Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration in Sudan

By Major Eric Grehan

Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) is a program designed to hasten the normalization of a war-torn society. DDR starts with a peace settlement encompassing all parties to the conflict, and shared willingness to disarm and reintegrate all the combatants into civilian society. Soldiers come to a DDR site, where they hand over their weapons and uniforms to neutral observers. Then they move through an indoctrination program in which they get the essential ingredients of a new life: food, household equipment, some money and, ideally, a job.

In Sudan, DDR was supposed to begin in 2005, immediately after signature of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, but planning has taken more than three years.

The United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) is conducting its pilot DDR program at Ed Damazin, in Blue Nile State. The process requires the participation of representatives of the various military forces, and the U.N. Joint Military Team: a group of at least three United Nations Military Observers (UNMOs), of whom at least one must speak Arabic. The U.N. Joint Military Team is responsible for verifying all candidates presented for processing, and ensuring that their documentation is in order and acceptable.

Each day, the Joint DDR Commission of Blue Nile State sends a list of about 55 candidates to the DDR centre, and the UNMOs of the Joint Military Team assemble the documentation each candidate needs to go through the DDR process the next day. Getting the paperwork ready takes more than two hours, as the UNMOs must first confer with their interpreter to ensure that names written in Arabic are correctly transliterated to the English alphabet, and then prepare several forms for each candidate. The forms are designed to capture — among other data — the soldiers’ rank, date of birth, military affiliation, military identification numbers, and date of discharge. The U.N. requires specific data on female combatants, so there is a separate form for women.

The UNMOs of the Joint Military Team leave the U.N. camp at seven o’clock each morning and drive to the assembly area in Damazin, where work begins at seven-thirty. With the help of the Language Assistant, they explain the DDR process to the candidates: when their names are called, the soldiers must present themselves to the representative of the army in which they served, and then come to the table to have their information verified by the members of the U.N. Joint Military Team. When they have signed a “Liability for Transportation” form and the transportation manifest, they receive a boarding pass for the Pakistani Army trucks that will take them to the DDR Centre. UNMIS Force Protection — provided by the Pakistani Army — and the local Sudanese Police are very much in evidence at the assembly area, and all the candidates are told they cannot have any weapons in their possession during the DDR process.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in 2005 and, after four years, UNMIS assumes that all DDR candidates are as integrated into civilian society as they’re ever going to be. Consequently, this DDR program is more of a belated severance package for the ex-combatants, and indeed many candidates are old enough to retire.

Female candidates tend to be much younger, and are not required to prove full military status — they need only prove they were “associated” with an armed group. Women arrive with certificate printed in black and white on ordinary paper date-stamped 10 February 2009, the day the DDR program began in Blue Nile State. They typically have no other form of identification, and none of their documentation requires a photograph.

On average, the Joint Military Team manages to process more than 50 people each day by nine-thirty in the morning, when the trucks leave the assembly area for the DDR Centre. There, the candidates go through a full day of indoctrination under the hot Sudanese sun. As well as various briefings, they receive a medical examination, an HIV test, and a “demobilization kit” including staple foods such as rice and cooking oil, blankets, mosquito netting, a hand-cranked radio, a flashlight, fabric to make clothes, and £800 Sudanese. Altogether, the goods and cash come to about $1,000 in Canadian funds.

A member of the staff of the Canadian Forces School of Aerospace Studies at 17 Wing Winnipeg, Maj Eric Grehan is currently deployed in Sudan as a United Nations Military Observer.