SUDAN: Durable solutions elusive as southern IDPs return and ...

Some sources (Tufts-IDMC, August 2008; Landinfo, November 2008) report that even in the
areas designated as “IDP camps” around Khartoum it is more and more difficult to identify IDPs
and differentiate between them and economic migrants or other urban poor living in the same
areas, especially because these areas are not delimited and they do not differ from ordinary
residential areas in the slums around the capital. Moreover, IDPs often consider themselves as
"migrants" as opposed to "IDPs" and are consequently not counted as IDPs in surveys (Landinfo,
November 2008).
Since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in January 2005 between the
government in Khartoum and the SPLA/SPLM, significant numbers of IDPs from Southern Sudan
have returned to the South. The difficulties encountered in tracking these return movements and
a lack of formal registration adds to the problem of determining the numbers of remaining IDPs in
the Greater Khartoum area (UN and Partners, November 2008). (For further information, see the
section on return movements.)
A final difficulty is presented by the fact that significant numbers of IDPs in Khartoum, especially
people displaced from Southern Sudan, have lived in Khartoum for so long that they now
consider themselves as permanent residents of Khartoum: they have no intention to return to
their original homes in Southern Sudan (see the survey of IDP return intentions conducted by
IOM (September 2006), which established that 25 per cent of IDPs in the northern states of
Sudan had no intention to return to their places of origin, while a further 11.5 per cent was
undecided). Thus the 2007 Work Plan for Sudan noted that Khartoum had "an estimated one
million permanent residents who were previously regarded as temporary" (UN and Parners,
December 2006, p.296).
2. Figures
The figures in the table below have to be interpreted with some caution. In many cases, there is
no information available about the methods that were used to produce the figures that are quoted.
For example, Assal (March 2006) shows that while some surveys provide figures only for the four
areas that are recognised by the authorities as “camps”, other studies include other areas within
their definition of “camps”. In some cases, no reference is provided to the provenance of the
figures: it is therefore impossible to know with certainty to which date the figures refer. The
definition of who is an IDP also varies between the sources and is thus a further factor
responsible for the difference between the various estimates (Assal, March 2006; Landinfo,
November 2008). Finally, the difference between the different numbers is due in part to a lack of
access to the displaced populations in the Greater Khartoum area, and the fact that efforts to
quantify the scale of displacement have not always been fully facilitated by the authorities (Tufts-
IDMC, August 2008; Aegis Trust, June 2006).
Organization Date of
publication
Provenance of
the figures
GoS April 2010 Estimate
based on an
empirical
study and
analysis
carried out
between July
IDP number in
Khartoum exl.
“camps”
Estimate from
293,183
IDP number for
“camps”
Estimate
330,484
IDP number in
Greater
Khartoum
Estimate
623,667 (the
study points out
that an
estimated 1.5
million IDPs
had locally
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