By James Innocent
The Initiative for Peace and Communication Association (IPCA) organized a one day brief community dialogue with justice Actors to provide opportunities for youth, women IDPS, Refugees and returnees, to reclaim and advocate for their rights in Yei River County of Central Equatoria State on Tuesday which brought up youths, women, police, chiefs and other government authorities targeting thirty five participants.
Blantine Loice is one of the program managers for IPCA, she says the organization will continue to boost community through empowerment of the youths, police, chiefs and the whole community of Yei River County and address issues affecting the Refugees and the Returnees whenever they have challenges in their various locations in case of any threats they face.
“Blantine mentions that, We have psychosocial support that can also support in the area of trauma healing in the community were one of the officers will reach up to the place where the person is having an issue so that he or she is well counselled so with today’s dialogue we are going to form groups to poster peaceful coexistence among the police and the citizens as we all believe that the GBV has their clusters,” he mentions.
Meanwhile the Executive director for Yei River County Timon Wani points out that the citizens and the police in the community don’t have a close relationship among themselves in the community so he urged IPCA to continue providing capacity building training for the police and the citizens to live in a peaceful relationship.
“If there is no relationship between the police and the citizens, no any citizen will come close to the police station and when police goes close to the civilians, they will run away from them so I want the gap between the police and the civilians to be strengthened through capacity building,” he stated.
Alex Kenyi Lokosa shows happiness for the dialogue organized by the organization because most of the IDPS failed to leave the houses belonging to the returnees who wanted to settle so it’s better if someone requests for a land from the owners with agreement and there are many cases of plots being sold by area chiefs and, I appeal to the chiefs to stop selling plots belonging to people who have gone for refugee in the neighboring countries to avoid conflicts in the community,” he added.