More than
31,000 South Sudanese refugees - mostly women and children - have crossed the
border into Sudan this year, fleeing famine and conflict, the United Nations
refugee agency said on Monday.
The United
Nations declared famine last week in parts of South Sudan's Unity State, with
about 5.5 million people expected to have no reliable source of food by July.
"Initial
expectations were that 60,000 refugees may arrive through 2017, but in the
first two months alone, over 31,000 refugees arrived," a statement from
the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in
Khartoum said.
More than a
million people have fled South Sudan since a civil war erupted in 2013 after
President Salva Kiir' fired Vice President Riek Machar. Fighting between
government forces and Machar-led rebels has caused the largest mass exodus of
any conflict in central Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Some 328,339
South Sudanese refugees have sought refuge in Sudan, including about 131,000 in
2016, many exhausted, malnourished and ill, having walked for days. More than
80 percent of the latest arrivals were women and children.
The fighting
has uprooted more than 3 million people and the U.N. says continuing
displacement presented "heightened risks of prolonged (food)
underproduction into 2018". In the fighting, food warehouses have been
looted and aid workers killed.
South Sudan is
rich in oil resources. But, six years after independence from neighbouring
Sudan, there are only 200 km (120 miles) of paved roads in a nation with an
area of 619,745 square km (239,285 square miles).
REUTERS
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