CAIRO, Egypt (AP) – Civil war drove Christine Pompeo from her village in Sudan’s deepest south to a crowded apartment in the Arab world’s biggest city.

Now a peace treaty has been struck to end the 21-year war that displaced 4 million, but Pompeo and many others are hesitant about returning.

“There are no jobs in the south, we can’t work on our farms and so many people are suffering. We have no money here but life is safe,” Pompeo says, brushing a tear away during a Cairo church celebration of the Jan. 9 peace treaty signing. “I am worried for my future.”

Pompeo, 30, from a village near the southern city of Juba, is among an estimated 500,000 Sudanese living in neighboring countries who have been recognized by the United Nations as refugees.

They account for a portion of the overall number of Sudanese who left the country during the war, which pitted southern rebels from Christian and animist backgrounds against soldiers of Sudan’s Islamic-oriented government, which is based in the Arab-influenced north.

Unofficial estimates put the number of people who left Sudan during the conflict at between 2 million and 4 million. Inside Sudan alone, another 4 million people were displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The U.N. refugee agency is now laying the groundwork for hundreds of thousands of refugees to return, with the first batches expected to arrive as early as July.

This weekend the UNHCR’s deputy high commissioner, Wendy Chamberlin, begins a weeklong trip to southern Sudan, Uganda and Kenya to inspect the effort.

Repatriation is vital to peace. The returnees are needed to help rebuild a region where cities and infrastructure lie decimated and little development has taken place during the two decades of fighting. The war left more than 2 million people dead, either from violence or war-related famine.

UNHCR has asked for $92 million to bring the refugees home, but it has received just $6 million so far. Without more help, many refugees – including thousands who had pinned hopes on migrating to another country like the United States – will be reluctant to return to a home offering little immediate hope.

“Southern Sudan in its present condition is so poor and lacks so much infrastructure. Not all the refugees will be rushing to return,” says Javier Lopez, the UNHCR’s acting deputy representative for operations in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. “Refugees returning don’t know what they are going to find because they’ve been living outside for so long. They will probably find nothing and feel their lives in places like Cairo are much better.”

Of the 500,000 recognized Sudanese refugees, almost half are living in teeming refugee camps in Uganda. Another 88,000 are in Ethiopia; 69,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; 60,000 in Kenya; 36,000 in the Central African Republic and 30,000 in Egypt.

U.N. officials say several thousand Sudanese who had been living in camps in Uganda and Kenya have started returning on foot to their villages since the Jan. 9 peace treaty signing. In some cases, bombs or looting have destroyed the homes they left behind. In others, refugees are returning to find their land occupied by strangers.

The UNHCR’s Cairo-based assistant regional representative, Damtew Dessalegne, says while many refugees returning to southern Sudan after years of exile could face unemployment, war-destroyed homes or strangers living on their land, their involvement is crucial to the region’s rebirth.

“Many have the knowledge and the skills necessary to rebuild their communities,” he said.

One southern refugee living in Cairo, Boutros Akot Monot, believes most of his countrymen will heed the call to return.

“There are many problems in southern Sudan, but people are hoping to return to improve it,” 30-year-old Monot said. “There is nothing like our own country.”

AP-ES-02-11-05 0155EST

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