Juba, 02 October, 2020 / 10:19 pm (ACI Africa).
Refugees from South Sudan who have gone to neighboring Sudan in search of better living conditions are being mistreated instead and are being denied wages when they go to work in farms while some are poisoned in their camps, a Catholic Bishop in the host country has told ACI Africa.
In the Thursday, October 1 interview, Bishop Daniel Adwok said that South Sudanese refugees who have tried to reach Sudan during the post independent conflict in their home country have taken enormous risks including abuse at the hands of security agents and dangerous terrain such as forests and flowing waters.
“Many of the refugees in Sudan these days go to work in the agricultural fields, and some come back with nothing to show for their work. They are threatened at gunpoint and denied their wages yet the government does nothing to help,” Bishop Adwok told ACI Africa on the sidelines of a meeting of the Bishops’ Administrative Board in South Sudan’s capital Juba.
The Auxiliary Bishop of Sudan’s Khartoum Archdiocese added, “It is unbearable that the dignity of South Sudanese is being infringed upon by those expected to be protecting them and offering them refuge.”
He observed that many students who come to Kosti refugee camp located south of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, to sit for their Sudan School Certificate have been found to have food poison in their systems.
