Trods en våbenhvile i Sydsudan nægter tusindvis af flygtninge at vende hjem, selv om deres regering opfordrer dem til det. Traumer og frygt for, at ny konflikt blusser op, har sat sig dybt i flygtningene.
MALAKAL, 16 June 2014 (IRIN): Civilians displaced by brutal fighting in South Sudan are ignoring calls from government officials to return to their homes, preferring the safety of squalid UN bases to the risk that conflict could again engulf towns already devastated in the six-month conflict.
Amid a massive humanitarian operation, aid agencies had hoped that a cease-fire agreed in May would allow some populations to return and sow crops before the rainy season begins in earnest, thereby reducing the likelihood of a famine in the months to come.
But tension remains high, and interviews with internally displaced persons (IDPs) near the northern town of Malakal as well as in the capital, Juba, suggest slow-moving peace talks held in neighbouring Ethiopia must yield concrete results before civilians will consider returning home en masse.
“If a peace deal is signed, and the rebels really go back to where they came from, then maybe we can return to Malakal,” said Bongjak Chol, a 39-year-old warden for the South Sudan Wildlife Service.
“But not before. I could be killed.”
Thousands killed
Civilians abandoned Malakal and many other towns after a power struggle within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) boiled over into vicious fighting that began in Juba in December and swept across the north and east of the country.
The conflict has split the army and pitted loyalists of President Salva Kiir against supporters of his former deputy, Riek Machar.
Government troops as well as opposition fighters have been accused of massacring civilians on the basis of their ethnicity. Kiir is an ethnic Dinka, while Machar is a Nuer.
Thousands of people have been killed and an estimated 1.5 million driven from their homes, crippling government services and economic activity in much of the world’s youngest nation. Some four million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.
Waiting for peace
While about 400,000 people have crossed into neighbouring countries Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda and Kenya, an estimated one million are displaced within South Sudan.
That includes some 90,000 sheltering in the bases of the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS, which are now known as Protection of Civilian (PoC) sites.
Chol is one of 18,000 civilians squeezed into the PoC site in Malakal, where UN officials and relief organizations are striving to improve the dire living conditions.
Makeshift shelters made of sticks and plastic sheeting are packed together either side of a single main access road.
Drainage is so poor that many of the shacks stand in water and mud that in places rises above the knee, even before the rains begin in earnest.
Children play along the road among garbage and razor wire, as trucks carrying earth from the site of a planned new camp edge past the tight rows of tea shops and food stalls. Flies buzz around dead dogs and cats, and smell of human waste is ever-present.
“Nobody can be happy here in the water and the dirt,” said Peter Gony, a 52-year-old ethnic Nuer community leader.
“They are just waiting for the government and the opposition to make peace. But there is no peace.”
Forced inactivity
On the southern flank of the base, which lies a few miles (kilometres) north of the town, earthmovers were levelling a huge area to which most of the IDPs will be shifted in the coming months.
IDPs have begun moving into scores of clean white tents erected on the first section. Relief organizations have built water points and latrines. Indian UN troops guard the perimeter, which is lined with earthen berms and razor wire.
Nyamet Nyibong, a grandmother who said she saw a nephew and a sister killed in the fighting, said the new facility was a big improvement.
“People were getting sick, sleeping on the wet ground. Here there is space, some wind and I can breathe,” she told IRIN, sitting on a low stool outside the new tent she shares with two sisters-in-law and other relatives.
But she said she was frustrated by her forced inactivity.
“In the village we would be out planting sorghum and beans,” said Nyibong.
“Here we just sit from morning until night, and we don’t know if this situation will improve.”
The difficulties at the base have persuaded some survivors to seek refuge elsewhere.
Across the nearby White Nile River, an estimated 60,000 people have descended upon the fishing hamlet of Wau Shilluk.
Shanty-like settlements have spread along the banks of the broad river. A field behind has turned into a vast open defecation site.
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