Conditions at UN’s South Sudan camp inhumane, says MSF

People forced to sleep standing up with children in their arms as flooding and insecurity near Bentiu make living conditions desperate

 By Sam Jones, 21 August 2014

The Guardian

The 40,000 people sheltering from South Sudan’s civil war in a flooded and crowded UN camp are enduring conditions “barely compatible with life and incompatible with human dignity”, and must be helped before disease and danger force them back into the conflict zone, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) has warned.

Fierce fighting around the town of Bentiu, which lies in the northern Unity state close to the border with Sudan, has driven thousands of South Sudanese to seek sanctuary in the nearby UN base over recent months.

But the camp is struggling to withstand the rainy season downpours, which have left huts and tents flooded with sewage-contaminated water and water levels so high that people are being forced to sleep standing up with their children in their arms.

Its inhabitants also have to deal with the threat of violence from the armed groups beyond the perimeter whenever they venture out to gather the firewood needed to cook their dry rations.

Ivan Gayton, an emergency coordinator for MSF, said recent breakthroughs – such as reducing the number of children dying in the camp each day from three to one – were now in jeopardy. “By providing water, some sanitation, some healthcare and some feeding, we, the UN and other NGOs, have actually managed to get the figures heading in the right direction,” he said.

“But now people are living in conditions that are barely compatible with life and are incompatible with human dignity. What we have now is a 1.5 sq km camp in the middle of the largest grass swamp in the world, so it’s not a place you would chose. It’s not fit for human habitation – at least not for 40,000 people.”

Although people were building small dykes and dams, Gayton said, their camp was rapidly becoming a sewage-swilling lake.

He praised the UN mission in South Sudan (Unmiss) for protecting civilians from the fighting, but he urged it to drain the camp, move people to dry land, and provide armed escorts to those venturing beyond its walls.

“I’m not sure how meaningful protection is if it obliges you to live in conditions where you can’t lie down to sleep and you have to sit or stand, carrying your children,” he said. “You get dry grains, which you can’t get any nutrition from if you don’t cook them, so you’ve got to get firewood. The analogy is: ‘Oh, I see you’re being pursued by your enemies. By all means, come into my house, I have a cellar which is a little flooded and not too pleasant, but at least no one will shoot at you there. Here’s some food. If you want to cook it, you’ll have to go back outside, where your enemies are waiting for you.’ All in all, that just doesn’t add up to protection. It’s better than nothing, and obviously 40,000 people have chosen it, but it’s just not good enough.”

Gayton pointed to Darfur, where the UN provided armed protection to firewood patrols, as an example of what could be done in the camp.

But he also acknowledged the extreme instability of the area, where gunfire and explosions are heard daily and where the local airstrip was recently shelled. The town has frequently swung from government to rebel control, and on Tuesday Unmiss expressed “serious concern” after government soldiers celebrating war veterans’ day fired into the air for half an hour. The gunfire wounded one child inside the camp and Unmiss staff found nine bullets in their accommodation and office blocks. Three days earlier, violence in Bentiu forced 340 people to shelter at the airport with Unmiss troops.

“The UN are doing a great job of protecting the people who’ve fled the violence in the civil war – but we need a little more,” Gayton said. Unless things got better in the camp, he added, people might start taking their chances outside.

“An unplanned exodus, with people just leaving because conditions have been allowed to degrade so far that they vote with their feet and take their chances with the war and rainy season? I’m not optimistic that that’s going to work out,” he said. “We must improve conditions in the [camp] so that people see staying there as a rational, viable choice: if we allow conditions to become so bad that people feel forced to decline the protection that’s on offer, that’s a fundamental failure of the whole concept of the protections of civilians.”

Unmiss said it was doing what it could to protect people in Bentiu from both the flooding and the threat of violence. A spokeswoman said three excavators had been hired to improve drainage in the camp, and that two pumps were operating around the clock to get water out of the area.

She said that although Unmiss was aware that women and girls leaving the camp were exposed to “unacceptable” sexual harassment and violence, the mission simply did not have the resources to police the entire country. “The mission’s mandate to promote a safe and secure environment outside its facilities allows Unmiss to conduct patrols in the vicinity of its compounds and beyond, and interact with the general population to protect civilians more effectively,” she said.

“Unmiss forces are carrying out patrols in areas of high risk, but it is impossible for a limited number of peacekeepers and UN police advisers to be everywhere in a country the size of South Sudan.”

The country has been in turmoil since December when President Salva Kiir accused his vice-president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup.

The tension sparked bloodshed between Kiir’s Dinkas and Machar’s Nuers, dividing the country along ethnic lines. Since then, tens of thousands of South Sudanese have been killed; 1.5 million people – more than half of them children – have been displaced; and almost 5 million are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. With crops untended and so many people driven from their homes, warnings of a famine in some areas look increasingly likely to be fulfilled.

Copyright 2014 The Guardian

Featured Image: People struggle in flooded conditions at a UN camp near Bentiu, South Sudan. Photograph: Ivan Gayton/MSF

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