Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 00:22:53 +0200
Sudanese refugees in South Sudan caught between two wars
By Stephen Graham
DORO REFUGEE CAMP, UPPER NILE STATE, 25 June 2014 (IRIN) - South Sudan’s
brutal conflict has throttled the supply of food to Sudanese refugees in the
remote northeast of the country, fuelling tensions and hunger that have
triggered a deadly crime wave and prompted thousands to return to the
war-zone from which they fled.
Some 126,000 Sudanese refugees housed in four camps in Maban County, Upper
Nile State, are caught between an intensifying war in their homeland and the
fighting that broke out in December between forces loyal to South Sudanese
President Salva Kiir and those of his former deputy, Riek Machar.
While the conflict has yet to reach the camps, it has cut off access to
Maban, triggering a food crisis that must compete for the attention of aid
agencies already swamped by the urgent needs of 1.5 million others uprooted
by the recent violence.
“We are sitting on dynamite here,” Adan Ilmi, the top UN Refugee Agency
(UNHCR) official in Maban, told IRIN. “Any slight thing can create serious
conflict between the refugees and the host community, among the refugees
themselves, or against the humanitarian agencies.”
Refugees poured into Maban in 2011 after the Sudanese government launched a
military offensive against rebels from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army -
North (SPLA-N) in Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile regions. Sudanese
warplanes have reportedly stepped up their bombing campaign this year,
drawing
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/06/12/us-sudan-un-idUSKBN0EN2FR20140612
> condemnation from the USA.
While safe from the bombardment in neighbouring Blue Nile, camp-dwellers
have faced months of meagre food rations as UN agencies have struggled to
feed and provide basic services to displaced people across a country with
few all-weather roads or airstrips, and in the midst of a brutal and
unpredictable conflict.
Fighting in the northeast has prevented the UN World Food Program (WFP) from
trucking in supplies stockpiled in neighbouring Ethiopia; insecurity also
halted barge traffic on the Nile River - a key transport artery in the rainy
season now under way; airdrops from Ethiopia were hamstrung by a fuel
shortage; and a hastily chartered C-130 aircraft can deliver only 40 percent
of the 2,200 tons needed in Maban every month.
According to WFP, the camps received enough rations for only seven days in
March, 10 days in April, and 20 days in May. A 15-day ration was distributed
in early June, with WFP hoping to deliver more before the end of the month.
Future supplies depend heavily on restarting barge traffic and opening roads
from the towns of Melut and Renk, where stocks of sorghum are available.
WFP was also negotiating with Sudanese officials to bring supplies across
the northern border by air and boat.
Refugee camp lacks food
This IRIN reporter visited Doro, one of the four camps, when aid workers
were distributing the latest rations.
Istor Ali, a 40-year-old woman in the long, slow-moving queue, said her four
children had eaten little for five days. The youngest, aged two, had been
crying a lot. His face had swollen up and he had fainted repeatedly, she
said.
The youngster showed classic symptoms of malnutrition. So why had she not
taken him to the camp’s hospital?
“I don’t think he is sick,” Ali said defiantly, “just hungry.”
When the reporter recounted her case at the hospital, a doctor smiled
ruefully.
“People have become used to things that they shouldn’t have to,” said Joel
Selvakumar, a Norwegian working for medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières
(MSF).
In March and April, the number of patients visiting MSF’s therapeutic
feeding centre spiked to as much as double that seen a year earlier.
However, malnutrition rates have remained below emergency levels - perhaps
because of the lengths refugees have gone to in order to find additional
food.
Rather than attending school, bands of children have ventured out to pick
fruits and edible leaves or to hunt birds. Women cut firewood to sell in the
nearby town of Bunj. They also go to the town to work at market stalls, do
laundry and to sell bread and water.
“Any slight thing can create serious conflict between the refugees and the
host community, among the refugees themselves, or against the humanitarian
agencies.”
Many of these survival strategies bring problems. Women say local residents
chase refugees from the land, sometimes violently, seizing their tools and
livestock. Aid workers worry that some women have been drawn into
transactional sex.
“A person in need can do anything,” Syla Musa, the chairman of the Doro camp
residents committee, told IRIN. “If the girls are out in the market, they
also can do anything.”
Clashes
Local residents are also among the victims.
According to James Pasha, the top government official in Maban, at least 14
people have died in clashes between refugees and local residents in the past
three months. In one recent incident, Ilmi said, a local resident was killed
and 20 cattle stolen. Youths from the camps are blamed for a string of raids
on sorghum stores in villages near the camps, he added.
Aid agencies have also been targeted.
Armed gangs have stolen large quantities of food from warehouses at the
camp. Ilmi said the local police were outgunned, and the refugees did not
want to risk their lives defending the supplies.
Pasha suggested the thieves were SPLM-N fighters “from the front line in
Blue Nile” and were stealing in order to feed their families in the camps.
Signs of desperation
In another sign of desperation, refugee families have sold off vital
household possessions, including tarpaulins from the roofs of their houses.
Humanitarian agencies distribute so-called non-food items, also including
cooking utensils and mosquito nets, every year before the seasonal rains.
But the lack of food means these items have been held back out of concern
that they too will be sold, leaving some without protection as the rains
intensify and malaria infections soar.
The distribution of 45 tons of seed that could help ease the food shortage
has also been pushed back until after the June food distribution, even
though it would soon be too late to plant. Aid workers fear hungry refugees
will eat the seed rather than sow it in the small plots around their
makeshift homes.
Ed Hughes of the Danish Refugee Council, an NGO which manages the Doro camp,
said refugees were increasingly unlikely to sow the seed. The delay meant
prospective yields would be lower, and some refugees were worried that they
might be displaced again, he told IRIN.
Officials said about 2,000 people left the camp in April and returned to
Blue Nile and that more could follow if the food shortage continues. In many
other families, men had returned alone and temporarily in order to cultivate
land in their villages, despite the dangers.
Josepa Musa, a 27-year-old woman comforting her malnourished twin sons on a
bed at the camp hospital, said her husband had returned to Blue Nile in May
to plant maize, sorghum, pumpkins and water melon. He would return to Maban
after the harvest in October.
Musa said her husband and other farmers would dig holes in the ground and
hide in them if they heard the approach of the Sudanese air force’s feared
Antonov bombers, which have reportedly dropped 300 bombs in
<http://nubareports.org/bombing-intensifies-in-blue-nile/> Blue Nile in the
first half of 2014.
In his absence, she said she had worked in a tea shop in Bunj, grown sorghum
on a small plot in the forest, and gathered firewood to earn a little money.
“I am not getting enough to eat myself, so I don’t have enough breast milk
for the children,” she told IRIN.
Refugees are concerned that the growing insecurity caused by the South Sudan
crisis might even force them to flee the camps. So far, Maban has been
spared in the fighting, which has pitted ethnic Dinkas aligned with
President Kiir against Machar’s fellow Nuers.
Tensions rising
However, tensions have been rising. In May, Nuer civil servants abandoned
Maban and many fearful civilians followed them south to opposition
strongholds. UNHRC’s Ilmi said many Nuers and Dinkas working for aid
agencies in Maban had subsequently quit, weakening a relief effort already
struggling because of a lack of experienced staff.
At the same time, the South Sudanese army redeployed its troops in the area,
leaving only Nuer soldiers in Maban and shifting Dinkas to another barracks
- a move opposed by Pasha, the county commissioner.
“This is the national army, not a tribal army,” he said. “If we separate
them, maybe they will start fighting.”
Camp chairman Musa forecast that, if slow-moving peace talks between Kiir
and Machar failed to bring
<http://www.irinnews.org/report/100252/analysis-looking-beyond-igad-in-south
-sudan> peace, and the fighting engulfed Maban, most of the Sudanese
refugees would try to cross back into Blue Nile.
“If that happens, we will lose so many people,” he said quietly. “There are
many people who won’t make it that far.”
<http://www.irinnews.org/Photo/Details/201406250833380904/A-welcome-burden-w
omen-sweat-under-the-weight-of-rations-distributed-at-the-Doro-refugee-camp>
http://www.irinnews.org/photo/Download.aspx?Source=Report&Year=2014&ImageID=
201406250833380904&Width=490
Photo: <http://www.irinnews.org/photo/> Stephen Graham/IRIN
A welcome burden: women sweat under the weight of rations distributed at the
Doro refugee camp
(image/jpeg attachment: image001.jpg)