Some 400 South Sudanese return to Africa's newest nation each week from Sudan
NAIROBI (AlertNet) – Some 400 South Sudanese are returning to Africa’s newest nation each week from Sudan, but they face “acute” food shortages in their homeland, the United Nations said.
South Sudan was born in July after a referendum agreed under a 2005 peace deal with Sudan ended decades of civil war. Some 350,000 southerners, who face discrimination in Sudan, have returned home since South Sudan became independent six months ago.
But an inter-agency assessment found that conditions were bleak in areas of return.
“There was a lack of essential drugs in all health facilities, limited access to safe drinking water, an acute food shortage due to poor crop performance and a lack of shelter and NFIs (non-food items),” the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in South Sudan said in an update on Jan. 12.
“While these issues also affect the host communities, the vulnerability of returnees means that they have a lower coping capacity and will find it harder to adapt.”
The findings were based on an interagency assessment of conditions in final destinations for returnees in Northern Bahr el Ghazal State.
An estimated 4 million southerners were uprooted by the war in Sudan, millions of them taking shelter in ramshackle slums and refugee camps around the Sudanese capital Khartoum.
Many returnees are not used to South Sudan’s rural lifestyle, where most people make a living as farmers. Some have even tried to return to Sudan.
Aid workers fear the mass migration of returnees to South Sudan could create more poverty, food shortages, tensions between old and new communities and a rise in urban slums, putting pressure on public services in one of the least developed regions in Africa.
The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) said around 2.7 million people in South Sudan will need food aid this year due to crop failures brought on by erratic rains and violence from various armed conflicts.
South Sudan has a population of 8.3 million. It has been plagued by ethnic clashes for decades but violence has risen recently, fuelled by a flood of weapons left over from the civil war and other conflicts.
Some 330,000 people were displaced in South Sudan last year, while violence in Jonglei State has affected 60,000 people since late December.
(Editing by Rebekah Curtis)
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