Darfur, Abshok camp for displaced persons.©ICRC/ref. sd-e-00009

But Abshok camp is neither.

In it, more than 40,000 African civilians make do with little more than life’s basics – food, water, shelter, latrines – after having been driven from their villages in a government counter-insurgency campaign against rebels in Sudan’s Darfur province.

The Sudan government decided last April to create Abshok – the word means "hedgehog", named after the spiky bushes growing at a nearby Arab village.

At the time, the international aid community was pondering an ethical dilemma: was it right to help create displaced people’s camps in Darfur, amid widespread violations of international humanitarian law that had led to massive population displacement? Some considered these as “concentration camps”, set up as a result of “ethnic cleansing”.

"Horrendous" conditions

“To us in the field, there was no question: something had to be done,” says Alexander Liebeskind, one of the ICRC delegates who saw displaced families living in a disused tree nursery called Meshtel, on the outskirts of northern Darfur’s main town of El Fashir.

“At Meshtel, there were 30,000 displaced people squatting on a dry river bed,” he says. “It was horrendous.”

The displaced were sleeping under cotton sheets strung across trees, with some of the better-off families camped out with their beds and furniture. ICRC delegates thought Meshtel a health and safety risk, prone to seasonal flooding and disease.

The El Fashir authorities offered land for a camp on the northern edge of the town – a long valley between two sand dunes. ICRC delegates took a look at it and decided to make do.

“We said ‘we can do it and if we do it, we do it all’,” says Liebeskind. “We set conditions: the people had to agree to be relocated, they had to have freedom of movement, there was to be a police station to keep law and order, and the government had to be committed to defend the camp from outside attacks."

Darfur, Abshok camp. Fitting a submersible pump©ICRC/ref. sd-e-00009

Then came the logistics. The displaced at Meshtel estimated there were between 60,000 - 70,000 people; it seemed rather a lot... Liebeskind says it took a Sudanese Red Crescent volunteer three days' work to establish that the real number was half that: 32,529, to be precise.

Wells were drilled, and water pumps installed by the ICRC and Unicef. Plots were measured in large blocks, separated by wide “roads”. Tents were airlifted in.

There were only four ICRC staff members in El Fashir at the time – Liebeskind, Irfan Sulejmani, Karen Strugg and Mohammed Osman – supported by key members of the local branch of the Sudanese Red Crescent.

With no previous planning experience, they laid the whole camp out, the emphasis on keeping communities together, but with adequate individual space. “The whole luxury of the camp was space,” says Liebeskind. “Physically and psychologically, it’s very important for those people to have an organised space.”

Waiting for the police

The authorities gave the ICRC three days to facilitate the transfer of the displaced from El Fashir’s old tree nursery; the ICRC said it needed eight or ten. But on D-Day – when trucks should have started moving the families – there was still no police post.

“At four o’clock in the afternoon, one policeman arrived on foot,” says Liebeskind. “We made it clear that we would wait, that we were not joking.”

In the end, moving everyone by truck with their belongings took 20 days, the new camp swelling to 42,000 persons, with Meshtel becoming a "check-in counter" for Abshok, Liebeskind says. The operation was completed by the end of June.

“In all my career with ICRC,” he says, “I've rarely seen an operation requiring so few means and having such a big impact. There was a lot of co-operation and team spirit, a minimum of infrastructure, and it worked.”

When the move was over, there was a birth of twins in the camp. The same day, a child died. A slope overlooking the camp was selected for the graveyard.

“The cycle of life and death in the camp had begun,” says Liebeskind.