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Back in the 1980s, in a small northern village, nearer Egypt than Khartoum, there were few signs of the conflict in the south.

Especially if, like most of my neighbours, you were able to ignore the refugees.

But they were there, dark and dusty boys in ragged shorts, doing the most menial chores for negligible reward.

In the market place at Kerma they manned the blacksmith’s bellows, muscles pumping hour after hour, dully staring into space. Coated with dried mud, they turned bricks out of rough moulds to dry in the sun.

They staggered under nylon sacks of dates, loading and unloading under the complacent eye of fat merchants, and later sleeping on the donkey cart.

But the displaced in the far north were at least scattered.

Refugees

Around Khartoum, they were, and still are, packed in hundreds of thousands from the open savannah and swampland of the south, compressed into squalid camps of straw-walled huts and lean-tos of rough wood and plastic sheeting.

From time to time, the city authorities decide, apparently arbitrarily, to bulldoze a district or two.

So many are the refugees that, if Sudan were a democracy at peace with itself, Khartoum would be a bastion of southern domination.

There is optimism that peace in the south can finally hold

But over the years, the wealthier in the capital have come to rely on those despised refugee labourers.

And some southerners have been able to use their education to make a more dignified way in life.

But the street children, intermittently purged from Khartoum’s back alleys, tell a different tale.

Songs of the Uduk people of the Specialty dating mormon site border region speak of the dark days of war and the harsh fate of the internal exile.

“My feet are bruised / We are on the long bitter road / With the children too.”

But even the squalor of a refugee camp at Jebel Aulia, or Wad al-Bashir, or the others outside Khartoum, compares favourably to life in the war zone itself.

‘Widening divisions’

Government tactics that have been seen in Darfur in the past 18 months were pioneered and refined in the south.

The Antonov AN-32 is a cargo plane, not a sophisticated bomber.

So when you use it to drop bombs, you kind of chuck them out at random, so it is not really a surprise that they land on villages.

Around one million people have been displaced during the conflict

Not very effective strategically, but very useful for persuading large numbers of civilians to leave the area.

The notorious “Janjaweed” of Darfur, too, have their precedents in the deployment of ethnically motivated militias in the south.

Murder, rape and torching villages among their specialties.

Khartoum’s government has been consistently adept at widening divisions in the fractious southern movement.

Every splinter group, every self-aggrandising warlord, meant that Khartoum’s enemies expended bullets and men on each other, and of course the civilians got caught in the middle of that too.

War

But the southerners were not alone in their suffering.

Military hardware costs money, and the war in the south has sucked up the bulk of Sudan’s capital since 1983.

Every Revolution Day at Green Square, a huge open space south of Khartoum, parades of tanks, trucks and armoured personnel carriers roll past the assembled dignitaries.

And wars need men as well as machines.

Conscription for service in the south has long been dreaded.

The war is estimated by the UN to have claimed at least 10,000 lives

In a fit of zealotry in the mid-1990s, the government launched a renewed jihad in the south, deploying as cannon-fodder units of the Popular Defence Forces (PDF).

These were, in theory, ideologically motivated soldiers, Sudan’s own mujahideen.

But northern kids knew that training was basic at best.

Any decent equipment went to the regular army, and despite the shroud of secrecy, everyone in Khartoum knew that the planes touching down at the airport in the small hours were bringing home full body bags, not victorious troops.

One year, the PDF recruiters decreed that every 18-year-old male, even if still in school, was “eligible” for service.

There were stories of young men across the north, hidden by their relatives, living rough under bridges in the countryside, desperate to avoid the draft.

‘Peace’

So the celebrations across the country in the wake of the new peace treaty are all too understandable.

So many hundreds of thousands are pinning their hopes on a rebirth of the south, and a possible return to rebuild villages and towns.

I think back to two of my students at a northern secondary school during the 1980s.

John Akon Deng, the only southern boy, quiet and determined despite the ostracism, walking for hours, alone in the fields around the school perimeter with his Bible for company.

He hoped to return to Juba, the southern capital, one day.

And Bashir Adam, a farmer’s boy from an island on the Nile nearby, last seen in Green Square, in the immaculate uniform of the presidential guard with a captain’s pips on his shoulders.

Very proud, heading for the south.

I wonder what became of them. And I wonder what part they will play in the peace, assuming it holds.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 15 January, 2005 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Original article ‘News - Sudanese count the cost of war‘