United by Country, Divided By Their Tribal Differences

By Pamela Constable,
Washington Post Staff Writer.

Many Darfurians Remain in Conflict, but Sudanese Who Settle In Area Find Themselves at Odds on Religion, Politics, Locale

Although the five-year conflict in Sudan's vast, parched Darfur region has spawned dozens of U.S.-based support groups, and the killings by militias have been labeled genocide by U.S. officials, very few of Darfur's victims have actually reached the United States.
In the Washington area, many Sudanese are longtime emigres from other parts of the country: an accountant in an Oxford shirt, a night nurse who leads a church choir, an architect who moonlights as a political activist. Theirs is an extraordinarily diverse emigre group, often separated by religion and politics.

"I hate to talk about tribe and conflict. We have our problems, but our variety makes us a great country, like America," said Alaaeldin Mustafa, who runs a Sudanese variety store in Adams Morgan. The shelves are crammed with incense, fresh dates and hookah tobacco. On the wall is the handwritten creed of a wise merchant: "Don't argue. Don't blame. Don't embarrass the customers. No politics, no religion."
Mustafa's little shop is a cordial oasis in an exile universe that reflects the complex enmities of the troubled North African nation. The Sudanese in the United States -- about 1,000 in the Washington area, more than 200,000 nationwide -- are Arabs and Africans, Muslims and Christians. They speak more than a dozen dialects and form rival charity and advocacy groups based on religious and political bonds.
Their country is represented in the District by two diplomatic missions that are formal partners in a coalition government yet barely tolerate each other's existence: the permanent embassy of Sudan, which is on Massachusetts Avenue NW, and the new political mission representing southern Sudan, which opened 18 months ago just a few blocks away in a small, spare office. In Darfur, vast numbers of poor villagers have been driven by violence to other villages or camps, but most have remained inside Sudan. Among the small number of Darfurians in the Washington area, some are from the area's Arab tribes, and most are professionals who received political asylum.
"There are a lot of Darfurians here, but unfortunately we are divided," said Elnour Adam, an architect in the District who is a leader of several pro-Darfur groups. He said the Khartoum government has tried to divide emigres along Arab and African lines, even though most Darfurians are Muslims and would prefer to peacefully coexist. "They manipulate and marginalize us. They use all the tools they can."

Sudan's ambassador, John Ukec Lueth, a former southern rebel fighter-turned-army general and a longtime college professor in Iowa, insisted in a recent interview that the Darfurian Muslims are "fighting among themselves" rather than facing government repression. "Darfur consumes all my time here, but Americans don't understand our tribal loyalties and grudges," he said. "The situation is far more complex than people think."
A majority of Sudanese emigres are refugees from a far older and bloodier conflict: the war in southern Sudan, which raged intermittently for half a century and claimed several million lives. Although that war officially ended with a peace agreement three years ago, just last month the Bush administration extended the temporary refugee status of some southern refugees through 2010, reflecting the still-tense conditions.
Many southerners here are middle-class professionals, but others barely make ends meet, and all have harrowing tales to tell. Angelina Likia Oneika, 43, a nursing home aide in Fairfax County, fled fighting twice and spent years as a refugee in Egypt and Uganda. Reaching the United States in 2000, she struggled to feed six children until her husband arrived. She worked at Target and walked home with bags of groceries on her head.
"In wartime, we survived by running from bush to bush, so we can survive here, too," Oneika said. "There was so much suffering, so many lives lost. Here, life is hard, but we are in the promised land. I tell my husband, 'Honey, put your pride away. Here, you have to start from zero, but you are safe, and you are free."

Most southerners are Christian, and many in the Washington area worship at Cornerstone Free Evangelical Church in Annandale, where hymns are sung in a lilting blend of Arabic and African tongues. The unofficial Sudanese pastor, Samuel Juma, spends his time delivering used furniture to poor families, raising funds to buy bicycles for refugee camps or arranging mourning services for families' deceased relatives back home.
Yet Juma, a genial man whose wife, Esther, is an expert in cooking Sudanese corn porridge and spinach with peanut sauce, acknowledges that he has virtually no connection with emigres from the north, most of whom are Muslim and worship at area mosques.
"The northerners live in a separate world. They are completely unknown to me," he said, noting that Sudan is so large that it encompasses several time zones and a land mass larger than the eastern United States. "We meet and say hello at occasions, but there is nothing in common."
Khalid Yousif, an accountant from Burke, is an Arab Muslim from the north who said he partly blames both sides in the Darfur conflict. He also criticizes religious repression by the Islamic authorities based in Khartoum.
"We used to be told to go fight the evil Christians because they want to kill all Muslims. Now the conflict [in southern Sudan] is over, but there are still abuses," said Yousif, who has lived in the United States for 20 years. "Here in the United States, we learn to disagree without disrespecting each other. Some people say they are from one tribe that is better than another. I say, don't bring your stuff here; learn from America."
At Mustafa's shop in Adams Morgan, the spirit of goodwill.