A massacre in April sent thousands of residents of this south Sudan district fleeing into the swampy wastes of the upper Nile. Last week, hunger drove them back into the clutches of the gunmen.
“What else could we do?” pregnant 20-year-old Nyakong Gatwech said. “The food the United Nations gave us is too little for all the family.”
She was shot in the arm and slashed with a spear when she returned to her village but survived. Others were not so lucky.
Officials estimate at least 185 people, mostly women, were killed in a second raid on August 2 by a militia force of dozens of fighters. The massacre was one of the deadliest single outbreaks of violence in the still largely lawless south of Sudan since a 2005 peace agreement ended two decades of civil war.
But it was not the first in Jonglei state, an ethnically divided region that was one of the worst hit by the long conflict with northern forces that left an estimated 1.5 million people dead and 4 million more homeless.
There have been repeated outbreaks of deadly fighting this year between the Lou Nuer and Murele ethnic groups, which have left more than 1,000 people dead and many thousands more homeless.
UN officials have warned that the recent rate of violent deaths now surpasses those in Sudan’s war-torn western region of Darfur.
Traditional rivalries over cattle and pasture were further poisoned by opposing allegiances during the 1983 to 2005 civil war, with the Lou Nuer mainly siding with the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement that now heads the autonomous regional government in the south and the Murele mainly supporting pro-government militias.
Gatwech said former rebel fighters of the southern army had escorted her back to her village but that there were not enough troops to ward off the Murele militiamen.
“We thought the soldiers could protect us, but they killed them too,” she said, adding that 11 troops had died and several more had been wounded.
Namach Duk, 12, was attacked by the militiamen in a small fishing camp outside the small Jonglei town of Akobo.
“They shot me in the leg as I ran towards the river. Then they stabbed me in the back with a spear and left me for dead,” she said, turning to show a jagged hole in her arm.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack as “heinous,” and the World Food Programme has warned that an escalation in violence will hamper efforts to deliver aid.
“It was a clear massacre — women and children were lying in the river and shot at close range,” Akobo District Commissioner Goi Jooyul Yol said.
“Tribal conflict has taken on a new dimension,” he said.
Lou Nuer village elder Chot Rom agreed that the traditional conflict with the Murele had taken a turn for the worse.
“In the past we have fought over cattle, but this is something different,” he said.
“The Murele also abducted our children — we don’t know if we will ever get them back, and we expect more attacks in the future,” he added, lying on a thin bed in a simple hospital ward where he was being treated for a gunshot wound to the groin.
The civil war years have left the region awash with weapons, something that the regional government has tried to tackle through a disarmament program.
But some charge that a heavy-handed yet uneven implementation of the program has left communities who have surrendered their weapons prey to others that have refused to reciprocate.
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