Refugee Children Dying at Alarming Rate in South Sudan, Aid Groups Say - New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya — Nine children are dying every day from preventable illnesses like diarrhea in an overcrowded, swampy refugee camp in South Sudan, and United Nations officials said Friday that they were stepping up efforts to evacuate people as fast as they could.

Heavy rains, overflowing latrines and a ceaseless influx of sick and hungry people have conspired to create an epidemiological disaster at the Jamam refugee camp, with death rates now nearly twice the emergency level, said the aid group Doctors Without Borders.

“The situation is getting worse by the day,” said Tara Newell, an emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, who spoke by satellite phone from the camp on Friday evening. “We’re arriving in the middle of the rainy season, tents keep falling down, children have to wear wet clothes, there’s malaria, and we see children getting sicker and sicker.”

The Jamam camp sits on a flood plain just inside the contested border between Sudan and the newly independent nation of South Sudan. The refugees are streaming out of Blue Nile, the state in Sudan where rebels allied with the South Sudanese are fighting the Sudanese Army, saying they want more autonomy. The struggle for self-government has become a familiar casus belli for rebel groups in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and other marginalized areas of Sudan far from the capital, Khartoum.

So far, political negotiations have failed, and both sides, the Blue Nile rebels and the government, have vowed to fight on.

United Nations officials said Friday that they had been moving refugees out of the Jamam camp to safer locations, but that in the past few days they had to halt the relocations to respond to a sudden influx of more refugees who showed up at the border and had to be moved as quickly as possible out of the militarized zones. The United Nations plans to resume evacuations from Jamam this weekend and move as many as 4,000 refugees to another camp farther east that has better water supplies.

“These are unequivocally unsafe and unfit locations,” said Adrian Edwards, a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “It’s still an ongoing full-fledged crisis.”

In Jamam, the swampy terrain is perfect for malaria, and a recent deluge knocked down tents and made the latrines overflow, spreading human waste through a camp of around 35,000 people and contaminating water supplies. Many children are now dying from malaria and diarrhea-caused dehydration, aid workers say.

United Nations officials said that they were desperate to move the refugees to higher ground, but that land mines were another factor hampering relocation efforts. In addition, Jamam is in a very isolated and undeveloped area, with few roads nearby, making it extremely difficult to ship in food, medicine and other supplies.

“The situation in Jamam camp is simply not manageable,” said Michael R. Goldfarb, a Doctors Without Borders spokesman. He said all the organizations and governments involved, including the South Sudanese government, “must find better options.”

The two Sudans face a number of crises, and none look as if they are going away anytime soon. Thousands of unaccompanied children are fleeing the war in the Nuba Mountains, a development reminiscent of the Lost Boys exodus of the 1990s, when countless Sudanese boys wandered for months searching for refuge.

Sudan and South Sudan are still at an impasse over sharing profits from oil fields located predominantly in the South, a dispute that has paralyzed both economies. And protests continue in Khartoum, with police officers shooting tear gas at demonstrators and detaining and beating hundreds of people.