The number of South Sudanese who have fled their conflict-ridden homeland for a neighboring country passed one million this week following renewed violence, the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday.
Advertisement
“With this milestone, South Sudan joins Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia as countries which have produced more than a million refugees”, said Dobbs.
South Sudan’s government is challenging a new report by a USA -based watchdog group that says the country’s leaders have amassed wealth overseas amid a conflict in which tens of thousands have been killed. A ceasefire agreement was signed in August 2015 but intense fighting broke out in the capital Juba in July, prompting Machar to flee the country and leading Kiir to remove him from the role of first vice-president.
Smaller numbers of South Sudanese refugees have fled to Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
They only agreed to settle their differences under intense global pressure, signing a peace deal in August 2015 – and Mr Machar returned to Juba as vice-president in a unity government in April.
The report included images of mansions and luxury vehicles in South Sudan and around the world said to be owned by Kiir and other senior officials. More than 1.6 million people were displaced within the country, he added.
“South Sudanese Vice President Taban Deng had given assurances that Juba will expel rebels within 21 days after his trip to Khartoum”, Sudan’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Kamal Ismail said, quoted by Sudan Media Centre, close to the powerful National Intelligence and Security Service.
Contrary to perceptions that the conflict is rooted in an ethnically tinged feud between Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar that first erupted in 2013, the report said, the real struggle is over control of the country’s vast mineral and oil resources.
The council voted last month to deploy the regional protection force (RPF) in Juba, which will be under the command of the United Nations peacekeeping mission. “They include survivors of violent attacks, sexual assault, children that have been separated from their parents or travelled alone, the disabled, the elderly and people in need of urgent medical care”. This “while much of their country’s population suffers from the consequences of a brutal civil war and, in many places, experiences near-famine conditions”, the report said.
Most of the recent refugees have crossed into Uganda.
“These countries have commendably kept their doors open to new arrivals, ” the UNHCR said.
Advertisement
The civil war in Southern Sudan began in 2013 and lasted for two years.
