JUBA: Mayen Koang, 47, has spent the past five months holed up at a United Nations peacekeeping base in Juba, one of tens of thousands of displaced South Sudanese who are too scared to return home.
Sitting on a plastic chair in a makeshift tent, the father-of-eight says he is still too afraid to go back because, as an ethnic Nuer — the same tribe of rebel leader Riek Machar — he fears he will be killed by members of the Dinka community, the tribe of President Salva Kiir.
Before the fighting started on December 15, Koang had a normal life as a senior government official. But as the clashes escalated into all-out war and a vicious cycle of ethnic killings, he quickly fled to the UN base along with thousands of other Nuer.
“Life is not good here,” he says of the squalid camp, where the displaced are living on hand-outs that are in short-supply and where the barbed wire fences give both protection and the impression of being in a prison camp.
“But we have no choice. We are here because we have no place to go.” It’s a predicament shared by close to 70,000 people in eight UN bases across South Sudan. In some towns they are packed with ethnic Nuer, in others Dinka. In still others, the two communities share the same camp, albeit segregated by nervous UN peacekeepers.
Many have fled massacres, gang rapes and other atrocities perpetrated by soldiers on both sides. Others have seen their friends, neighbours or colleagues turn against them during the nearly five-month-long frenzy of ethnic violence.
Even the UNMISS bases are not totally safe: in Bor last month, a pro-government mob attacked a camp and killed dozens of civilians before Indian, Nepalese and South Korean peacekeepers beat them back.
“This is a tribal war, a tribal cleansing. Some of our colleagues working in the office of the president were killed,” Koang says.
Aid agencies and analysts believe well over 10,000 people have been killed, although no precise count exists. The UN has counted at least a million people who have been forced to flee their homes, with more than three million in need of aid.
On Friday, Kiir and Machar finally met face-to-face, shook hands, said a prayer and agreed a ceasefire to be implemented within 24 hours. They also agreed to allow aid in, and work on a transitional government.
But undoing the damage from the months of civil war, which has seen the world’s youngest nation descend into carnage and rapidly collapse, will not be easy now that old ethnic wounds have been opened.
This leaves the United Nations and aid agencies with the task of protecting, feeding and treating 70,000 people, who are unable go home despite the abject poverty and squalor of the camps.
“We survive on the little food they give us, but there is no school here. None of my children have been to school since we came here,” said Mary Robert, a 47-year-old widow who lives in a cramped tent with her five children.
She points to ditches around her house, dug in an attempt to drain away water now that the rains are beginning. But even with the channels, water still comes up into the tent.
As for her future plans — particularly returning home — she shrugs and says it’s a case of wait-and-see.
“We want peace. What we don’t want is the killing. We don’t want more killing.”(AFP)
