Yida Refugee Camp
Photo: A young boy rides his family’s donkey toward the market in Yida Refugee Camp. (Operation Broken Silence)
This historical overview provides a contextual background for understanding the issues Operation Broken Silence works on. It is part of our resource list for students, teachers, and the curious and was last updated November 2023. For more information about what's happening in Sudan and our work, please sign up for our email list.
Introduction
Yida Refugee Camp in northern South Sudan came into existence in 2011, when the second war and attempted genocide in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan began. We encourage you to read our historical background piece on the Nuba Mountains before continuing here.
A chronological examination of Yida can be broken out into three main periods:
Pre-Existence To Founding : 2010-2011
Camp Growth & Humanitarian Challenges: 2011-2014
International Tension, Stability, & Population Decline: 2015-2019
Since Operation Broken Silence’s primary Sudanese partners work in the Nuba Mountains and Yida Refugee Camp, a summary of the current situation is provided at the end as well.
Map: Location of Yida Refugee Camp. (Operation Broken Silence)
Pre-Existence To Founding: 1992-2011
The history of Yida Refugee Camp in northern South Sudan is intricately connected to the Nuba Mountains just across the border in Sudan. Yida sits roughly 17 miles away from the international border dividing the two countries. This demarcation is illustrative of the historical religious and ethnic grievances the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan have suffered underneath national military regimes in Khartoum.
The locality was depopulated of its native African tribal populations in the 1990s during the Second Sudanese Civil War. The Nuba Mountains of Sudan north of the area now known as Yida are inhabited by roughly 100 African tribes who have been referred to collectively as Nuba for centuries. Estimations vary wildly; however, it is generally thought that roughly 45% of the Nuba people are Christian, making the mountains home to the largest community of Christians in Sudan. Other religious affiliations include 45% of the population identifying as Muslim, with the remaining 10% following local tribal regions or identifying with no religion at all.
Photo: A girl who survived an aerial bombing in the Nuba Mountains. Her mother brought them to Yida Refugee Camp in 2015. (Operation Broken Silence)
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Bashir regime of Sudan attempted to Islamize and Arabize the Nuba Mountains through war and genocide. This caused high levels of death and destruction on Nuba communities but ultimately strengthened the Nuba identity and armed resistance to the Bashir regime. The situation in the Nuba Mountains stabilized from 2003-2009 as the peace agreement that ended the Second Sudanese Civil War came into effect.
Some people resettled the area now known as Yida after the war ended in 2005, but it remained only sparsely inhabited by South Sudanese throughout the 2000s. By 2010, the area’s largest community was a small Dinka farming village of roughly 400 people. During the rainy season, the landscape transforms from being visually semi-arid into a lush, green wetland.
As southern Sudan prepared for an independence referendum in 2010, several soon-to-be international border areas between Sudan and southern Sudan witnessed rising tensions. The area that would become Yida Refugee Camp remained relatively quiet as it was shielded to north by the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement-North (SPLM-N) in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan and southern Sudan’s own military.
That began to change in 2011. From January-May, the Bashir regime of Sudan escalated militia attacks on isolated frontline communities in the Nuba Mountains. With southern Sudan on the verge becoming an independent country, it was clear that a new war was coming to the Nuba Mountains.
The return to war came early on the morning of June 6, 2011. Regime forces invaded the state capital of Kadugli and began massacring Nuba civilians. Survivors witnessed army soldiers and regime intelligence agents dragging Nuba people from their homes and executing them in the streets. Additional agents hunted through the city for Nuba leaders and intellectuals to kill, a step of the 10 Stages of Genocide.
Over a three-day period, the Bashir regime oversaw the systematic mass killing of thousands of Nuba civilians in Kadugli and began a widespread aerial bombing campaign on communities across the Nuba Mountains. Large numbers of Sudanese army forces and regime paramilitaries began to advance on the outskirts of the Nuba Mountains. Heavy fighting broke out across the frontlines. Nuba civilians fled for the safety of mountains or toward the South Sudan border.
Most of the initial refugees who arrived in Yida were survivors of the Kadugli massacre. They brought with them firsthand accounts of the killings. Along the way they had no sustainable food sources or clean water. The small farming village welcomed the new arrivals, offering food and land for them to farm. Yida Refugee Camp was born.
Rapid Camp Growth & Humanitarian/Security Challenges: 2011-2014
The ebb and flow of Nuba refugees into Yida since the outbreak of the war has matched the severity of armed conflict in the Nuba Mountains. During particularly intense stretches of regime aerial bombings and ground offenses, the population of Yida Refugee Camp has swelled. The first three years of the war witnessed major assaults on frontline communities and widespread aerial bombing against schools, markets, and places of worship. Yida Refugee Camp grew rapidly as a result, even with the critical road from the Nuba Mountains to Yida in South Sudan under constant threat by regime forces.
Over 30,000 refugees fled into Yida during the first year of the war. The regime responded by sending a warplane across the border to bomb the fledgling refugee camp in November 2011. This war crime caused considerable international outcry, making the regime decide not to launch such a brazen cross border attack again.
By July 2012, local aid workers were reporting over 600 new arrivals a day and growing humanitarian needs. Children were showing up malnourished and parents reported having to scavenge for leaves, roots, and tree sap to eat to sustain their journey to Yida. The World Food Program quickly scaled an emergency food distribution program to 21,000 people, but struggled to keep up with the growing population.
Three months later in October, Yida had more than doubled in size to roughly 65,000 people, with over 1,000 new arrivals flowing in on peak days. Driving the influx were Sudanese government warplanes, which had increased the frequency of bombing runs and begun using cluster munitions on Nuba villages.
As humanitarian conditions worsened in the camp, crime and basic security began to deteriorate as well. With no signs of a ceasefire or peace agreement on the horizon and humanitarian support lacking, community leaders in Yida Refugee Camp and local South Sudanese government officials began to push for more structure and services to address basic needs. A South Sudanese police force entered the camp and arrangements were made for refugees to begin farming the areas around Yida. An on again-off again effort to collect and remove small arms from the camp also picked up pace.
By January 2013, Yida’s population had swelled to over 70,000 people and little progress had been made on the camp’s humanitarian and security challenges. Relationships with nearby South Sudanese Dinka villages had also deteriorated. Local South Sudanese accused the Nuba refugees of harvesting their resources –including fish, wood, honey, and tall grass— to turn a profit at the growing market in Yida Refugee Camp. The Nuba refugees reported being robbed by members of nearby villages and being forced to pay taxes without any sort of documentation provided.
These tensions exploded into violence in March 2013. South Sudanese police and a Nuba militia —primarily made up of members from the Angolo tribe in Nuba— opened fire on each other. Armed Dinka militias entered parts of Yida and began looting homes and shops with police participation. More than 7,000 Nuba refugees fled north to the town of Jau, which sits on the Sudan-South Sudan border. The violence was finally quelled when a heavily-armed South Sudanese army force entered the camp to restore order.
The violence forced refugee leaders, local South Sudanese officials, and humanitarian organizations to focus on permanently improving conditions in the camp, even as the United Nations moved forward with opening additional camps in less secure areas. Throughout 2014 and over the next few years, more clean water wells would be dug, shelter supplies and food provided, schools opened, and limited medical services launched. A major effort to reduce the proliferation of weapons in the camp took on a more concrete form as well, leading to a reduction of Nuba militias and soldiers and more lightly armed South Sudanese police units.
In January 2014, regime forces launched a major offensive to capture the critical route connecting the Nuba Mountains to Yida Refugee Camp. After briefly losing control of a handful of key towns, the Nuba SPLM-N managed to defeat the attack and drive regime forces out of the area, permanently securing the road for refugees and trade flows in the area.
Cultural Sustainment, International Tension, & Population Decline: 2015-2019
By 2015, Yida Refugee Camp had grown to be the largest Nuba community despite being outside of the mountains and in another country. The camp’s sheer size and improving humanitarian and security conditions made it a cultural and trading hub of the Nuba people.
The camp’s residential landscape was increasingly dotted with boon shops —a traditional Nuba coffee infused with ginger, cardamom and cinnamon— tea stalls, churches, schools, and community gathering and laundry sites. Community leaders created a process to handle local disputes peacefully. Nuba wrestling matches —a famous, historic sport in the mountains— brought in crowds to watch. Barbed wire that had been put up to help secure the camp’s perimeter was taken down and repurposed as clotheslines.
Yida’s expanding market and improved farming access also allowed for refugees to improve their own humanitarian conditions, as well as become a trading hub between the Nuba Mountains and South Sudan and nearby local communities. The camp was beginning to look more like a permanent city and economic engine in the region. Nuba teachers at most schools in the camp were underpaid and not well-resourced, but more and more children —one of the largest demographics in Yida— had access to a classroom, sometimes for the first time ever.
Photo: A Nuba woman waits for water to boil at her boon and tea shop in Yida’s market. (Operation Broken Silence)
Challenges in Yida persisted despite improving conditions. In 2016, three churches were burned to the ground. International groups focused on Christian persecution reported that agents sent by the Sudanese government were responsible, but one of the church’s pastors informed Operation Broken Silence that they had no evidence of that being the reason. The congregations chose to forgive the perpetrators and rebuild.
Most notably, the relationship between the refugee community and United Nations (UN) became a source of growing anxiety in 2016. The UN had long referred to Yida as a “temporary” settlement and as the agency opened other less secure camps in South Sudan had begun calling Yida a “transit” area.
Photo: Torched logs from one of the churches burned down in Yida. The rebuilt church sits in the background. (Operation Broken Silence)
The reasoning provided for the UN’s growing discomfort with Yida has left much to be desired. Over the years, UN workers have claimed that the camp is too close to the border, plagued by armed actors, and that overpopulation was occurring. Nuba refugee leaders have asked for evidence of the latter two and partnership time and time again and received less and less in response.
The solutions offered by the UN fell even further short than the arguments. Efforts to replace Yida with other camps over the years have seen mostly negative results. A new UN camp called Nyeli flooded so frequently it had to be closed. While Yida is less than the 50-kilometers minimum distance from the border set by UN guidelines, the new UN camp Ajuong Thok did not meet the UN’s distance guidelines either. To make matters worse, the camp is near a section of the border that has historically been controlled by Sudanese regime forces, and residents felt it wasn’t safe to leave the camp after being threatened by local communities. Ajuong Thok was also nearing capacity by mid-2016 when the UN intensified efforts to close Yida, and another camp at Pamir wasn’t even built before the UN tried to move Nuba refugees there.
Many Yida residents thus refused to leave for new UN camps, even as the UN slowly reduced humanitarian operations from 2016 onward. However, Yida’s population began to decline in 2017 after the first ceasefire in the Nuba Mountains was signed. With the end of regime aerial bombing and major ground offensives, as well as slowly deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Yida, families began returning to their villages in the Nuba Mountains to rebuild.
Yida Refugee Camp Today (2019-Present)
In 2019, a civilian revolution swept across Sudan, leading to dictator Omar al-Bashir being overthrown by his own generals in April of that year. Following a horrific massacre of peaceful protesters in Khartoum in June, renewed protests surged across Sudan and forced the regime to the negotiating table. A transitional government that was supposed to move the country toward free elections, democracy, and protection of basic human rights was implemented.
The transitional government was overthrown by surviving regime forces in October 2021. Leading the coup were the Sudanese army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), two uneasy allies whose generals never saw eye-to-eye. Military leaders in both organizations desired to see themselves as Sudan’s new ruling junta, with other armed regime groups beneath them.
Photo: A mother checks on her baby while cooking outdoors in Yida. (Operation Broken Silence)
From the time of the coup to early 2023, conditions in Sudan deteriorated on almost fronts. Inflation surged, peaceful protests resumed, humanitarian needs spread, and the web of oppression that transitional civilian leaders had been lifting was reinforced.
The RSF used this time to double down on becoming a self-sustaining force in Sudan. RSF generals fully secured their own weapons supply lines, launched international diplomatic efforts, entrenched themselves further in Sudan’s gold-mining sector, and began recruiting more fighters, both within Sudan and from other countries across the Sahel region. These actions almost always came at the expense of ordinary Sudanese, who faced increasing attacks by RSF soldiers and dwindling economic opportunities.
It also deteriorated the RSF’s tenuous relationship with the more dominant army, to the point of collapse. With a long-promised peace agreement elusive and coming fracturing of the regime all but sure, Nuba leaders had begun preparing for a new war shortly after the October 2021 coup. Meanwhile, in Yida Refugee Camp, clean water sites had begun falling into disrepair and schools struggled to gain access to basic supplies.
The new war came on April 15, 2023. The RSF launched multiple attacks on army bases across Sudan and attempted to seize government buildings in Khartoum. The lightening strike failed to knock the army out of power, with army units across the country putting up stiff resistance and bombing civilian areas RSF units attacked from. Both sides have engaged in large-scale war crimes, with the RSF using the fog of war to double down on their genocide of ethnic African minorities in Darfur.
Photo: A Nuba woman walks home from a clean water well in Yida. The well she used has since fallen into disrepair and closed. (Operation Broken Silence)
At first, the Nuba Mountains were seen as a safe haven, with roughly 200,000 people from Khartoum and other areas fleeing into Nuba SPLM-N controlled areas and even into Yida Refugee Camp.
Fighting reached the western Nuba Mountains in June 2023. Small skirmishes between the army and SPLM-N devolved into major fighting around Kadugli and spread north to Dilling. The RSF entered the fray as well, attacking army forces from the west and north. While some Nuba communities near the frontlines have been forced to evacuate and prices of basic goods have soared, life goes on as usual in much of the rest of the Nuba Mountains and Yida Refugee Camp. There has been no widespread aerial bombings of villages as in previous wars, but the situation remains tense. It is believed that if the RSF makes serious gains in the region, more frontline communities will be at-risk, which would likely lead to new refugees entering Yida once more.
The army-RSF war continues today, as does fighting on the western frontlines of the Nuba Mountains. For more up to date information on the situation in the Nuba Mountains, Yida Refugee Camp, and across Sudan, please visit our blog and sign up for our email list.
From Learning To Action
Operation Broken Silence is building a global movement to empower Sudanese heroes in the war-torn periphery regions of Sudan, including Nuba teachers in Yida Refugee Camp. Teachers just like Chana.
The Endure Primary and Renewal Secondary Schools we sponsor in Yida are run entirely by Sudanese teachers. Your gift will help pay educator salaries, deliver school supplies and more.
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