Greed, lawlessness torture South Sudan
Burgeoning humanitarian crisis and violence has stalled development of fledgling state
War without end.
South Sudan won hard-fought independence from Sudan four years ago this month, but the fledgling state was still in its infancy when it was shaken by a new and horrifying conflict. Now it is in a massive humanitarian crisis, its people devastated and its oil-fuelled economy near collapse.
The war began in December 2013, when South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused his Nuer former deputy, Riek Machar, of fomenting rebellion. Fighting erupted in the capital Juba, Dinka troops attacked Nuer civilians, the Nuer retaliated and a downward spiral of violence began.
Tens of thousands have been killed, 2 million have been displaced and more than 4 million of the country’s 12 million people are facing acute hunger.
“The quality of life has plunged,” says Joyce Luma, the World Food Program country director for South Sudan. “There’s acute food insecurity, fighting has reduced food production and inflation rates in the last three months have risen up to 20 per cent. Now that the rainy season has started there’s a cholera outbreak.”
Last month, reports from the UN and human rights groups told of appalling atrocities that spared no one, and UNICEF head Anthony Lake called them “unspeakable.”
“Survivors report that boys have been castrated and left to bleed to death,” he said in a statement. “Girls as young as 8 have been gang-raped and murdered. . . . Others have been thrown into burning buildings.”
Children have also been recruited as soldiers “on an alarming scale” by armed groups on both sides.
It’s unusual for violence to continue with such intensity in the rainy season, says Luma. “People are taking refuge in swampy areas where it’s difficult for the fighting forces to go. They are living in deplorable conditions.”
The cause of this extreme violence puzzles — and terrifies — even the South Sudanese, no strangers to war.
“It’s the question on the lips of everyone,” says Jok Madut Jok, of the Sudd Institute in Juba, also a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
“South Sudan has known war for the better part of 200 years. But now I think that something in the social order has broken to allow this.”
When the killings began in Juba, he says, “It was an extremely shocking incident of violence against unarmed people. It triggered vengefulness and retribution.
“People at first thought it was political rivalry, then it took on an ethnic character. When they feared they would be attacked because of their ethnicity, they wanted to take preemptive action. Then there were no limits.”
But the underlying causes were lack of governance and rule of law, says Jok.
“On one hand, people had a heavyhanded, often violent, state, on the other hand, the ubiquitous absence of government in the rural areas. South Sudan citizens see that the government is doing things to them, but not for them.”
Lawlessness was accelerated by greed, says the Washington-based Enough Project. “South Sudan’s political leadership embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from the state treasury, leaving little for education, health or other services,” Akshaya Kumar, George Clooney and founding director John Prendergast wrote at CNN.com. “Soon this violent kleptocracy degenerated along factional lines.”
The marriage of convenience that former hostile rebel leaders entered into at independence crumbled quickly under accusations of corruption, nepotism and unconstitutional actions by the president. When hostility flared into violence, it also fed the flames of ethnic hatred among people who had lived together, often uneasily, for centuries.
“The ethnic conflict between the Nuer and the Shilluk, and the Dinka on the other hand, is a major impedi- ment to peace,” says Yohannes Woldemariam of Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colo. Each of the groups, he adds, is a complex “cluster of ethnicities.” All are herders and farmers from the Nile Valley region who have tussled for land for decades, and whose rivalries were exploited by the north during Sudan’s long civil war.
With bloodshed, homelessness, hunger and disease continuing on a huge scale, humanitarian agencies are calling for solutions, including tougher sanctions. “Targeting the corrupt networks and their international enablers — including unscrupulous bankers, corporations and traffickers . . . should be the centerpiece of the international community’s response,” says Enough. Diplomacy has so far failed. Six rounds of peace talks have col- lapsed since the conflict in South Sudan exploded. Now a East African regional organization is ready to launch new negotiations, with the addition of European countries and China.
Some say it is the last chance for peace. Millions living in misery are hoping against all odds that finally their long agony of war will come to an end.