Violence stemming from rivalry between Murle and Lou Nuer tribes has sent at least 100,000 people fleeing their homes. Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste reports from Jonglei State.
Greste says “The state is vast, flat, and infuriatingly inaccessible, especially at this time of the year.”
“It is now the wet season, and not a single road is passable. Only a handful of airstrips are dry enough for planes to land, and the weather is so bad that even helicopters often struggle to fly. And motorised ground transport like four-wheel drives and motorcycles? Forget it. Swollen rivers and boggy ground make it tough to even walk across.
“But a handful of people have walked, bringing with them disturbing accounts of a brutal ethnic conflict that has claimed hundreds – possibly thousands – of lives. They speak of heavily armed raiding parties attacking isolated villages, stealing cattle and killing everyone they find – women and children included – in a truly vicious cycle of killings, revenge and yet more revenge. There are stories of thousands of wounded people hiding in the bush, too afraid to come to government-controlled villages for help.”
He says the crisis presents “a deeply troubling dilemma for journalists, the aid community and international human rights organizations.”
“How do you help people who are, to all intents and purposes, little more than ghosts?”
Photo: Women from the Murle tribe waiting for a food handout from the World Food Programme (Al Jazeera)