by Jennie Matthew
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ABYEI, Sudan, April 8, 2008 (AFP) - Pulling donkeys, pilfering or begging, south Sudanese boys wearing rags and sleeping rough are the bane of Arab traders in Abyei, where marketplace spats exemplify rising political tensions.
Poor and illiterate, they left hungry families in some of the most deprived areas of southern Sudan to walk to Abyei, a town of mud huts and market shacks bustling with soldiers, displaced people coming home and aid workers.
They skivvy for mostly Arab traders, the backbone of the local mercantile class with the connections and money to travel to Sudan's more prosperous north, bringing back wares to sell in the market.
The boys frequently quarrel with their employers, claiming they refuse to pay properly for odd jobs. The merchants dismiss the boys as good for nothing, unruly street urchins who pilfer and defecate on their market stands.
Humanitarian workers say the scraps personify the tensions between mostly Christian Ngok Dinkas in Abyei, who see the oil-rich region as an intrinsic part of self-governing south Sudan, and northern Muslim Arabs desperate to hold onto the land.
Nine-year-old Saintino Kiir walked for two days from his home to Abyei. He works for an Arab woman in the market, selling sweets for a promised 30 Sudanese pounds (15 dollars) a month.
"This Arab woman has been promising me money but I haven't received anything. But she gives me scraps from what she cooks and lets me sleep outside in her yard," he says, kneeling rather awkwardly on the earthen ground.
He can't read and hangs his head in shame. Sometimes he gets bad headaches and chest pains but he has no money for a doctor or medicine.
"I was working with a donkey for an Arab. He insulted me and I left. When I brought back little money, he said I was a thief. Sometimes he didn't give me my wages," says his 14-year-old friend, Joseph Ring, who left home last year.
Police often sweep the streets, detaining boys for alleged theft and locking them up for a few days. They say there are more than 100 such urchins in town, some living on the streets as young as six-years-old.
At the cells, about six wild-eyed boys squeeze up against the bars, their fingers laced through the holes, staring anxiously at the police in the yard.
"We arrest them for theft in the market, hold them three or four days, then release them. A fine is supposed to be paid and sometimes this is paid on their behalf by international organisations," said Captain Abu Obeida Mohamed Ahmed.
"This relationship (between the street boys and the Arab traders) in many ways represents an historical problem that is still trying to be addressed," said one international aid worker in Abyei.
-- 'They are good-for-nothing thieves' --
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Ali Hamid came to Abyei three years ago to escape the conflict in Darfur, selling clothes bought back from a hot, dusty 12-day round trip to Khartoum.
But now the spectre of trouble is rearing over the small town he once saw as a refuge from the brutal civil war in western Sudan.
Sudan's two ruling coalition partners are at loggerheads over what the Arab north interpreted as the rival Christian and animist south's unilateral dispatch of an administrator to the area, without presidential approval.
The administrator, prominent Sudan People's Liberation Movement politician Edward Lino, has accused the army of planning to attack and says avoiding war between rival ethnic groups dominates "almost every aspect of my work."
In 2011, Abyei will hold two referendums: one on whether to retain its special administrative status in north Sudan or be incorporated into the south; and the second one on whether the south should break away as an independent state.
"We didn't used to have problems in Abyei. The problems occurred recently with the roads being blocked and the tribal difficulties," said Ali Hamid.
"Problems on the road are starting to make this job not so good, but roadblocks create the same problems for Dinka and Arabs. Once we had to spend the night somewhere because tensions were holding up cars."
Relaxing in his white robe in the stultifying heat after prayers on Friday, the weekly day of rest that southerners are agitating to have moved to Sunday, Hamid and his friends trade complaints about the street boys.
"My shop was robbed yesterday by the children. They took some clothes and a belt," his friend leans over to interject.
"I know they need food but they are good-for-nothing thieves. Normally I catch them and grab back what they have stolen," he adds.
Abdel Rahim Jibril, 59, is one of the oldest established traders in Abyei. He doesn't trouble himself with politics. More displaced southerners coming home means more customers; more aid workers means a richer local economy.
He's rich compared to the street boys. A good month earns him 1,000 Sudanese pounds (around 500 dollars), a bad month 300 pounds.
"They used to come and sleep here at night. They used to defecate and urinate here," says his assistant Awad Mohamed Osman, pointing to the ground under the stall, near some hanging hair extensions and dusty bras.
As an Arab born and bred in Abyei he is worried about the consequences for the future with the SPLM and Ngok Dinka increasingly flexing their muscles.
"There is no problem at the moment but if there are problems we are the ones who will be targeted. Because we were born here in Abyei, we don't know anywhere else," he says, standing to the side of the old man.
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