4 UNABLE TO

GO HOME

Last September, at a meeting in Addis Ababa, President Salva Kiir and his deputy-turned-rebel leader Riek Machar signed a peace agreement, ending nearly five years of civil war.

Two weeks later, residents of the POC site at Malakal joined government soldiers in a "peace walk" around their largely empty town.

Across the border to the south, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni floated the idea that South Sudanese refugees like Logonda and Wani might soon leave: "We hope that with the UN support in regards to food and basic essentials, the refugees could return home by January and take advantage of the rains that start in March in order to grow some food."

While there have been small numbers of returnees reported, none of the refugees Al Jazeera contacted was ready to go back. Reports from those who have travelled into Kajo Keji to check on the situation, as well as poet Lo Liyong who returned to a village for the funeral of well-known South Sudanese journalist Alfred Taban in May, found swaths of empty villages and untended fields.

Land rights researcher Deng said that in his experience, most displaced populations want to return home. But that is complicated by the prevalence of property destruction and land occupation in this conflict - something he said the government has not yet addressed.

"Now, how do you again go back and start from zero?" said businessman Wani, adding that he doubted the government would provide support were they ever able to return in the case of a fully implemented peace agreement.

Among the people surveyed, more than half, 224 people, said they would return home were the fighting to stop. Among those who said they had been displaced by government soldiers, or who were certain their properties were destroyed, that percentage was even higher.

"Definitely, there has not been the kind of decision from the government to combat this in a serious way that one would need to see in order to enable a return process," Deng said.

"The fact that it's been allowed to go on for so long, and the longer that it happens the more entrenched it will become, it really contributes to the kind of problems that we're seeing around displacement and the difficulty of getting people to leave the POCs and to return from refugee camps."

The peace deal, already criticised by analysts such as Alan Boswell for its similarities to failed earlier pacts, makes no reference to land rights or compensation. "Going home", for many, will mean returning to properties that have been looted, occupied or destroyed - often without effective assistance or restitution.

"There's a major gap in humanitarian structures on this," says Lucy Hovil, senior research associate for the International Refugee Rights Initiative. "The definition of repatriation is basically dumping people over a border with three months of rations, and there's almost no mechanism in place to ensure that they can get their piece of land back ... When people return, they're going to be on their own. That's the precedent and that is the harsh reality."

The result is refugees becoming displaced within their own country, "because they still can't go home."

"People don't think about the longer-term consequences and the cyclical nature of conflict. This is sowing the seeds of the next round of conflict."

When asked by Al Jazeera in January 2019 whether the government had any policy to assist refugees returning home whose houses had been destroyed, Information Minister Makuei replied, "nothing."

He said refugees went to Uganda for political or economic reasons. "Do they mean to tell us they will not come back unless their houses are rebuilt?" he asked.

"The land policy has nothing to do with the peace agreement," he said. "The refugees who are returning home, their lands are there and they will come and occupy their land."

Some 2.3 million South Sudanese were living as refugees as of August 2019, according to the UN refugee agency. Another 1.9 million were internally displaced, with nearly 200,000 in the UN's POC sites, such as the camp at Malakal.

Deng said when the government targets land, houses and other property, it's really a way of targeting people seen as supporting the opposition or other armed groups that oppose their leadership.

"By failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant, they're really just shoring up support for the armed groups and when they go in with such a heavy hand, in the end, it just ends up turning the whole community against whoever it is that's attacking. You end up with a situation where the government may have won the war, but they have failed to win the hearts and minds of the people."

Since the peace deal was signed, fighting continues in some parts of South Sudan. A group of international monitors assessing the implementation of the pact were threatened and assaulted by government security agents. Few refugees have returned.

Last October, at a peace celebration in front of a crowd of thousands, Salva Kiir apologized to the South Sudanese for five years of war.

"It was a complete betrayal of our people and their liberation struggle and this is what has warranted my apology to the people of South Sudan," he said. "This war was not your war."

All routes were to be opened, he said, for humanitarian supplies, for trade. "More importantly, it will allow internally displaced persons to return home."

"Peace has come at last and it is here to stay."

When Wani hears Kiir speak such words, he just laughs and shakes his head. He spent much of his life - more than 30 years - in refugee camps in Uganda before South Sudan gained its independence. Now, just eight years after that historic independence vote, he's living in exile once again.

"We didn't intend to come this way, but we were forced out by the government soldiers," he said. While living in Uganda, registered as refugees, he's lost his mother, his father, and one of his nine daughters.

Gladis Blessed, who was eight years old, developed a disease that Wani first thought was malaria. He took her to the hospital, but they couldn't find a cure. He took her on a long journey to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he tried to get her better treatment. She didn't survive. He now believes someone must have poisoned her. His mother died of old age. His father had tuberculosis; He stopped eating, couldn't walk, and he died because they couldn't afford the drugs to save him.

In South Sudan, the dead should be buried in their homeland - it is an important cultural practice. But with the conflict, it was impossible for his mother and daughter. They buried the two together, side-by-side, in a Ugandan cemetery. When his father died four months later, friends were able to return his body home to Kajo Keji, and laid him to rest on the family land.

"Me I'm 50 years old, what if I die today?" he says. "My kids will not know about [South] Sudan. These kids will not go back to South Sudan."

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