A few phone snaps from our recent trip to South Sudan:
With escalating wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the still ongoing civil war in Sudan has gone largely ignored by the international community. For over a year, fighting has devastated the African country, since fighting erupted between two rival generals who couldn’t reach an agreement about power sharing.
11 million people have been forced to flee their homes. Although many are displaced within their home country, many have also fled violence and hunger (famine was declared in parts of Sudan earlier this month) to neighbouring countries.
Over 700 thousand people have now fled Sudan into refugee camps in northeastern South Sudan, where they still face food and water shortages and live in makeshift homes in the mud. UN organization @worldfoodprogramme said they will scale down their food distribution in the four camps we visited, as they lack funding.
“I’d Rather die by a bomb or bullet in my homeland than in a camp in South Sudan”, said one refugee who wants to go back to his homeland. But for now, most people are stuck in the camps; the area surrounding the camps is flooding, making access routes impassable (we arrived on a small plane, that can’t even fly out to Maban on most days because of the rains).
To read our story, with pictures by Guy Peterson, tap/click on this Volkskrant link.