Chol Deng, her husband and five children sit, exhausted, under a tree, having journeyed back to South Sudan five years after fleeing their corpse-strewn hometown Malakal.Encouraged by a six-month lull in fighting as a peace deal holds for the first time since 2015, the family last month joined scores of others warily returning home from Ethiopia and Sudan.
“People died, lots of them. People could literally walk on dead bodies across Malakal. That was why we left,” Deng told AFP, recounting the family’s flight to Sudan in February 2014. “I want to know if the country has peace. I want my kids to come back home.”
But for now, they will stay in Udier, an opposition-controlled village relatively untouched by war in the Upper Nile region, keeping an eye on a peace deal which appears to have run worryingly aground, analysts and diplomats warn.
At some point, they are hoping to return to Malakal, once the country’s second city and now a ghost town of flattened, burned homes flanked by a large UN-protected camp where some 30,000 former residents live.
“I am always scared, I have seen people dying,” Deng said of her fears of fresh fighting.
In Udier, like in much of the country, young men with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders can be seen wandering along dirt paths between villages or strolling through the market. Just in case.
Stuck
Observers warn that the latest peace deal is in danger, with a long list of tricky issues to be resolved before a unity government is formed in May.
“The two sides stopped fighting. That’s the good news. But now they’re stuck on nearly everything else,” said Alan Boswell, a South Sudan expert with the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Speaking to AFP in Juba, UN envoy David Shearer said it was promising to see that opposition members were back in town, for the first time in two years.
However “we should be further along … if momentum slows, frustration sets in, and that might lead to anger.”
Observers warn that reuniting arch-rivals President Salva Kiir and rebel leader and former vice president Riek Machar in government for a third time without resolving these issues could be a recipe for further disaster. It was the pair’s running rivalry which kickstarted a civil war in 2013 characterised by brutal violence, rape and UN warnings about “ethnic cleansing”.
A 2015 peace deal brought Machar back as vice-president, and he returned to Juba with heavy security.
When the deal fell apart in July 2016, the capital was engulfed by a brutal battle between their rival armies. Machar fled on foot with the fighting spreading across the country.