Eurasia Press & News
PALORINYA RECEPTION CENTRE, Uganda (AFP) — The new head of the UN refugee agency Tuesday urged concerted global action to improve conditions in war-ravaged southern Sudan in a bid to stem a flow of refugees, still fleeing despite a landmark peace deal.
On a tour of camps in northwestern Uganda, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Antonio Guterres expressed regret that thousands of southern Sudanese were still leaving their homes at a time when his agency had been planning to help with the repatriations of earlier arrivals.
He said the international community should do more to help the African Union (AU) stabilise southern Sudan and fully implement a January peace deal between Khartoum and the ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) that many predicted would lead to a surge in the number of people going home.
“The effective presence of the AU will work as a deterrent to any disturbance of peace in southern Sudan,” Guterres told reporters. “Therefore the international community needs to strengthen the AU capacity to handle the situation.â€
“There is need for the implementation of the Sudanese agreement and … the AU has to see to it that things are effectively implemented,” the Portugese former prime minister said.
Despite the peace deal that ended the 21-year war between Khartoum and the SPLM/A — Africa’s longest-running conflict — refugees are still streaming across the border into Uganda, citing food shortages and attacks by Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) which has bases in southern Sudan.
Continued attacks by the LRA have created instability in southern Sudan and fuelled the refugee influx into northern Uganda.
Uganda’s deputy minister in charge of refugees, Christine Amongin, said the Danish government had given Uganda a grant of about $16 million to improve areas where large numbers of refugees from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda are living.
“Denmark has extended to us $15 million assistance under the development assistance to refugees,” Amongin told Sudanese refugees in Moyo district, adding that additional one million dollar is to build a bridge linking two camps in the district.
“They came at midnight when we were asleep and torched our houses and killed people,” said 38-year-old John Baptiste. “Five of my children disappeared and I only escaped with one. I only went back there to bury my wife.”
“I ran because of the attacks,” said another refugee who gave his name as Bol. “The LRA attacked us and burnt our houses.”
Under the terms of the agreement, up to 10,000 UN peacekeepers, many of them from the pan-African AU, are soon to be deployed to southern Sudan where international donors have pledged billions in development and humanitarian aid.
However, the peace dividend has been slow to come to the region and despite expected huge influxes of millions of returnees, refugees are still leaving.
Since February, the UNHCR says it has processed 8,838 southern Sudanese in Uganda alone and that camps set up to help with repatriations have instead become transit centres for incoming refugees.
“It makes the situation very difficult,” Guterres said, noting that about half of the new arrivals had come through Palorinya.
“The whole situation is negative from all points of view, because the UNHCR set up this reception centre to prepare for the repatriation of refugees, but it is now used for a purely different thing,” he said.
Sudan’s north-south civil war killed at least 1.5 million people and displaced some four million others, hundreds of thousands of whom are in UN camps in Uganda and Kenya.
