UN officials praise Sudan for hosting South Sudanese refugees

The UN Secretary-General’s Humanitarian Envoy Abdullah Al Matouq and UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres returned yesterday from a visit to White Nile state, where more than 50,000 South Sudanese refugees currently reside at four sites. They visited the Joda border crossing through which the majority of the South Sudanese refugees have arrived in White Nile state and went to El Alagaya refugee site, which hosts over 8,000 refugees, UNHCR reported in a press release, issued on Wednesday.   “We are extremely grateful to the Government of Sudan and its people for the hospitality they continue to extend to South Sudanese refugees,” said Guterres. “We need to collectively build on these efforts and ensure that they can be sustained in order to not only support the refugee response but also mitigate the impact this large influx has had on Sudanese host communities. I am therefore appealing to the donor community for further financial support to ensure we have the means to respond to the continued influx from South Sudan,” he said.  Al Matouq and Mr Guterres met with President Omar Al Bashir and ministers in Khartoum today, to discuss ways in which the international humanitarian community can strengthen its partnerships with the Sudanese government to improve cooperation on humanitarian assistance across the country, including for the South Sudan refugees. Deteriorating humanitarian situation “The humanitarian challenges in Sudan are immense,” said Al Matouq. “The number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in Sudan has risen by 800,000 since the start of 2014 (as of July 2014). This is in addition to some 6.1 million people who required humanitarian assistance at the beginning of 2014,” he stated. The growing number of South Sudanese refugees further compounds a deteriorating humanitarian situation across Sudan. In Darfur alone, over 400,000 people have been displaced since the beginning of the year, placing significant strain on the delivery of humanitarian services.   The UNHCR reported that more than 2,000 new refugees from South Sudan were registered in the past week. This brings the total number of South Sudanese refugees to 102,695 people since December 2013, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sudan stated in its latest weekly bulletin released today. “This means that, on average, over 10,000 people have arrived from South Sudan each month. If this trend continues, there may be over 120,000 refugees from South Sudan in Sudan by mid-December 2014.” Overview: Numbers of South Sudanese refugees in Sudan over the past ten months (OCHA Humanitarian Bulletin Sudan, 13-19 October 2014)