100,000 flee amid tales 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 Sudanese 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,” United Nations spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told reporters recently.
Interviews with people from Kajo-Keji now living in the Palorinya refugee camp, and UN documents obtained by the Associated Press, describe multiple human rights violations committed by South Sudanese soldiers against civilians.
The man in the tattered jeans told the AP 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.
“They kept on forcing me to say who really told me this news. 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 $400 Cdn, he was released and fled to the Palorinya camp.
Before fighting broke out in Juba in July, Kajo-Keji had been a quiet county of about 200,000 people in Central Equatoria state. It was part of South Sudan’s breadbasket, predominantly inhabited by the Kuku ethnic group.
After July, the civil war that had been raging since December 2013 came to Kajo-Keji. A number of rebel groups emerged in the area affiliated with opposition leader Riek Machar, who is now in exile in South Africa.
Civilians found themselves caught in the middle of fighting.
Seven refugees in the Palorinya camp interviewed by AP said they knew someone who had been the victim of sexual violence. Many said South Sudanese soldiers targeted them because of suspicions that they supported the rebels.
“Someone will be arrested and taken to the barracks,” one woman said.
“When someone is taken, there is no coming back. You don’t know if that person is being killed.”
When a team of UN officials visited Kajo-Keji last month, they found its main town almost entirely silent during weekdays, according to internal reports.
Victims and witnesses told stories of rape, theft, abuse of power and the murder of friends and family members accused of supporting the rebel forces.
A respected elder pleaded with UN peacekeepers, saying civilians were “captive on our own land.”
The elder told UN officials: “When are we going to receive the required help and be protected from being harmed by our national army? We need imminent protection before it’s too late. If we get killed because we told you the truth today, so be it.”