Over one million S Sudan refugees in Uganda: UN

ARUA, Uganda: The number of South Sudanese who have fled to Uganda has hit one million, the UN said on Thursday, with no end in sight to the war behind the world’s fastest-growing refugee crisis.

The nearly four-year civil war has pushed an average of 1,800 South Sudanese into neighbouring Uganda every day for the past year, many of them women and children fleeing "barbaric violence", according to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR).

Another one million have sought refuge elsewhere in the region, but it is Uganda -- one of the world’s poorest countries and the size of the United Kingdom -- that has borne the brunt of the crisis.

"We still have new arrivals coming, and we cannot really see, you can say, the end of the new arrivals," said Bik Lum, head of the UNHCR in Arua in northern Uganda, home to Bidibidi, the world’s largest refugee camp with around 270,000 residents.

Many who arrive have harrowing stories, such as Jasmine Ramadan, a refugee now working as a shopkeeper in Uganda, who told AFP how her car was stopped by armed men who took her 13-year-old daughter into the woods to rape her.

She pleaded with them to take her instead. They gave in and she ended up being raped by six men. Her daughter, hiding in the bush nearby, witnessed everything. South Sudan’s civil war erupted in December 2013 just two years after it obtained independence, when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup.

The conflict initially pitted Machar’s ethnic Nuer against Kiir’s Dinka, but since the collapse of a peace agreement in 2015, the war has engulfed other ethnic groups and local grievances. Thousands of people have been killed by the violence, which plunged part of the country into famine earlier this year.

"The number of hungry and displaced South Sudanese is overwhelming," said International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) president Peter Maurer. "The staggering scale of suffering is evidence of the cumulative effect of three-and-a-half years of a style of fighting that appears calibrated to maximise misery." —AFP