A Cry for Respect in a Sudan Camp

A Cry for Respect in a Sudan Camp: "KALMA CAMP, Sudan -- Boys in tattered clothes were waiting in food lines, girls were hauling water on donkeys, crippled orphans were begging on crutches. Suddenly, a call went out across this vast camp of stick-and-rag huts filled with civilians displaced by the conflict in Darfur. Abandoning their routines, thousands of children converged at key spots.

There, teenage leaders rallied the crowds. They spoke of the persistent lice, the filthy latrines, the longing for home among the camp's 90,000 inhabitants. They described a humiliating incident that morning in which a camp leader had been beaten and dragged off by Sudanese troops amid contradictory explanations.

And then they made a proposal that both shocked and exhilarated the gathered adolescents: that they kidnap humanitarian aid workers to protest their miserable conditions.

'It was a scary idea,' said Nazira Sulliman, 12, who attended one of the rallies. 'Many of us had never done anything that wrong. But it also made us feel strong.'"...

After three days of negotiations, the hostages were released unharmed, and so was Taha, though he was later detained again and is still in jail.

But the unprecedented armed threat from the children of Darfur illustrated how a passive, victimized generation of young people, driven from their villages and confined in camps, could suddenly became a dangerous mob.

"Okay, it wasn't really the so-called 'right thing to do,' " said Al Tieb Mohammed Adam, 27, a charismatic youth leader in Kalma. "But here we are living in this horrid camp with no money, no hope for marriage, no security to go home. The jobless youth of Darfur are angry. We are sick and we are rising."

Across Africa, an estimated 18 million children are growing up in impoverished camps like Kalma. They are refugees from fighting in parts of Uganda, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Congo as well as Sudan, according to the U.N. High Commission for Refugees.

The Darfur conflict has driven nearly 2 million people into camps since 2003, when groups of mostly African rebels launched an uprising, protesting discrimination by the Arab-dominated government. Authorities responded by bombing villages and arming Arab militiamen, known as Janjaweed, who looted and burned villages.

More than 60 percent of the displaced Darfurians are children. They are dependent on food aid, stripped of their culture, mostly uneducated and unskilled. According to the United Nations, such displaced children are especially susceptible to forced labor, sexual exploitation and recruitment by armed groups. Isolated and frustrated, they can become desperate.