About 60,000 people have fled South Sudan since fighting broke out between rival army factions in July, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says.
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OVER a million refugees have fled South Sudan’s ongoing civil war, overwhelming aid agencies and creating one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, the United Nations said yesterday.
Humanitarian organizations say they are finding it very hard for logistical, security and funding reasons in providing urgent protection and assistance to the hundreds of thousands in need, including 1.61 million internally displaced people.
This includes some 185,000 people who fled the African nation’s capital Juba in July following an upsurge in violence.
The team said it will produce a full report about rights violations during the civil war.
The total number of refugees from South Sudan has passed the one-million mark after a renewed bout of fierce fighting in July.
“These countries have commendably kept their doors open to new arrivals, ” the UNHCR said.
It revealed that South Sudan, with an estimated population of over 12 million a year ago, joins Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia as countries that have produced over one million refugees.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, has been riven by ethnic violence almost since it was founded in 2011, with civil war breaking out in 2013 between the Dinka and Nuer peoples.
Numerous worldwide attempts to reach a truce between the warring sides have failed.
Refugees make maize porridge at a transit centre for South Sudanese refugees in the remote north-western district of Adjumani, Uganda. They keep coming; over the past week more than 20,000 new arrivals were recorded, primarily through the Oraba crossing in the northwest. “Many children have lost one or both of their parents, some forced to become primary caregivers to younger siblings”, he noted.
Kamal Ismail, state minister of foreign affairs, told state-owned media that South Sudan had promised to expel insurgencies within 21 days during a visit by First Vice President Taban Deng Gai last month.
U.S. expressed disappointment South Sudan leaders had failed to harness peace with the August 2015 peace agreement in the wake of personal power struggles and individual enrichment.
The United States welcomes The Sentry’s report chronicling public corruption among South Sudan’s leaders, including President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar.
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On Friday, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who helped lead a Security Council delegation to South Sudan the previous weekend to assess the crisis, expressed outrage that the South Sudanese government had threatened people who had talked to the delegation.
