More than 7,000 refugees are now camped at Jau – along the border of Sudan and South Sudan – after fleeing armed clashes in the Yida refugee camp.
Many are afraid to return, citing growing tensions between the refugees and Yida’s local community.
Thousands fled the camp following an armed clash Saturday, March 16, between South Sudanese police in the camp and several members of a militia comprised chiefly of members of South Kordofan’s Nuba Angolo tribe.
According to eyewitnesses, an argument between the two groups quickly escalated in a section of Yida inhabited by the Nuba Angolo community. The two forces exchanged gunfire for around one hour, killing a 2 year old child and wounding 12 other civilians. A South Sudanese policeman was also killed in the fight. The skirmish was eventually broken up by the South Sudanese Armed Forces (SPLA), which fired heavy machine guns into the air to stop the battle.
12 year old Nurah Hassan was in line at the camp’s food distribution center when the fighting began. She fled to Jau with some members of her family, but in the confusion, was separated from her mother. “I could hear the bullets and I started to run with everyone else,” she said. Nura said she hopes to return soon to Yida to find her mother.
According to several camp residents and officials interviewed by Nuba Reports, the recent fighting highlights the growing tensions between the refugees from South Kordofan and the local population.
In just over one year, the population of the Yida camp has swollen from a few thousand to nearly 70,000, as fighting in South Kordofan has intensified. The refugee population now dwarves the mainly Dinka community, which numbered around 500 before the camp was founded.
There have been several disputes between the local population and the refugees. Yida’s local community has often accused refugees of harvesting local resources – such as fish, honey, timber, and grass – and selling them at the camp market. Refugees in turn have reported being robbed by members of the local community and having taxes levied on their businesses without documentation.
The relationship has been especially strained between locals and the Nuba Angolo tribe, which have repeatedly accused on another of cattle raiding. The militia that clashed with police Saturday has, in the past, been affiliated with rebel groups in Sudan – including the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Southern People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) in South Kordofan. But camp residents say the group comes from South Kordofan’s Angolo community.
Following Saturday’s clash, members of Yida’s local Dinka community launched almost immediate reprisals. 57 year-old Abdalla Kaki is a butcher in the camp as well as a former deputy chief of the Nuba Torin tribe. He says a large group of men in civilian clothes carrying guns and spears began looting in the camp. “They began to enter our homes and taking everything they could carry. Everyone was running because there were scared,” he said.
Camp residents say the attacks continued into Sunday, when around 150 men from the Dinka community began to loot the refugee camp market. “I found thieves in my shop so I ran to tell the police,” said shop owner Silimon Ismaiel. “When I came back to see if the problem was fixed I found the police were also taking things from my shop. So I questions them about it and they pointed their guns at me and told me to keep quiet.”
Around 25 shops were looted Sunday along with about 40 homes in the reprisal attacks. 39 year-old refugee Jallal Khatir believes his family is not safe in the camp anymore. “Now we are only thinking about how we can go back to Nuba.”
On Tuesday, several members of the refugee leadership, World Food Program officials and representatives of various humanitarian organizations travelled to Jau, to try and convince those camped there to return to Yida
