UN refugee agency relocates South Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia ahead of rainy season

The UN Refugee Agency ( UNHCR) has started to relocate more than 50,000 South Sudanese refugees from flood-prone areas in Ethiopia ahead of the rainy season, which is expected to start in late April, a UN spokesman said here Tuesday.

"The refugees are being moved from the Leitchuor and Nip Nip refugee camps in the Gambella region," Farhan Haq, the deputy UN spokesman, said at a daily news briefing here.

"They are being moved the existing Pugnido camp and a new camp called Jewi which was opened over the weekend and is located some 18 kilometers from the regional capital Gambella," said Haq.

"UNHCR says that finding the land with the right conditions to set up another refugee camp has been a huge challenge, as several sites that had been identified immediately after last year's rainy season were subsequently declared unsuitable," he said. "It adds that more land is still needed to accommodate new arrivals from South Sudan."

The refugees received high energy biscuits and water as they boarded the buses for the 300-kilometer-long journey, which takes about eight hours. A total of 51,316 refugees from flood-prone areas in the two camps will be relocated.

Political in-fighting between South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, started in mid-December 2013 and subsequently turned into a full-fledged conflict, uprooting some two million people in the world's youngest country. Nearly 1.5 million people are internally displaced inside the country and more than half a million fled across the border into neighboring countries, many of them to Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is Africa's largest refugee-hosting country with more than 670,000 refugees, mainly from Somalia, followed by South Sudan, Sudan and Eritrea. This includes more than 250,000 South Sudanese refugees in the Gambella region, of whom more than 194, 000 have arrived since mid-December 2013. Endite