In Sudan, UN refugee chief calls on world leaders to help rebuild shattered lives

Arriving in a small village in South Sudan after for seven days travelling throughout the country to spotlight the plight of 4.5 million people displaced by years of war, the head of the United Nations refugee agency has vowed to tell the political leaders of the world’s richest nations to do more to improve the lives of African people.

Arriving in a small village in South Sudan after seven days of travelling throughout the country to spotlight the plight of 4.5 million people displaced by years of war, the head of the United Nations refugee agency has vowed to tell the political leaders of the world’s richest nations to do more to improve the lives of African people.

Standing underneath a huge shade tree in Yari, south Sudan, António Guterres told villagers yesterday that UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is doing its best to help with schools and health centres so that people who fled 21 years of civil war between southern rebels and the Khartoum Government can come home and stay home. But more international funds are needed to develop the desperately poor region, he said.

He drew a clear link between development aid, economic growth and peace for a long-tortured region where even today landmines still deface the landscape and claim lives.

With the signing of a peace deal in January, preparations are now being made for people to return home from neighbouring countries. People displaced within Sudan are also on the move and UNHCR is working in south Sudanese communities and elsewhere to drill boreholes and build schools and health clinics in order to improve conditions for people to return, rebuild their lives, and remain in their homeland for good.

"If we want Ugandans to be in Uganda, Sudanese in Sudan and Portuguese in Portugal," the former Portuguese prime minister said, "we must stop war. But it is very difficult to have peace if everybody is poor, if people don't have enough to eat, if children don't have schools.

"I want everybody in the world to have a home," he said on the seventh day of a 10-day visit to Sudan and refugee camps in Chad and Kenya, promising to "tell the chiefs of the rich people" that they must do more for Africa.

Meanwhile, in the strife-torn Darfur region, where a separate two-year conflict between the Khartoum Government, allied militia and rebels in the region has killed at least 180,000 people and sparked its own wave of displacement, the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) has reported a series of incidents over the last few days, including lootings of commercial trucks and unconfirmed attacks on several villages.

The mission notes that attacks on trucks, including UN-contracted vehicles, banditry and looting are regularly reported in all three states of Darfur.