Life and Death in Darfur Sudan s Refugee Crisis Continues
Batul Javil's story is familiar, but terrifying all the same. She had taken her children to visit her parents in a neighbouring village in Sudan's southern Blue Nile state beyond which, after an international border was created in July 2011, Khartoum's rule ends and newly independent South Sudan begins. It was a day, she says, like any other. Then without warning, all hell broke loose.
"All of a sudden, the war came," Javil says. A plane darkened the sky, dropping bombs indiscriminately on the village and its inhabitants. All they could do was run, she says, try to find cover, simply get away. The family could not go back to their village, could not stay where they were, so they headed for the border crossing into South Sudan's Upper Nile state. "It took three days to get to the border. We walked and rested, walked and rested. There was no water. The children were very hungry. All the time the military plane was circling. We were very fearful."
Now, having reached the relative safety of Gendrassa camp in Maban county, one of five centres aided and supplied by Oxfam in co-operation with the UN's refugee agency, Batul says she misses her home and, most of all, her youngest child, who died of complications arising from malnutrition, fever and anaemia during the trek out of Blue Nile.
"I miss my child, I miss my husband. We lost all our animals. We did not even have a chicken to take with us. We have only the clothes we wear … Life is difficult. I don't know when it will end. I don't know when we will go back."
In newly established Kaya camp, down the long, dirt road from Gendrassa and the nearby town of Bunj, Hamed Yusif squats on the ground, carving wooden legs for a bed he is making for his family. A new arrival, he too tells of aerial bombing by the Sudanese armed forces' Russian-made Antonovs and by artillery that forced his family to flee their village. "All the time they are attacking, attacking," Yusif says. "The children and the women ran into the bush. The animals died. The houses were burned by the army. We lived under trees in the bush. We were running for two days. We could only carry water. We ate leaves and berries."
Yusif slices a strip of wood from the stump he is carving, and says he has a message for Sudan's president, whom the refugees hold responsible for the violence in Blue Nile: "I ask Omar al-Bashir, please stop the war, please stop the bombing. If he came here, we would ask him to stop the war." But he is not hopeful his plea will be heard. "I don't want to go home. We will stay here."
The crisis in Blue Nile, and a similar emergency in an adjacent Sudanese border state, South Kordofan, caught the international community unawares when it erupted in 2011 at the time of South Sudan's independence.
Forces hostile to Khartoum that were stranded on the "wrong" side of the new border, principally the Sudan People's Liberation Army-North (SPLA-N), were targeted by Bashir's troops. Inevitably, and possibly deliberately, given Khartoum's record in Darfur, tens of thousands of civilians have been caught in the ensuing violence.
About 700,000 people are estimated to have been affected in Blue Nile and South Kordofan; 250,000 have been displaced in Blue Nile alone and, of these, Oxfam says that 117,000 are now in camps in Maban county, where they are reliant on international aid for basics such as clean water, sanitation, and food.
Thousands more residents of Blue Nile have fled to Ethiopia, while refugee camps are steadily expanding in South Sudan's Unity state. Each upsurge in fighting swells their numbers. Nobody is going back. And the rising cost of providing assistance to so many people in so remote and inaccessible a region is severely straining aid agency resources.
Aid workers and regional analysts warn a "second Darfur" may be in the making here, referring to western Sudan where hundreds of thousands of displaced people still depend on UN assistance 10 years after the crisis first erupted. But, unlike Darfur, Blue Nile has not fully registered with an international community still congratulating itself on ending Sudan's north-south civil war.
"There are 117,00 refugees in Blue Nile. They have been abandoned in a lost corner of Africa for too long," says Jose Garcia Barahona, Oxfam's country director for South Sudan. "It is extremely expensive and difficult to provide assistance, and there has not been enough international attention to this crisis. This needs to change."
Experts say the overall conflict zone continues to expand, in part as a result of this neglect. A report by Helen Young and Zoe Cormack, published by Humanitarian Exchange, drew attention to what has been dubbed the "New South" – a vast, often undemarcated and disputed border region, 1,300 miles long, that includes oil-rich Abyei and southern Darfur, once again the scene of tribal clashes recently. "This growing zone of conflict and insecurity … has brought Sudan and South Sudan to the brink of war," said the report.
With seven out of South Sudan's 10 states subject to some form of armed insurrection or tribal conflict, most notably eastern Jonglei state, the risk that the refugee crisis may fatally destabilise the world's newest, poorest independent state is clear, says Barahona.
"Oxfam is concerned about the potential for deeper internal instability in South Sudan arising from the huge needs of the population, which have been even more neglected than the refugees," he says. "Since the end of the war there hasn't been any peace dividend for ordinary people. And that combined with the availability of plenty of small arms adds to the potential for dangerous conflict."
Stark warnings about the Blue Nile crisis have been accumulating in recent weeks, although it is uncertain whether politicians are taking notice. In a report, We Had No Time to Bury Them: War Crimes in Sudan's Blue Nile State, Amnesty International details a host of atrocities allegedly committed by the Sudan armed forces.
"In what appears to be a concerted attempt to clear the civilian population out of SPLA-N-held areas, and to punish the residents of these areas for their perceived support for the SPLA-N, the Sudanese government has both attacked civilians and denied UN agencies and humanitarian groups access to assist them," Amnesty says.
The report reproduces testimony from victims who describe the use of "indiscriminate shelling, deliberate ground assaults on civilian villages, and abusive proxy forces". Khartoum is charged specifically with carrying out a "scorched earth campaign" in the Ingessana Hills area, a rebel stronghold.
"These actions constitute war crimes which, given their apparent widespread as well as systematic nature, may amount to crimes against humanity … Much of what is now happening in Blue Nile and South Kordofan follows a pattern that is familiar from Darfur," Amnesty says.
Bashir and other high-ranking Sudanese officials have been indicted by the international criminal court for alleged genocide and war crimes in Darfur, but to date no serious attempt has been made to bring them to justice. This lack of accountability was encouraging similar misdeeds in Blue Nile, the Amnesty report suggests. Bashir denies any wrongdoing.
The work of helping refugees in Upper Nile continues, meanwhile, against a backdrop of over-stretched staff and resources, says Oxfam's project manager, Andy Boscoe. Water supply is a particular problem, he said, noting that, of 33 boreholes sunk at Jamam camp, all had failed.
At one point Oxfam was forced to bring in water by truck, at the unsustainable cost of $12,000 a day. Even then, there was not enough to go round. Overall, the crisis response cost $120m in 2012, according to Myrat Myradov, a UN protection officer in Maban.
Jamam, which was prone to flooding, has since been closed and its inhabitants relocated to a new camp, on higher ground, at Kaya. But as the rainy season started, Oxfam workers were fighting to contain other threats: an outbreak of potentially fatal hepatitis E, and tensions between refugees and villagers, who say the newcomers steal their livestock and cut down trees for firewood.
Security in the camps was another headache, Boscoe says. Despite attempts to keep them away, armed men, apparently belonging to the SPLA-N, were often seen visiting relatives and friends during breaks in the Blue Nile fighting. This in turn raises questions about the possible recruitment of young men and children as soldiers, and sexual violence against women, an issue of special concern to Oxfam.
"Maban county has proved to be a harsh environment for refugees and an extremely difficult operating environment for the humanitarian response," a recent Oxfam report stated. "The refugee population is overwhelmingly made up of women, children and young people. Women and girls live under the threat of domestic violence, sexual harassment, beatings and exploitation, particularly during firewood collection and at water collection points."
Education about sexual and gender-based violence and human rights, and additional institutional capacity, could help mitigate such problems, if it could be funded, the report said. Likewise, it noted: "The presence of armed actors in the camps and the fear of recruitment is undermining the civilian nature of the camps and further endangering refugees."
Outside a relocation site at Jamam camp, Sheikh Elrathy Korth, an imposing man who is paramount chief in his village, all of whose inhabitants are displaced, is in no doubt about the solution to all these problems: stop the bombing and the war.
"If the president of Sudan was a real leader, he would not be doing that. The international community should tell this leader to stop so we can have peace and stop this killing. In Blue Nile we do not trust the government. They do not share our resources – oil, gold – for education and health. Our views are not represented," Korth says.
"How long will we be here? I don't know. I do know that if this government remains in power, I will be slaughtered."
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/05/south-sudan-new-darfur-warnings
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