Batul Javil's story is familiar, but terrifying all the same. She had taken her children to visit her parents in a neighbouring village in Sudan's southern Blue Nile state beyond which, after an international border was created in July 2011, Khartoum's rule ends and newly independent South Sudan begins. It was a day, she says, like any other. Then without warning, all hell broke loose.
"All of a sudden, the war came," Javil says. A plane darkened the sky, dropping bombs indiscriminately on the village and its inhabitants. All they could do was run, she says, try to find cover, simply get away. The family could not go back to their village, could not stay where they were, so they headed for the border crossing into South Sudan's Upper Nile state. "It took three days to get to the border. We walked and rested, walked and rested. There was no water. The children were very hungry. All the time the military plane was circling. We were very fearful."
Now, having reached the relative safety of Gendrassa camp in Maban county, one of five centres aided and supplied by Oxfam in co-operation with the UN's refugee agency, Batul says she misses her home and, most of all, her youngest child, who died of complications arising from malnutrition, fever and anaemia during the trek out of Blue Nile.
"I miss my child, I miss my husband. We lost all our animals. We did not even have a chicken to take with us. We have only the clothes we wear … Life is difficult. I don't know when it will end. I don't know when we will go back."
In newly established Kaya camp, down the long, dirt road from Gendrassa and the nearby town of Bunj, Hamed Yusif squats on the ground, carving wooden legs for a bed he is making for his family. A new arrival, he too tells of aerial bombing by the Sudanese armed forces' Russian-made Antonovs and by artillery that forced his family to flee their village. "All the time they are attacking, attacking," Yusif says. "The children and the women ran into the bush. The animals died. The houses were burned by the army. We lived under trees in the bush. We were running for two days. We could only carry water. We ate leaves and berries."
Yusif slices a strip of wood from the stump he is carving, and says he has a message for Sudan's president, whom the refugees hold responsible for the violence in Blue Nile: "I ask Omar al-Bashir, please stop the war, please stop the bombing. If he came here, we would ask him to stop the war." But he is not hopeful his plea will be heard. "I don't want to go home. We will stay here."
The crisis in Blue Nile, and a similar emergency in an adjacent Sudanese border state, South Kordofan, caught the international community unawares when it erupted in 2011 at the time of South Sudan's independence... read more:
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