Refugees returning to Sudan reach 10,000 mark
Sudan-UN, Politics, 7/6/2006

The number of refugees repatriated to southern Sudan under United Nations auspices passed 10,000 this week, a modest landmark in the efforts to bring home some 350,000 people who fled two decades of civil war that formally ended in early 2005 with a peace agreement between the Government and rebels.

"Here they are given all the basic services, including health education, mine risk education and HIV/AIDS awareness," UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative Jennet Siama Zebedeo said at the Alero way station where the joyful returnees will stay for two or three days while Agency staff decide their final destination.

They will then be transported in UNHCR trucks to their home villages around the towns of Yei, Maridi, Yambio and Juba.

"I am very happy to be back in my motherland," George Taban Cleopas, 42, said as he jumped down from one of the trucks after the convoy arrived late Tuesday afternoon with 262 refugees from Moyo, northern Uganda. Most of the Sudanese were seeing their homeland for the first time in years.

Cleopas left his home area of Kopera, 20 miles west of Yei, and crossed to Moyo in 1993, when the war in southern Sudan was at its peak. He said his immediate concern was to plant crops and make some money needed as outstanding dowry for his Ugandan wife.

"I have seven children with my Ugandan wife and her parents are demanding three cows and $250," he said. "I could not pay, so they took her and my children away at the last moment of our repatriation." Other returnees were facing similar dowry problems and had left partners in Uganda.

Regina Kila Louis, 22, was happily reunited with her grandparents and other relatives during a warm welcome. The mother of two fled with her parents to Uganda when she was only six. She hopes to get a micro-loan so that she can build a home and start a business. Her Ugandan husband owes dowry and she will not rejoin him unless he pays her family.

After delays last year due to security and logistical concerns, UNHCR began repatriating Sudanese from neighboring countries, also including Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic in December and the rate of returns has been steady since then. This latest convoy brought the number of UNHCR-assisted returnees to 10,113.

Apart from the refugees in neighboring countries, more than 4 million Sudanese were displaced internally by the decades-long war in the south, which is separate from the conflict still raging in Sudan's western Darfur region, where more that 2 million people have been uprooted, including over 200,000 who have fled to eastern Chad.

Previous Stories:
  African Union extension of Darfur forces praised   (7/5/2006)
  Sudan - Iran seek stronger relations   (7/5/2006)
  Sudan, Chad presidents meet, thank Qathafi   (7/3/2006)
  Sudanese rebel groups recruiting refugees Chad camps   (5/16/2006)
  Sudan government, main rebels sign Darfur peace agreement   (5/6/2006)

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