Side view of Mangateen IDPs Camp as of Monday, 29th May 2023. Photo Credit: Charles Wote/Eye Radio.

Internally Displaced Persons at the Mangateen camp in Juba are urging the unity government to provide them with compensation if they are to return home.

Chapter 3 of the 2018 peace accord mandates the interim government to institute programs for relief, protection, repatriation, resettlement reintegration and rehabilitation of the IDPs and returnees.

The programs are to offer special considerations to conflict affected persons such as children, women, widows, war wounded, orphans in the provision of public service delivery.

These include access to health and education services and grant the host communities the same benefit, protection and humanitarian services.

Meanwhile, in chapter 5, the government is also tasked with forming the Commission for Truth, Reconciliation, and Healing, the Hybrid Court for South Sudan, and the Compensation and Reparation Authority.

However, both the CTRH and the Reparation and Compensation Authority have not been established – three years after the formation of the unity government.

Geng Maliah, the deputy chairperson for Mangateen Camp Management Committee said they are facing many challenges including lack of food, shelter and shortage of water at the camp.

“We are still here simply because the peace is not fully implemented,” Maliah said in an interview with Eye Radio on Tuesday.

“If peace is fully implemented and we are relocated to our places of origin and also, we are compensated, because you cannot just go back home. You will not be able to do what you want there.”

Maliah said he expects the government to rehabilitate and compensate the displaced civilians to enable them to start a new life.

“As an IDPs, I can say it [peace accord] is not yet implemented. If I am taking six months without receiving anything, how would I know that there is peace going on because I am here suffering running to where I can get food.”

The makeshift camp in the heart of the capital was established in 2015 and hosts around 14 thousand internally displaced people who fled the second cycle of conflict in the country.

Camp chairperson Makuei Chien Jok recently told Eye Radio the IDPs population are vulnerable to extreme weather events as the makeshift shelters aged and plastic sheets torn by the sun.

Makuei said they have suffered humanitarian neglect for a long time and last received plastic sheets in 2019.

Meanwhile, Karbino Keah, Mangateen IDPs Zone B leader said due to the lack of food, they are currently surviving on mango fruits.

“We don’t have food, we don’t have access to good education, we don’t have water and we lack many things. Our women always go in the morning to collect mangoes in the bush to come and sell it for our survival.”