4 - Regret
Summary
As Mol boarded his fight in 2012, he was fully informed of risks, but by 2013 he regretted taking them. That year, nine days before Christmas, six armed men followed him home. As he reached his front gate to his Juba home, they approached him from the side.
“What tribe are you?” they asked him.
“Why are you asking me?” he responded.
One of them grabbed him, but he managed to pull away, and ran to a UN IDP camp nearby.
Twenty-nine years earlier, Mol was a young boy studying in an elementary school in Maiwut, a small town in southern Sudan. One morning, militias arrived at his school and he fled out the back door, later taking a bus to Khartoum, a train to Wadi Halfa, a boat to Egypt, and a Jeep to Israel. He settled in Tel Aviv and was given temporary protection from deportation, but no work visa. Though he managed to survive by finding a job on the black market, in 2012 he was nervous he would be detained, and so asked OBI for help returning, undergoing an interview with HIAS shortly after. Unlike some refugees, he was warned by HIAS that there was food insecurity and violence in South Sudan. He also knew that most past returnees regretted their decision to return home, and that he might feel regret as well.
He nonetheless accepted OBI's free flight and $1,500, arriving in Juba shortly after. He opened a small shop, made a decent income, and was happy with his decision to return until, nine days before Christmas, six men forced him from his home. As of 2014 he still lived in an IDP camp near a military base, where soldiers occasionally fired at camp residents. He had no access to food, as the camp only provided food aid to children, and he feared venturing outside because his ethnicity is clear from Nuer tribal scars on his forehead. When I visited him, latrines in the camp were overflowing, dysentery spreading, and Médecins Sans Frontières evacuating. Today, if Mol could, he would go back in time, reject the help of OBI, and instead live in Israel, even if this meant living in detention.
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- Information
- The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation , pp. 88 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018