Access to land at the root of the Sudanese conflict

“Most of the livelihoods in Sudan are very mobile,” explains De Wit. “For hundreds of years, communities have been moving from highlands to lowlands, to watering places during the dry season, to grazing places during the wet season...This required making arrangements with their neighbours, discussions among people building consensus. But these days people don’t discuss anymore. They just take up arms”.

There are some concrete issues that have contributed to the increase of confrontation, points De Wit: the severe droughts during the 80s and the increasing presence of commercial farming activities, which have occupied spaces formerly used by pastoralists. In addition, there has been a marginalization of local administration and this has resulted in great disrespect of the rule of law. “People now try to live the way they think it’s the best way and this is not always according to laws and regulations because, says De Wit, often these laws do not reflect rural reality and are not legitimate to the people.”

The studies carried out by De Wit during 2001 and 2004 identified main causes of land-related conflicts in the country. The findings have been incorporated in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in January 2005.

“ There are some common elements that need to be considered in post-conflict development policies in order to avoid repeating errors from the past. Firstly, you need to secure access to land for people. A lot of those people have lost access to land because they left the country or they were displaced internally.

But securing land rights only are not enough; you need to create mechanisms so that people can exercises these rights. This is a second element; and a third element that we think is very important is to put into place mechanisms so that people can protect these rights. So you have access to rights, you have secure your rights and you need to protect them. These are the three basic elements that, of course, need to be addressed in an enabling policy, legal and institutional framework which is often weak and inadequate in post conflict situations.”

De Wit had a final recommendation on the upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development: “I think it is very important that people attending the meeting get exposed to solid and real life experiences. This is one of the major messages that we have being promoting in a number of countries: listen to your people, try to use the experience in the field and try to convince policy makers to use those experiences; try to involve people in developing those policies – upstream policy and law development is essential. The conference is inviting people, institutions and universities to present cases studies from all over the world so: let’s listen to those case studies and let us try to crystallize out of those case studies some lessons for the way forward.”

Listen to excerpts from the interview with Paul De Wit, Rome, 21 October 2005

Paul De Wit explains how mobile and more sedentary communities in Sudan compete for the access to the same natural resources and how this fact has increased dramatically confrontation during the last decades.
Duration: 2min04sec

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De Wit’s recommendations for the upcoming International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.
Duration: 55sec

Realaudio | MP3