Ailing South Sudanese fly home before deadline

Elderly and disabled South Sudanese in Sudan flew to their newly independent homeland on Wednesday in the last major movement of southerners before an April 8 deadline, the IOM said.

The "vulnerable" group of South Sudanese includes those with severe medical conditions.

They are among an estimated 500,000 ethnic southerners still in the north before next month's deadline for them to leave or regularise their status at the end of a grace period following the South's independence in July.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said it flew more than 240 people and their escorts to communities in the South on Wednesday.

A total of about 2,200 people will take dozens of flights south over 10 days, the agency said.

"The flights will be the last thing that we can do before April the 8th," Jill Helke, IOM's chief of mission in Sudan, told AFP.

But she said that, to some extent, "the pressure of the ending of the transition period should be reduced" with the signing last week by Sudan and South Sudan of an agreement during African Union-led talks in Addis Ababa.

Under the deal, both countries agreed to "accelerate their cooperation" to provide identification and other documents related to the status of people.

In order to apply for northern residence, people need documents from South Sudan. The north has not put in place the system to legalise their status and, until recently, the south showed no readiness to document those in the north, creating a vicious circle.

The United Nations refugee agency has called last week's agreement a "positive step".

Earlier this month the UN Special Representative for South Sudan, Hilde Johnson, said after meetings in Khartoum that although there is no formal change to the April 8 deadline, "there is an understanding that there might be flexibility on this issue."

Helke said her agency has proposed a survey of southerners in Sudan, which could lead to their receiving an interim document "that would afford protection from deportation or harassment or whatever else might be happening to people who are undocumented.

"We still haven't had it in writing but we believe we will get that quite soon."

The intergovernmental body, which is dependent on donor funding, has helped to move more than 23,000 southerners from Sudan to South Sudan, mostly by river barge.

A train took about 1,500 to the south earlier this month, and in January a series of IOM flights airlifted an earlier group of sick and elderly.