Hard homecoming for South Sudan returnees

Sudan: Two string beds, a cooking pot, some clothes and a chicken are the sum total of the Letio family’s belongings, returning home after years fleeing conflict.

The family of six, who lived in the north for years, has arrived back like thousands of others just days before Africa’s largest country splits in two to form the world’s newest nation, South Sudan.

“I’m happy to be coming back to my people,” said Emmanuel Letio, a father of five, arriving at the river port in the south’s capital Juba.

“But it’s not easy here, we have no shelter or home to go to,” he added, his children screaming beneath the tree, before they board a truck to take them onwards, to the far east of this impoverished, fledgling nation.

The family is exhausted after a tough fortnight-long journey through mosquito-infested swamps, travelling from the northern capital Khartoum up the White Nile in an open barge.

They join more than 300,000 people to have returned since October, part of an epic mass migration since 2005 of some 2.5 million people back to the war-ravaged land they fled from during Sudan’s decades-long north-south conflict.

Around two million people are thought to have died in the war with the Khartoum government, and when they finally got the chance, almost 99 percent of southerners voted in a January referendum for independence, which is due to become a reality on July 9. Thousands more are still expected, after the Khartoum government dismissed southerners from their jobs and northern officials threatened those who remain.

“People have been told that their jobs are over,” said Alfred Tombe, who worked as a building labourer in Khartoum.

Some estimate as many as one million southerners remain in the north, but no one knows how many will stay up to 40,000 are expected to lose their jobs in the north’s public sector.

The situation is not all grim. Although most speak Arabic not English, the official language of the southern government they could provide the new nation with crucial skills.

But the south is already struggling to accommodate the influx.

Juba, Monday, AFP