Portrait of a South Sudanese refugee woman in Uganda

Lunch time. South Sudanese refugees line up for a meal of posho and beans at Palabek Refugee Settlement Centre in Lamwo District on April 3, 2017 . PHOTO by CISSY MAKUMBI.

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Hard life. Many South Sudanese who grew up in camps as John Garang’s fighters fought to break off Sudan currently find themselves entangled in an unending conflict pitting president Salva Kiir against his former comrades. Daily Monitor’s Cissy Makumbi and Eriasa Mukiibi Sserunjogi look at the plight of a south Sudanese refugee in Uganda.

Elizabeth Labuk, 46, cheerlessly glares through the blistering Lamwo sunshine, which makes her stark dark skin glitter. She is clearly absent-minded and as the pause wears on, her eyes well up. Her voice shakes when she speaks again. “I just ran away when the fighting intensified and I don’t know where my husband ran to. I cannot rule out death because when the SPLA (Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army) launched the fighting against the rebels, several lives were lost and civilians were not spared too.”
Ms Labuk, a mother of two, is one of the estimated 15,000 South Sudanese refugees that have crossed to Lamwo District of Uganda following the recent eruption of fighting in the world’s youngest country. Lamwo is just one of the South Sudan refugee receiving centre, with the vast majority of them crossing into the West Nile sub-region of Uganda.

According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Uganda currently hosts some 600,000 South Sudanese refugees out of a total of 1.2m, which makes it the second largest refugee-hosting country in the world after Turkey. The other refugees in Uganda come from Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Eritrea, Rwanda, among other African countries.

Our conversation with Ms Labuk is periodically interrupted by her son, who is visibly malnourished and is prone to seeking attention. She managed to escape her home village of Payam- Pajok, Magwi County, Imatong State in South Sudan with her two children, in the company of village mates.

Ms Labuk did not participate in the decision that led to her flight from her village. She was just part of a horde of helpless people who walked for two weeks, surviving on water from streams and wild fruits until they reached the Ugandan border.

The journey from Ms Labuk’s village in South Sudan’s Imatong State to the refugee centre in Lamwo is on the face of it short, just about 35 or 40 miles. But, Ms Labuk says, could not use established roads or means of transport for fear of ending up in rebel or South Sudan soldiers’ camps. They therefore had to negotiate forests and rivers to get to Lamwo.

“Indiscriminate killing”
“When fighting erupts it was hard to tell the government forces from the rebels since they all behave in the same manner and killing is what they do best,” Ms Labuk says, throwing her hands in the air in apparent surrender.

Before the decision to flee was made, Ms Labuk had heard of the possibility of escaping to Uganda, where she had been as a refugee on two previous occasions. She also knew that as the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement/Army, which under the leadership of the late John Garang fought the war that led to the break off of South Sudan from Sudan, had been welcomed in Uganda and received support from the Ugandan government.
“I knew Uganda was a good country but getting there was hard,” Ms Labuk says.

Uganda has been “good” by hosting the suffering people of South Sudan, including Ms Labuk, but it has also been pointed out in a report that there is another side to the Uganda-South Sudan relationship. After the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, which granted South Sudan semi-autonomous status from Sudan, and then the referendum that paved the way for the complete independence of South Sudan starting July 2011, many South Sudanese former fighters maintained their links with Uganda.

A report by the Sentry released on September 2016 accused South Sudanese leaders and generals of looting their country’s money and investing it in real estate, expensive vehicles, other property and luxury lifestyles in Uganda and some other African countries. The research took two years.

As this happened, the report pointed out, the situation in South Sudan went out of hand as the much-needed investment in public infrastructure was not made and no efforts were made to build up reserves for the fragile economy that depended on proceeds from crude oil and aid.

The Sentry is an initiative by activists led by John Prendergast, an American human rights activist, author, and former Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council, and George Clooney, an American actor, filmmaker, activist and philanthropist. The study emanated out of concerned due to lack of progress and apparent degeneration in South Sudan.

Bleak life. A Ms Elizabeth Labuk with her children and Mr David Wangwe, the settlement commandant at Palabek Refugee Settlement in Lamwo District.

Hopes dashed, talk of genocide
The situation in the young nation first openly got out of hand in December 2013 when fighting broke out between forces loyal to president Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, his then deputy. Ugandan forces were deployed in Juba within hours of the fighting breaking out, eventually saving Mr Kiir from being ousted.

Mr Machar fled the country, but returned to Juba in April 2016 after penning a peace deal with Mr Kiir August 2015 to become first vice president. But his second stint as vice president was even shorter, last less than four months. Following a gun battle at the South Sudan’s presidential palace on July 8, 2016, Mr Machar was in flight to the jungles of the Congo, injured, and having escaped death after an attack in Juba, which president Kiir first indicated was launched out of a misunderstanding. Mr Machar ended up in South Africa.

The attempts to broker the deal heavily drew in Uganda, an influential member of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAAD) regional grouping which has over the years attempted to stabilize South Sudan.

Mr Festus Mogae, former president of Botswana, was requested by the African Union to broker a peace deal in South Sudan, and former US president Barack Obama stepped up a gear towards the end of reign to push through a deal on South Sudan, seeing to short-lived return to Juba of Mr Machar in 2016.

But as all these efforts ensue, the human toll in South Sudan, according to different organizations, has been considerable.
Amnesty International in an October 2016 report entitled “We did not believe we would survive”: Killings, rape and lootings in Juba accused the protagonists in the South Sudan conflict of exacerbating the war in order to profit from it. The report refers to acts of indiscriminate killing. It says in part: “Witnesses at one of the sites said that snipers positioned themselves on a hill near the edge of the site, and shot at it seemingly at random. One of the most organized and large-scale attacks occurred in the same Jebel area, at the Terrain hotel on Yei road, on the same afternoon. Some 80 to 100 government soldiers stormed the hotel, deliberately killing a captive journalist, shooting another man in the leg, raping or gang-raping several women, beating and threatening some 30 others, and stealing everything in sight. The hotel was inhabited by foreign aid workers, and the assault was the worst incident yet in a long-standing pattern of government attacks on humanitarian personnel.”

The United Nations human rights commission in December last year warned that South Sudan was “on the brink of an all-out ethnic civil war,” calling for the deployment of 4,000 peacekeepers to protect citizens from a “Rwanda-like” genocide.

The ethnic tensions had in the earlier years been thought to exist between the Dinka ethnic group of president Kiir and the Neur of Mr Machar. But Ms Labuk does not belong to any of these groups - Ms Labuk, is a member of the Acholi ethnic group of South Sudan - proof that the conflict is on the way to assuming a national character and spreading to the whole of the country.

Something happened in her village shortly before they fled. “Eight people were killed in my presence of which three were my immediate relatives while others were my neighbors. It’s at this note that we scattered and we took to the bushes where we spent two weeks with my children before crossing several swamps, Ms Labuk says.

She repeatedly refers to her husband, from whom she says she has not heard since then – a month to the day of the interview on April 3, 2017, but she declines to name him.

But Ms Labuk still counts herself lucky, for she at least made it with her two children. Out of the 15,000 refugees currently in Lamwo District alone, some 729 children are unaccompanied. Of these, 570 were separated from their parents when the war started while 159 lost contact with their relatives in whose custody they had been before the war broke out. Some of the unaccompanied children are very young, about four years old, the authorities say.

Disrupted life

Ms Labuk, like thousands of other South Sudanese, has lived a disrupted life. Her recent flight to Lamwo is the third in just over two decades, with the first one having come in 1994 when she fled to Bweyale in Kiryandongo District, Uganda. Ms Labuk again fled in Uganda’s Pader District in 2001, on both earlier occasions to escape the fighting largely between two rebel groups facilitated by Uganda and Sudan. Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, that terrorized many parts of Northern Uganda for almost two decades, was backed by Sudan to destabilize Uganda as Uganda also backed Garang’s SPLA to destablise Sudan. Ms Labuk’s village became a war theater especially when Kony’s fighters crossed into Sudan, facing off by SPLA with the support of Uganda. On occasions the Sudanese army would shell the area in an attempt to flush out SPLA rebels.

“Our country has never had peace over the years, but we just stay since home is home,” Ms Labuk says, her face expressionless.

She says the several times that she has been fleeing for fear of her life, she has lost a lot of household property and livestock. On returning home, she says, she has to begin life afresh, often without any help. While in South Sudan, she says, everyone is on their own.“The government forces have not spared us in their hunt for the rebels and one wonders why should we be killed yet we are innocent,” she asked.

When South Sudanese refugees are received, says Mr David Wangwe, the settlement commandant at Palabek Refugee Settlement, each family is allocated plots measuring 30x30 metres for erecting a shelter, and another 30-30 metres “for small scale farming for sustainability”.

The refugees also get saucepans, Jerrycan, cups, plates, cooking oil, solar lights, blanket, mosquito nets and food for one month at the beginning and more will be distributed monthly as resettlement gains momentum.
Ms Labuk has already received her share but she is not satisfied. “I want my life and husband back,” she says.