A few weeks ago I spent a few early morning hours in Singapore Airport, watching, between nods, a group of African people waiting to board the same flight to Melbourne. There were about 20 of them, including some very small children, a few women, but mostly men, and they were all dressed as if for a formal occasion. They were a striking sight as they waited, standing and silent, before the gate lounge door was unlocked. When I cleared customs in Melbourne, they were still in the immigration queue, but in the arrivals terminal there was a small knot of fellow Africans waiting to meet them.
A week or so later I was back at the airport, and again there were those familiar Africans, all waiting for the same Singapore Airlines flight number. The arrivals terminal has its own rhythm: the early desultory pulses of the automatic door, then the great disgorge, and finally, as the crowd wilts away, the trickle of presumably more complicated arrivals. This evening, the latter were the people the Africans were there to meet: one small group of six or so women and children, one larger group of 16 adults and children. Some of the welcoming party were experienced enough to arrive well after the flight had landed, turning up in their borrowed mini-vans just in time to shake hands, hug and kiss children and be part of the video opportunity.
This is a regular scene in a drama invisible to most Australians. The new arrivals are South Sudanese, fleeing not Darfur and the Khartoum-sponsored Janjaweed, but earlier episodes of civil war in the central and eastern parts of southern Sudan. Along with barrels of oil, Sudan has been producing refugees more or less continuously since independence in 1956. We hear now that war has displaced a million people in Darfur; but further to the east, in the 20 years prior to Darfur erupting into our consciousness, at least two million people died and more than four million were made homeless. There is an uneasy peace in this region, reached through talks that began in June 2002 and which have continued in stages until the present. These current months are a crucial moment in the difficult negotiation process. A comprehensive peace agreement guaranteeing security, the delivery of humanitarian aid, the sharing of wealth and power and territory, and freedom of religious and cultural identity, is