Returnees stranded in Kosti and Malakal

About 3,500 southerners returning home from the north have been stranded in Kosti and Malakal with little access to any food, shelter or sanitation, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Of these, about 1,500 - some of whom left their homes three months ago - were currently squatting in Kosti due to a lack of barges travelling down-river, money to pay for the journey, or fear of getting stuck in the garrison town of Malakal, about 900 km farther south along the Nile, Ann Kristin Brunborg, an OCHA programme coordinator, told IRIN. The other 2,000 have managed to make it to Malakal, but are stuck because of general insecurity in the area and the lack of passenger space on barges, according to OCHA. In any case, barges were unable to travel far beyond the town due to low water levels, Brunborg told IRIN. "They have some plastic sheeting for cover, but the ground is muddy, and with the rains and the defecation in the open, the living conditions are desperate," she said. Grains and oil had been distributed by an NGO, the Adventist Development and Relief Association, in Kosti, she said, but a local mill was refusing to grind the grains. In consequence, many of the returnees, who had exhausted funds raised from selling their possessions, were now complaining of stomach pains. Conditions in Malakal were also deteriorating rapidly. Eighty percent of the town's 120,000 residents and most of the 35,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in and around the town lack clean drinking water due to a water plant having been out of action for a month, according to the UN. Nadia el Maaroufi, an OCHA official, told IRIN last week: "People are taking water direct from the Nile, leading to an unknown number of deaths and cases of diarrhoea. We do not know how many people are dying." Nothing had been done to repair the plant, she added. Meanwhile, security conditions around Malakal, in the Shilluk Kingdom area, remain tense. Local sources say at least 100,000 people were displaced in the area earlier this year when militias razed an unknown number of villages to the ground, looting and killing along the way. The Kosti-Malakal route is a hub for transport and movement from north to southern and western Sudan. Kosti in particular has key road and rail networks, as well as river barges. But the barges used for transport are generally made for freight, forcing the passengers to sit on the upper deck and defecate into the river. Many of them were in bad shape and in need of rehabilitation, said Brunborg, adding that accidents that cost lives could easily happen. Most of those stranded in Kosti and Malakal had come from Khartoum; others had arrived on buses and trucks from Kassala and Port Sudan, in a bid to reach the south in expectation of a peace agreement between the government of Sudan and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army. Many of Sudan's three million to for million displaced people and economic migrants - between one and two million of them around Khartoum - are expected to return to their homes once an agreement has been signed. According to OCHA, all returnees traveling to Equatoria and Upper Nile are expected to travel through Kosti despite the rainy season, which has just started. Large numbers going to Kordofan, Darfur and Bahr al-Ghazal will also use the same route. It was essential that the returnees be informed of the numbers who had been stranded en route, Brunborg emphasised. Complicating matters was the fact that agencies did not have budgets to activate an emergency response to assist the returnees, while the crisis in Darfur was taking up most of the donors' attention, Brunborg told IRIN. A worst-case scenario in the coming months would be "a humanitarian crisis" unless agencies managed to raise money, get response teams in place and prepare for the return of hundreds of thousands of people. "The fact that millions of IDPs might return to their homes areas in Sudan after the signing of a peace agreement should not come as a surprise to anyone," she said.