said he hoped to recruit dozens of Nuer people from around the United States to return to their ethnic homelands, encourage people to participate in the elections and build unity among Nuer subclans.
Several Sudanese refugees who had settled in Nebraska already have returned to southern Sudan to join in such efforts, said Stephen Hoth of Omaha, vice president of the Nuer group.
Speakers at the convention included John Marks, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Sudan operations, and Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, the Government of Southern Sudan’s lead emissary in Washington, D.C.
Contact the writer:
444-1057, christopher.burbach@owh.com
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