Stranded Southern Sudanese returning home

Up to 15,000 ethnic South Sudanese who have been encamped in crowded conditions in Sudan will be flown to South Sudan, avoiding a May 20 expulsion deadline by local authorities, the IOM said on Saturday. “We hope to start within a week,” Jill Helke, who heads the International Organization for Migration (IOM) office in Khartoum, told AFP. The IOM estimates that 12,000-15,000 South Sudanese are in the Kosti way-station about 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Khartoum. Many have been living in makeshift shelters or barn-like buildings, waiting for months for their transport home. The governor of the area declared the migrants a security threat and initially gave them a May 5 deadline to leave, a decision that sparked concern from the United Nations and the IOM, which has already helped to return thousands of South Sudanese. Sudanese officials last week extended the deadline to May 20 but the IOM, in a written statement, said it has now been assured by the government in Khartoum that the deadline “would not be enforced, given that a firm departure plan was now in place.” The South Sudanese in Kosti are among about 350,000 ethnic Southerners whom the South Sudanese embassy estimates remain in the north after an April 8 deadline for them to either formalize their status or leave Sudan. Hundreds of thousands of others have already gone to the South, which separated last July. IOM said that all the Southerners in Kosti are dependent on assistance from the international community for food, water, healthcare and other essential services and most do not have their own means to arrange transportation. “The aircraft are already lined up and ready,” Helke told AFP, adding that the passengers will be brought by bus from Kosti to the airport in Khartoum shortly before their departure. “The planes will keep going twice or three times a day,” she said. IOM, which is dependent on donor funding, has money for about half the flights “but we’re working on trying to get the rest,” she added. The IOM had plans for moving thousands of people from Kosti by barge but Sudan’s military expressed security concerns. “Of course, there is an element of mistrust between South and north,” South Sudan’s ambassador in Khartoum, Kau Nak, told AFP last week. A month of deadly clashes between militaries of the north and South along the disputed border culminated in South Sudan’s 10-day occupation of the north’s main Heglig oil field. Sudan declared on April 20 that its troops had forced the Southern soldiers out of Heglig, but the South said it withdrew of its own accord in line with international calls amid fears of all-out war. Nak said Khartoum was asking for guarantees the barges would not carry military equipment on their return trips after delivering the human cargo. Since last year the IOM has helped return more than 23,000 Southerners, mostly by river barge. The United Nations Security Council last week ordered Sudan and South Sudan to cease hostilities, and to resume negotiations on unresolved issues including the status of each country’s nationals in the other country.