UN ignores South Sudan refugees

Doctors without Borders (MSF) has slammed the United Nations for “shocking indifference” towards displaced people sheltering at one of its compounds in South Sudan.

MSF said in a statement on Wednesday that about 21,000 people are living in unsanitary conditions at the UN Tromping base in the capital, Juba.

The aid group also warned that Diarrhoeal diseases, respiratory infections and skin diseases had broken out among displaced people at the compound.

The UN failure to improve conditions in the base is “shameful,” the group said, adding that the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) is refusing to move the displaced people to safer grounds before rainy seasons.

MSF emergency coordinator Carolina Lopez said, “The rains are getting heavier and if nothing is done right now, the consequences, already horrific, could become fatal.”

“People are living in natural drainage channels because there is no other space,” she added.

Hilde Johnson, the head of the UN mission, said earlier this month that Tomping is at “imminent risk of turning into a death trap.”

The violence that caused people to flee their homes in South Sudan erupted on December 15, 2013, when President Salva Kiir accused his sacked deputy Riek Machar of attempting to stage a coup.

The conflict soon turned into an all-out war between the army and defectors, with the violence taking on an ethnic dimension that pitted the president’s Dinka tribe against Machar’s Nuer ethnic group.

Some 870,000 people have reportedly fled their homes since the fighting broke out.