ブックタイトルThe Journal of Humanitarian Studies

概要

The Journal of Humanitarian Studies

Journal of Humanitarian Studies Vol. 4, 2015borrowed a 4x4 car from the ICRC office and I left to a place which was a tiny point on the map, at theend of the road, on the Kenya-Sudan border, which was officially closed. On the way, an ICRC nurse, sentfrom the ICRC Uganda office, joined me to provide the medical professional advice on the best way to dealwith the war wounded, if any.We drove on a narrow, but tarmacked, road to Lodwar, where, during the colonial times, the British hadexiled Jomo Kenyatta, who, later, became Kenya’s first president. We got the clearance to continue ourmission but, as it was late and dangerous to drive after dark there, we had to spend the night in Lodwar, ina local Hotel, the Turkana lodge, which offered, even by my African standards, a very minimum level ofcomfort. The following day, after few hours of a difficult drive, we stopped at the missionary hospital ofKakuma, where a team of Irish catholic sisters were doing wonders to help the local population and treatan important group of Southern Sudanese war wounded. The hospital was overwhelmed with the influxof wounded and was not properly equipped to cope with them. We conducted thorough interviews withthe wounded. Unable to do anything else, we promised to come back soon and went to our cars. However,the rains had cut the dirt track which served as a road to the border and we had to spend the night at thehospital.The following day, we finally reached Lokichokio, at the time a small African village of huts, where asemi-nomadic tribe, the Turkanas, lived, with almost no services available to them, except for a medicaldispensary held by a Canadian family of Protestant missionaries and a monthly visit by an Irish doctorfrom Kakuma. There too, they could not cope with the humanitarian consequences of the Southern Sudancivil war.After we got the needed clearance from the Kenyan Army officers guarding the border, we undertookseveral visits to surrounding makeshift camps and villages, where Sudanese people from the Toposa tribehad regrouped. Then, we decided to go back to Lodwar, where the only public telephone of the region wasworking, in order to call Geneva and request the ICRC to immediately launch an operation in SouthernSudan, with Lokichokio as a base.On the way back, we met with a relief convoy of food on its way to Juba, the capital city of the SouthernSudan. The trucks, overloaded, were stuck in the mud of the rainy season and the drivers had no hope toreach the border before several days. The organisers of the convoy, a Nordic Church organisation, did notknow that, because of the conflict, the border, anyway, was closed. When we told them we would comeback soon to start an operation from Lokichokio, they decided to donate their food to the ICRC. Withouthaving spent the first of my 50,000 USD given to me from Geneva, I already had a stockpile of foodavailable to start our operation.c CICR / HEGER, BorisLokichokio, ICRC hospital. Nurse attending to a patientBack in Nairobi, with the support of the Kenya RedCross Society (KRCS), we mobilised trucks and staff anddecided to build a camp, made of tents, to house the ICRCteams in Lokichokio, on a plot of land that the Governmentof Kenya had let use free of charge. Thus, few days later,with the agreement of all parties involved in the SouthernSudanese conflict, we could launch the first humanitariancross-border operation in Southern Sudan. Then, wechartered a plane, to shift the war wounded from SouthernSudan to various hospitals in Kenya but we soon realisedthat this was not a viable option on a long-term. Aftersome hesitations, the ICRC decided to build a temporary人道研究ジャーナルVol. 4, 201523