South Sudanese refugees crowd camps in Uganda

BIDI BIDI CAMP, Uganda — “I don’t want to go back,” James Issac declared, just minutes after becoming a refugee. “I don’t want to die.”

For two days, the slender 30-year-old from South Sudan’s Equatoria region navigated his way out of civil war, riding a motorcycle along dirt roads and avoiding government soldiers who, according to accounts by refugees, have taken aim at civilians.

In his last steps on South Sudanese soil, Issac passed a group of rag-tag rebel soldiers and crossed a rickety bridge into Uganda, and safety.

“I am happy,” he said, as Ugandan soldiers searched his belongings for contraband. “There (are) no problems here.”

He is one of 440,000 refugees who fled South Sudan’s spiraling conflict into Uganda in 2016 alone, creating some of the world’s largest refugee camps in just six months’ time.

More than one million refugees have fled South Sudan, spilling across borders in East Africa as the international community warns that the conflict and its ethnic violence could destabilize the region.

Since fighting erupted in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, in July and left a peace agreement in tatters, the world’s youngest country has seen ethnic cleansing and teeters on the brink of genocide, according to the United Nations.

Those fleeing have turned Uganda’s northwest from an empty bushland into a sprawling complex of refugee settlements.

The largest, Bidi Bidi, is a pop-up city that holds 260,000 people weary of war. The U.N. recently announced the Bidi Bidi camp had stopped taking new arrivals because it was full, and it directed South Sudanese to nearby locations.

The refugees “were in critical condition. Bullets remaining in their legs. Others had come with parts amputated. Others were severely bleeding,” recalled Rufaaaya Asiyati, a nutrition specialist working at the border crossing for the Ugandan government.

Some 20 percent of those under 5 years old are severely malnourished, she said. Most of the refugees are women and children.

When the refugees arrive in settlements set up by the U.N, some like 18-year-old Harriet Guo are alone and must fend for themselves. The refugees are given supplies to build shelters and must set them up themselves.

Like others in the camp, Guo tells stories of brutal violence that forced her to flee South Sudan.

Many refugees come from Yei, where the AP visited in November and heard stories of government soldiers killing, raping and arresting civilians based on their ethnicity. Unlike other counties in the region, Uganda has embraced the refugees, according to Charlie Yaxley, a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency.

“Many Ugandans themselves have previously been refugees, and you typically hear expressions of solidarity from the Ugandan people,” Yaxley said.

Uganda’s Bidi Bidi refugee settlement is a pop-up city that holds roughly 260,000 people. Some 440,000 refugees in Uganda have fled South Sudan’s spiraling conflict.