A COUNTRY TORN APART
In South Sudan, threats multiply as the people divide,
UNITY STATE, SOUTH SUDAN— There are cobras and vipers here, and hungry crocodiles and belligerent hippos. But thousands of South Sudanese are hiding in these swamps because they have an even greater fear of their own government — which the United States helped install.
“When the soldiers come, we go into the water up to our necks and hide, with only our noses out of the water,” a displaced villager, Nyakier Gatluak, told me after I waded through swamps and rivers to reach the island where she shelters. She and other parents hold children and command them to be silent, hoping that they will be invisible in the water and reeds.
I asked about crocodiles and Nyakier was fatalistic. “Even if you die in the water, it’s better to be killed by snakes or crocodiles than by soldiers,” she said.
A brutal civil war here in the world’s newest country has led government forces to burn villages, kill unarmed farmers, castrate boys, rape women and girls and pillage hospitals. Rebels engage in similar behaviour. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.
More than two million South Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes, many into the perilous swamps, and UN officials estimate that at least 50,000 may have died in the past two years.
All the figures are dubious, but it may be that as many civilians are dying in South Sudan’s war as in Syria’s, and growing hunger may make the situation worse. Yet South Sudan hasn’t received the diplomatic or media attention the crisis merits.
“This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world . . . yet it has been more or less off the international radar.” ZEID RA’AD AL HUSSEIN UN HIGH COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Atragedy unfolds After I reached the island, Nyakier was the first person I met. She told me that she fled her village last May after uniformed government soldiers attacked it, shot dead some women and children and gang-raped her sister. Nyakier eventually found a place to hide on this island, whose name and location I’m not disclosing for obvious reasons.
Her 3-year-old son, Banyieny, became sick from hiding in the water and died. Now her 8-month-old son is suffering from severe acute malnutrition and is in danger as well. She is breastfeeding him but doesn’t have much milk because she herself is starving; it was mid-afternoon when we met and she had had nothing to eat so far that day.
Multiply this family’s tragedy by millions and you get a window into the catastrophe faced by South Sudan, already one of the world’s poorest nations. Even before the civil war started two years ago, a girl was much more likely to grow up and die in child- birth than to finish high school.
All sides in this civil war have engaged in atrocities, and it has unfortunately taken on an ethnic dimension. In one small market town, I found a 6-year-old boy from the Nuer tribe, Gaiy, playing with astonishingly realistic toy guns he had made from clay, including a machine gun on a tripod with an ammunition belt feeding it.
His creativity and skill made me think that he would make a great engineer, but he had different ambitions. “I want to be a soldier,” he explained. “I want to shoot Dinka,” he added, referring to members of a rival tribe that dominates the government.
I asked why, and he was blunt: “Because they are coming to kill us.”
What has evolved is an ethnic cleansing that sometimes seems to be inching toward genocide, and those at greatest risk are not combatants but women and children suffering from hunger and disease.
In one remote area, I came across a mother named Yapuot Ninrew who before the civil war had owned 60 cattle and enjoyed a decent life. Then a few months ago, government soldiers attacked. They seized Yapuot, and although she was five months pregnant, they tied her hands behind her back and hanged her by the neck from a rafter in a hut.
After a minute or so, the troops laughingly cut her down but burned her hut and stole her clothing, her cattle and everything else she owned. They also kidnapped two of her sisters as sex slaves; the sisters later escaped.
Yapuot fled into the swamps with her five children, staying neck-deep in the water all day and crawling out on islands to sleep at night.
Two of her children, ages 4 and 8, drowned in the swamps while fleeing soldiers, she said (other villagers confirmed her account).
All this is unfolding in remote areas, without outside witnesses, without a global outcry. The victims are among the most voiceless on the planet, which is one reason the killing continues. Rape as a weapon A new UN report suggests that government-affiliated soldiers were allowed to rape women in lieu of wages and adds that the abuses may constitute crimes against humanity.
“This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war — yet it has been more or less off the interna- tional radar,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights.
Aid groups are working heroically to try to help, but in an impossibly difficult environment and at a huge cost: A humanitarian worker is killed here at a rate of once every two weeks. The United Nations has said its humanitarian appeal for South Sudan is only 3-per-cent funded and some aid groups are expected to pull out of the country this year, just as needs escalate.
There are no ideal policies, but it would help to have an arms embargo and sanctions aimed at the assets of individuals on each side of the civil war: Make leaders pay a price for intransigence, instead of profiting from it.
“Go after their assets,” advises John Prendergast of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. “Stinging financial pressure that targets the top leaders on both sides will impact calculations more than anything else.”
High-level international pressure on the government and the rebels to implement their peace accord would be useful. And it would help if the American public called on elected officials to do more: The late U.S. senator Paul Simon once said that if each member of Congress had received letters from 100 people protesting the Rwanda genocide, that would have been enough to push Washington to act.
President Barack Obama was outspoken about the Darfur genocide as a senator, calling on then-president George W. Bush to do much more, and he has clear concern about mass atrocities (he has done a fine job trying to reduce the risk of slaughter in Burundi and he did the same in the run-up to South Sudan’s independence). But today, his administration can and should do more.
We can’t stop every atrocity and I’m not even sure we can stop this one. But when people are being singled out because of their ethnicity and killed, raped, mutilated and starved, when a government that we helped put in place is regarded by citizens as more dangerous than crocodiles, then surely we can try a little harder. Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for the New York Times.