The number of South Sudanese refugees sheltering in neighbouring countries has this week passed the one million mark, including more than 185,000 people who have fled since fresh violence erupted in the country in Juba on July 8, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, said today.
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“With this milestone, South Sudan joins Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia as countries which have produced more than a million refugees”, said Dobbs.
South Sudan won its independence in July 2011 after its separation from Sudan following a civil war that lasted 25 years. Since then, more than 185,000 people have fled, majority women and children, according to the UNHCR. South Sudanese president, Salva Kiir, should resign from the presidency after the exposure of his involvement in the documented corruption practices, says spokesperson for the armed opposition leader, Riek Machar.
He said the president will instead go down the “anal of history” as the most corrupt and violent divisive political leader in the history of South Sudan, who had no idea how the nation was born, torn it apart and squandered its wealth in the most “primitive way”.
“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.
The report by The Sentry, which was co-founded by actor George Clooney, charged that the civil war is being fueled by competition among rivals over national resources such as oil.
Smaller numbers have also fled to Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Central African Republic (CAR), since July.
In the wake of heavy fighting in South Sudan’s capital Juba in July, the 15-member council last month authorized a regional protection force as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission and threatened to consider an arms embargo if Kiir’s government did not cooperate or stop hindering the movement of peacekeepers.
DRC is experiencing an influx into Ituri province close to the border with South Sudan and Uganda.
Most of those most recently uprooted have crossed into Uganda, which counts 143,164 recent arrivals, bringing the total number of South Sudanese refugees in the country to almost 375,000.
One of the general’s Ugandan residences, the report said, is next door to a home maintained by Gen. Gabriel Jok Riak, a South Sudanese military commander who is among six South Sudanese placed on a Security Council sanctions list a year ago. A peace agreement was signed in August, but fighting, that has left tens of thousands dead and more than 2 million displaced, continues.
The watchdog’s report also implicated global banks, businesses, arms brokers, property companies and lawyers in “knowingly or unknowingly facilitating the violent kleptocracy that South Sudan has become”.
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The council also expressed concern at “subsequent statements by certain members of the government which appear to contradict the commitment made to the Security Council consenting to the deployment of the regional protection force”.
