Sudan

When the flight attendant announces that we should prepare for landing, the plane plummets fast towards the hills at a speed that makes me think about the will which has remained on my to-do list for a while now. The plane steadies, only for a while, for when it hits Loki's runway it is with a thud. Never before had I felt a stronger urge to perform that old ritual of bursting into applause when a plane touched down.

More than a year ago, the United Nations mandated a peacekeeping force for the violence-torn Darfur region of Sudan. Two and a half million internally displaced people, known as "IDPs," remain in camps, under threat from government-sponsored forces. Undermanned and under resourced, the peacekeeping force is losing the trust of those it was meant to protect.

Produced, directed and shot by Susan Schulman

Co-produced and edited by Chris Milner

In association with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

In 2005, a historic peace agreement ended more than two decades of civil war between north and south Sudan. It was Africa's longest civil war, killing some two million people, sending four million others fleeing and literally burning southern Sudan to the ground.

The long-awaited peace came with a vision for a new Sudan. A democratic Sudan. One where the Sudanese people would live with rights and freedoms, enshrined in a new constitution.

Susan Schulman, a photojournalist who was embedded with Unamid peacekeepers in northern Darfur last year, recalls the day their convoy was shot at by suspected government soldiers.

Sudanese national security forces expelled a Canadian-Egyptian journalist, Heba Aly, just days after she made an inquiry about domestic arms production.

Sudan has become synonymous with war, due to the five-year conflict raging in Darfur. The UN estimates that 300,000 people have died and close to 2.5 million others have been displaced. The vast majority have been indigenous Africans.

Darfur's war is often portrayed as a racial one, pitting Arabs against Africans. But in northern parts of the country, many Sudanese are defying stereotypes. Heba Aly files this report from Dongola, a town in northern Sudan where Africans and Arabs have been living together harmoniously for decades.

In a crowded United Nations conference room in a southwestern Sudanese town called Wau, an exchange of sorts took place between two men of very different worlds who had more in common than they might have thought. At the front of the room was Constable Charles Obeng, a Canadian originally from Ghana, on Africa's west coast.

Sitting, waiting, sweating. When you live on the margins in Sudan, there's nothing much behind you, and nothing much in front to look forward to.

And get over any romantic notions about hardy stoic villagers. The people of the Nubian desert tell us they don't like it. And they gather each day in their homes made of mud to share tea and some grinding certainties.

Heba Aly reports on a village at the edge of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan. Sudanese people there say they're being marginalized by their government.

Listen to the five-minute piece

A delegation from the northern Sudanese village of Selem visits the mayor's office to complain of services in their village. July 2008.

It's a flashy headline, but a question that some people are legitimately asking themselves. Could there be a rebellion in the north, as there was in Darfur, to the west?

The answer depends on who you ask.

Northerners certainly complain of marginalization. They say they are worse off than Darfur, in fact.

Ask Abbas Adam Ibrahim whether he is Arab or African, and he does not quite know how to respond. "Both," the Sudanese man says, after slight hesitation.

Beads of sweat run down Rajaa Tag's face, as she crouches in the dark mud room that serves as her bathroom in a small village in northern Sudan. Her young son is screaming wildly - he hates being washed. She holds the small, malnourished boy in one hand, resting him against her hip, and washes him with the other. "It's ok. It's ok," she insists to him gently.