South Sudan refugees risk death for food

Wani, who cared for his elderly parents, received no food in October because distributions were delayed, his father Timon said. The memory of crops Oliver left behind proved too tempting and he returned to South Sudan to find food. 

Two weeks later, other returning refugees recognised his remains alongside another dead refugee on a forest path in South Sudan, where the ground was littered with bullet casings. 

“He went back to look for food,” said Timon as he spoke at a memorial service for his first-born child in the Palorinya refugee camp. “I‘m heartbroken.” 

DESPERATE REFUGEES 

The four-year war in oil-rich South Sudan, a country founded in 2011, has forced more than a third of its 12 million citizens to flee. Tens of thousands have died, some in ethnic killings, others from starvation and disease. 

Palorinya is the second biggest camp in northern Uganda after Bidi Bidi and alone houses 185,000 refugees. 

Each refugee is supposed to get 12 kg of grain, six kg of dry beans, cooking oil and salt each month, but WFP said this was delayed in October because grain was scarce in Uganda and the roads to Palorinya were bad.

Food distributions did not start until October 26, WFP said. It takes two weeks to complete a distribution, so tens of thousands of refugees did not get any food in October. 

Desperate, some returned to the war zone. At least eight refugees from Palorinya were killed in South Sudan after returning to look for food, according to family members and the Anglican church, which tracks civilian deaths.

In August and September, when rations were distributed normally, just two refugees were killed when they returned to find food, the church diocese in South Sudan’s volatile Kajo Keji region said.

Modi Scopas John, chairman of a Refugee Welfare Committee in Palorinya, said refugees were returning home every day. 

“If you have nothing to eat, what do you do?” he asked, perched on a plastic chair under a spindly tree. “You have to look for food.” 

FOOD SHORTAGES 

Wani was killed in Kajo Keji, where government and two rebel groups are battling for control in a war sparked by a feud between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar. 

Next to Wani lay the body of Yassin Mori (35) who also left Palorinya to look for food, according to his brothers who ventured into South Sudan to look for him. 

Mori left two wives and nine children. 

“Now we need support because we are left with his children and widows,” Taha Igga, one brother, said at a memorial service in the Ugandan refugee camp. 

Mutabazi Caleb, from aid group World Vision, which runs distribution, said Palorinya is two months behind other camps in its food distributions. 

WFP said it substituted half the cereal ration with money in September in some other camps so refugees could buy food and was expanding infrastructure to prevent future delays. 

Refugees said even when food arrives, it doesn’t last a month. Of the 12 kg of grain, refugees said they sell one to pay for grinding the rest into flour and another to buy soap, which is in short supply. 

They also complain the beans were sometimes inedible.

“They are not okay, others are rotten and they smell,” said mother-of-four Liong Viola (32) picking through her sack of shrivelled legumes during a distribution. 

WFP country director El Khidir Daloum said it was investigating the complaint and, “is committed to providing our beneficiaries with the highest quality of food”. 

John, the Refugee Welfare Committee chairman, urged people to stay in the camps. 

“At least let us die here of hunger rather than go back to South Sudan and be killed like a chicken,” he said.

Hungry refugees often ignore the pleas. At dusk last Saturday, Pastor Charles Mubarak packed extra clothes into a plastic bag to take back into South Sudan where he hoped to harvest cassava fields left behind when he fled in January. 

“As a family, we are 10 in number, and I‘m not in position to feed them,” he said. “If I get killed I get killed once, but dying of hunger is too difficult.” 

“If they give us food rations, I wouldn’t think of going back to South Sudan,” he said. “Food is life.”