More than 50,000 South Sudanese and 59 aid workers have been killed since civil war erupted in the country in December 2013. More than a third of them arrived since the most recent violence broke out.
Advertisement
State news agency WAM last night said the flight, due to leave this morning for Entebbe Airport, will carry sleeping mats, blankets, mosquito nets, buckets and other essential items for refugees living along the Ugandan border with South Sudan.
The United Nations said that South Sudan joins Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia as countries that have produced over one million refugees.
United States 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.
President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar, the Star notes, own luxury properties in Lavington, Nairobi, and others in East Africa, while their countrymen continue to suffer as the country’s economy nears collapse.
The number of refugees from South Sudan has passed the one million mark after a renewed bout of fierce fighting in July sent almost 200,000 people fleeing the war-scarred nation, the UN said yesterday.
“They include survivors of violent attacks, sexual assault, children that have been separated from their parents or traveled alone”, he said in a summary of the briefing online.
The UNHCR lauded these countries for keeping their doors open to the new arrivals. Vice president Machar fled the country during July’s chaos.
Sentry, a group co-founded by actor George Clooney and activist John Prendergast, said South Sudan’s leaders on both sides of the civil war and their families had profited from the conflict. The war has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and has displaced more than two million.
“The leaders of South Sudan’s warring parties manipulate and exploit ethnic divisions in order to drum up support for a conflict that serves the interests only of the top leaders of these two kleptocratic networks”, the report said.
With more than 300 people killed and soldiers specifically targeting global aid workers, the United Nations is now increasing the pressure on Pres. Salva Kiir.
Officials from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan were speaking at a news conference in Juba the day after the editor of a prominent newspaper in the five-year-old nation said his publication had been shut down by the authorities.
Advertisement
It called on donors to contribute the remaining four-fifths of a total $US701 million needed for South Sudanese refugee operations.
