Scottish Catholic Observer

Aid to the Church in Need, describes in a report on South Sudan how displaced people in the north-east have been so hungry they have had to scavenge for grass and berries.

One of the nearly 20,000 registered civilians seeking protection in the United Nations Mission in Unity and Upper Nile states told the charity they felt they had been abandoned: “We have lived through situations of war in the past, but the brutality and violence of the struggles this time is indescribable.”

Many others have fled north into Sudan where again there are problems of lack of food and other basic aid.

The ACN report—whose release coincides with the fourth anniversary of South Sudan’s secession from Sudan —highlights the country’s ongoing problems since tribal conflict escalated into full-scale war in December 2013. Projects and communications staff from ACN received first-hand accounts of the terrible situation for refugees by local people affected by the conflict.

Sources close to the displaced people (above) told ACN of the ‘inexplicable’ suffering of refugees in the north of the country in the Malakal and Bentiu areas and of the ‘attacks on women and children, and also people who are entirely external to the conflict between the two armies.’

ACN heard how South Sudanese people made homeless by the conflict were being forced into displacement camps described as ‘a prison in your own country and yet it is the only place people feel safe.’

According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, the conflict between those loyal to South Sudan President Salva Kiir and rebels backing former vice-president Riek Machar have forced more than 2 million people from their homes in the two years since it began.

After South Sudan was created in 2011, the power struggle between President Kiir, who is from the Dinka tribe, and Mr Machar, a Nuer, escalated into a wider struggle between the two different ethnic groups.

—This story ran in full in the july 17 edition print of the SCO, available in parishes.