South Sudan braces for the worst humanitarian situation with influx of returnees

By Kitab Unango

South Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is set to deepen amid the massive influx of people entering across it’s borders from war-torn neighboring Sudan.

Albino Akol Atak, said the scarce resources available are not enough to respond to the needs of thousands of refugees and returnees.

The majority of returnees are South Sudanese who fled previous conflicts in 2013 and 2016.

 “Now with this conflict, the level of returnees have increased, the level of refugees have risen, and you can imagine that the humanitarian situation has worsened more than it was before,” Akol told journalists in Juba on Monday.

South Sudan is currently struggling to host 50,000 people who arrived from Sudan in recent weeks.

Akol said they are expecting more arrivals in the coming days or weeks.

“We expect if this conflict continues all these people will move to South Sudan,” he disclosed.

Akol said that they are expecting more South Sudanese to return home when the conflict intensifies.

Sudan hosts 800,000 South Sudanese refugees who have fled long-running conflicts there. South Sudan gained its independence from its northern neighbour in 2011.

More than 2 million people are also internally displaced within South Sudan, where civil war from 2013 to 2018 resulted in an estimated 400,000 deaths.