As refugee flood continues, so do stories of abuse
PALORINYA, Uganda — In the bushland of northern Uganda, a recently arrived refugee from South Sudan describes how soldiers back home detained and tortured him for two months for reading an article online.
Tall and thin as a reed, dirt coating his tattered T-shirt and jeans, the young man is one of more than 100,000 people who have fled a single South Sudan county in just three months as civil war continues amid warnings of genocide. The surge of more than half a million South Sudan refugees into Uganda since July is Africa’s largest refugee crisis.
Like others who huddle in rapidly growing refugee camps in Uganda, the man spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retaliation and the possibility that South Sudanese intelligence agents circulated among them.
When they arrive after walking across the border, the refugees from Kajo-Keji county “report killings of civilians, sexual violence and fears of arrest and abduction as their main reasons for fleeing,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters recently.
U.N. documents and interviews with people from Kajo-Keji now living in the Palorinya refugee camp describe multiple human rights violations committed by South Sudanese soldiers against civilians.
The man in the tattered jeans said that after telling a friend about an article online that described alleged power grabs by South Sudan President Salva Kiir’s Dinka ethnic group, soldiers came searching for him.
“Who told you these things?” the soldiers asked. They didn’t believe he had read the article online because they hadn’t heard of the Internet, the refugee said. “All they wanted to get from me was to get to some other person, to get more guys into jail,” he said.
He spent two months in jail, unfed except for the food his family brought, he said. After paying the equivalent of roughly $300 he was released and fled to the Palorinya camp.
Before fighting broke out in July, Kajo-Keji had been a quiet county of about 200,000 people in Central Equatoria state, predominantly inhabited by the Kuku ethnic group.
More than 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers operate in South Sudan. But the mission “has been prevented from verifying allegations of government forces killing civilians, arbitrarily arresting those gathered in groups and restricting the movements of civilians in KajoKeji,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote recently to the U.N. Security Council.
Most members of the army are from the Dinka tribe. The United Nations has warned that ethnic divisions put the country at risk of genocide.