In South Sudan, children caught in war
Four-year conflict, natural disasters have taken enormous toll
In this village near the Ugandan border, vultures constantly hover in the sky and dogs prowl the streets. A repugnant, choking smell fills the air. Human remains lie unburied.
Much of the village is a killing field that underscores the brutality of a 4-year-old civil war tearing apart the world’s newest nation.
“My husband’s dead body is still uncollected since he was killed a month ago,” said Alek Kuur, 40, who has since sought refuge with her four daughters in a Catholic church in the nearby town of Torit. “We were attacked in the middle of the night. The soldiers were claiming that we are rebels. They shot and killed my husband and son.”
Kuur was talking about an April attack when South Sudanese soldiers allegedly pulled hundreds of people from their homes, accusing them of harboring rebel forces and killing members of the Dinka tribe.
But Kuur believes being a member of the Nuer tribe was her and her village’s real offense to the government soldiers.
Hopes of a resolution to South Sudan’s civil war were high in the past year or two. Instead, the vio- lence has escalated to the point that the Vatican announced in late May that Pope Francis was canceling a visit to the country. In the north, fields strewn with bodies are increasingly common.
“They killed several people from our tribe during the attack,” Kuur recalled. “They targeted men and male children. If you go to the villages right now, you will see bodies all over the place. The bodies are decomposing and no one bothers.”
South Sudan’s civil war is a political and ethnic conflict. President Salva Kiir is a member of the majority Dinkas, while rebel commander and former vice president Riek Machar is a Nuer, the second-largest ethnic group in the country. Tensions between the two men date to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, but the civil war began two years later when Kiir fired Machar.
Tens of thousands of people have since been killed. More than 3 million have been displaced, and the possible famine is threatening millions more.
“We received hundreds of displaced people during the attack,” said Jakino Lomogo, the priest at the Church of St. Peter and Paul that hosts Kuur and her family.
Children as young as 7 who didn’t escape the government troops were forced to fight with them to replenish the regime’s diminishing ranks of fighters, Lomogo and others said. Many of those children show distended bellies, indicating malnutrition.
Teng, 10, a child government soldier, said forces on either side storm schools and homes to recruit children at gunpoint.
“They sometimes kill your parents to ensure that you never think about them during the training,” Teng said. “Every male child here is a soldier on his own supporting either the government or rebels. It’s not our desire to be soldiers, but we are forced to so that we can protect ourselves.”
South Sudan’s government recruited 1,300 children to fight last year, according to the United Nations. That brought the total number of children in the conflict to more than 17,000 since 2013.
“Children are once again being targeted for child recruitment as the fighting intensifies,” said UNICEF’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa, Leila Gharagozloo-Pakkala.
The bodies left in the fields and the continued use of child soldiers illustrates how the civil war has worsened despite a peace agreement signed in August 2015.
The country’s dismal economy suggests the situation won’t change. Drilling revenues are down as oil prices dropped. Drought makes the threat of famine one of the worst looming disasters in the world.
South Sudanese lawmaker Goc Makuac, a Kiir ally, blamed the rebels for the economy’s troubles.
“The only way to stabilize this country is to stop the war across the country,” he said.
The economy is not on Kuur’s mind, however. The memory of her husband still haunts her.
“Kiir and Machar should remember the people of this country .... We are losing our children and husbands.” she said. “They should know that God will never forgive them.”