The International Committee of the Red Cross says more than 5,000 people in South Sudan are missing due to inter-communal violence and conflict.
This was revealed ahead of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances marked on August 30 of each year.
The day was created to draw attention to the fate of individuals imprisoned at places and under poor conditions unknown to their relatives or legal representatives.
Those missing were registered by ICRC in South Sudan as well as by families abroad in countries such as Uganda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya who are looking for their loved ones.
ICRC says most of them have gone missing because they were forced to flee fighting or internal violence and lost contact with their loved ones.
In many cases, the military and National Security Service were implicated in the disappearances.
In one example, in January 2017, Dong Samuel Luak, a prominent South Sudanese lawyer and human rights activist, and Aggrey Ezbon Idri, a member of the political opposition, were abducted from the streets of Nairobi, Kenya.
More than two years later, the United Nations Panel of Experts on South Sudan issued a report finding that South Sudan’s National Security Service was responsible for kidnapping them.
The two were reportedly killed on January 30, 2017, but the government vehemently denied executing them.
According to ICRC, it is difficult to trace the missing people since the government has not established a mechanism to trace them.
The ICRC Protection Coordinator for South Sudan, Nourane Houas says the government has a fundamental role to play in ensuring that the families of the missing people find answers to their missing loved ones, by creating a national database and registering the missing.
“By making sure that they gather registration of people, and so if for example, these people are missing, then there will be a mechanism in place like a national information bureau, for example, will be established, that would gather the data of people who would be acknowledged as missing people,” Houas said.
From January to June 2020, the ICRC reunited 76 people, including children, with their families and facilitated more than 55,000 phone calls among family members separated by conflicts and other situations of violence.
The ICRC is also helping detainees keep in touch with their families through letters and phone calls. Despite the challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ICRC has been able to register more than 577 new cases of missing people this year, to continue the search for the missing.