GENEVA — A daily exodus of villagers fleeing armed conflict, hunger and sexual violence in South Sudan has pushed the number of refugees sheltering in Uganda to over one million, the United Nations refugee agency said on Thursday, urging international action to deal with what it called one of Africa’s biggest humanitarian crises.
International relief agencies say that one-third of the South Sudanese population of 13 million people has now been displaced and that half of the population is suffering from severe hunger and is in need of food aid.
“We’re looking at Africa’s biggest displacement crisis,” Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the agency, said in an interview. “It points to the dramatic worsening of the situation inside the country.”
About 1,800 people have fled across the border to Uganda every day for the past year, 85 percent of them women and children, the refugee agency said. As many as 85 percent of those reaching Uganda recount horrific tales of seeing armed groups burning villagers alive in their houses, shooting people in front of their families, raping women and girls, and seizing boys to serve as conscripts, the United Nations reported.
The villagers often travel for days through the bush to avoid indiscriminate killings by the marauding armed groups, which have set up checkpoints on the roads.