KHARTOUM: An airlift from Khartoum of sick, elderly and other "extremely vulnerable" South Sudanese, suspended after a November plane crash, re-started yesterday, the International Organisation for Migration said.
"We are resuming the flights," and 101 passengers took off from the Sudanese capital in two trips yesterday to Aweil in the South’s Northern Bahr El Ghazal state, said Filiz Demir, an IOM official.
The flights will continue until Thursday moving around 300 people to Aweil and Wau, she said, providing Christian Southerners with a well-timed seasonal gift.
The vulnerable group are among roughly 40,000 Southerners encamped around the Sudanese capital awaiting transport to the South, which became independent in July last year.
Community workers say those in the camps have lost their regular jobs and sold their homes.
IOM suspended the airlift in mid-November when its only chartered plane crashed on landing at the Aweil airstrip. Miraculously, none of the passengers was hurt.
More than 1,000 extremely vulnerable South Sudanese had been moved in November before the accident.
South Sudan’s embassy says that, at last count, there were 171,000 South Sudanese still in the Khartoum area after an April deadline for them to formalise their status or leave the country.
Sudan and South Sudan have not come up with a detailed plan for returning the South Sudanese, and disagreements have stalled implementation of key deals signed in September on security and economic issues. Millions of Southerners fled to the north during a 22-year civil war which ended in a 2005 peace deal that paved the way for South Sudan’s independence following a referendum.
Meanwhile, rebels in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region yesterday reported the seizure of a town from government control after fighting that resulted in arrests and casualties. The Sudan Liberation Army’s (SLA’s) Abdelwahid Nur faction took control of Golo, a major town in the Jebel Marra area, at about mid-day yesterday after fighting when government militia tried to attack a rebel position, the group’s spokesman Ibrahim Al-Hillu told AFP.
Hillu said the rebels seized heavy machine guns, mortars, vehicles and other military equipment in the town and had taken prisoners. There were also casualties but he had no details.
Sudan’s army spokesman could not be reached for comment.
The fertile and mountainous Jebel Marra area is home to the non-Arab Fur people who gave their name to Darfur (Land of the Fur), and who are represented by Nur’s faction.
The group has several hundred combatants and a "sphere of influence" limited to the Jebel Marra region, which has been regularly targeted by government military operations and air attacks, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based independent research project.
In May, Nur’s faction along with the SLA-Minni Minnawi group briefly took control of the southern Darfur town of Girayda from government forces.
Peacekeepers from the African Union-UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) later found bodies in the street and signs of looting.
The SLA and other ethnic insurgents began an uprising against the Arab-dominated Khartoum government nearly a decade ago.
FROM: AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
