The Suffering of South Sudan A Child Nation Weeps
SOUTH SUDAN HAS JUST TURNED FIVE YEARS OLD – BUT THIS YOUNG NATION IS ALREADY ON ITS KNEES. ROCCO NURI IN AKOBO IN SOUTH SUDAN AND MIKE PFLANZ IN KAKUMA, KENYA, REPORT
LINA Obere clearly wants to play. She bothers her brother, pulling his shirt and rolling on the ground near him. She goes to her mother, Cecilia, nuzzling and trying for attention. She does not, however, disturb her twin sister, Karleta, who lies asleep under a faded pink shawl on the grimy floor of a paediatric ward in a refugee camp hospital far from their home in South Sudan.
She has anaemia and pneumonia brought on by severe malnutrition, and is so poorly she needs round the clock medical attention.
The twins will soon be five. They were born not long after their country won independence, on July 9, 2011. Like the nation as a whole, they should be looking forward to celebrating reaching their first half-decade. Instead, they are struggling and desperate.
“Everything just became too difficult at home and no-one was there to help us,” the girls’ mother says, one hand reassuringly on Karleta’s leg as she sleeps. “Everyone was hungry. People were dying. What could we do? We had to leave.”
Cecilia Obere and her family are among more than 2.4 million South Sudanese – close to one in five of the population – made homeless because of war, or hunger, or poverty. Their country, the world’s newest, has spent more than a third of its short life at war with itself.
Deadly gunbattles this week in the capital, Juba, risked a return to all-out conflict that was supposed to have ended in August last year. Britain, the US, and European nations sent special flights to evacuate their citizens from Juba this week.
The worst of the fighting – which killed 270 people between July 7 and 11 – appeared to be easing by this weekend. Riek Machar, the vice president, had left the capital with his forces “to avoid further confrontation,” his spokesman said.
Machar led the opposition forces that fought the government during the 2013-2015 civil war. He returned to government under the peace deal.
The clashes will do little to foster the calm that will be needed for the government to be able to help people like the Oberes. Focused on fighting the opposition, political attention and funds have been diverted from properly being able to invest in national development.
This has left South Sudan on its knees five years after the wild celebrations of its independence day, five years ago last weekend, when the country seceded from Sudan after decades of civil war between southern tribes and the Arabs in the north.
At independence, international donors including Britain, which helped lead the peace negotiations, queued up to offer help to build this new country that was born desperately poor, with no infrastructure, little in the way of health care or schools, and a government staffed with former soldiers unused to ruling. Despite the difficulties, hopes for a bright future were sky-high.
Those hopes were shattered by the 20132015 civil war. Since then, development indicators have barely moved. Infrastructure remains shambolic. Education, health, and social services are rudimentary, and largely implemented by foreign charities or NGOs.
The war’s effects on areas that saw fighting are clear: emptied villages, unplanted fields, bombed schools or clinics.
But the ripple effect of the conflict has even reached people living in places that escaped clashes.
The Oberes lived in such a place: the town of Isohe in Eastern Equatoria province. Cecilia’s first husband was killed when bandits stole all the family’s livestock in a cattle raid. She found help at a church mission where she swept floors and tended the garden in return for food and a place for her family to sleep. For a while, she says, her life stabilised.
“It was ok then, the children grew up well, there was work for me, and the church helped us all,” Obere says. “We planted food, it rained, the crops came, and we ate well. Just normal life. The children loved especially peanuts that we grew and pounded to paste. They would eat so much then run around full of energy.”
But then the prices in the market started rising, driven by devaluations of the local currency and a global drop in the price of South Sudan’s sole crucial export: oil. The rains failed one year, and again the next year.
More and more families like the Oberes started streaming into town from the failing farms, looking for help at the church mission. Soon, there were too many mouths and not enough food. Suddenly, the hopes of 2011 started to crack.
“I have never run away from home because of war or hunger before, nor did my parents, or any people I know,” says Obere, who is 26. “After realising my children were suffering so bad, I heard people talking about Kakuma, that you go there and people help you.
“I realised that there was nobody to help me, nobody to give me a cow or a goat to sell, so I thought, I have to go. Everyone was hungry. People were dying. What could we do?”
By the time she reached Kakuma Refugee Camp in the north of neighbouring Kenya, Karleta was very sick with Severe Acute Malnutrition.
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has recorded rates of the condition among South Sudanese refugee children recently arriving to Kakuma as high as 19 per cent of all
children, six times above the World Health Organisation’s emergency thresholds.
Hunger, not war, is now the main factor pushing South Sudanese families to flee from home, north to Sudan as well as south to Kenya. Less than four months into 2016, more than 125,000 had arrived in neighbouring countries. That was in excess of three-quarters of the total projected to flee during the whole year.
UNHCR now estimates that by the end of 2016, more than one million South Sudanese will be refugees. At least 237,000 of them will have left their homeland during its fifth birthday year, when the civil war is officially over.
But it is not all one-way traffic. Inside South Sudan, 2,000 internally displaced people each month are returning to the homes they fled when the conflict broke out in December 2013, convinced now that it is safe enough to start to rebuild their lives.
Gatluak Ruei Kon, 56, was far from home being treated in hospital for a chronic illness when the war erupted, and it became too dangerous for him to make the five-day journey back to his village.
Until recently, he was the first to sign up for help from UNHCR to make the move back to his family, near the town of Akobo close to South Sudan’s border with Ethiopia.
“I felt like I was trapped in a nightmare,” Kon says of his time in a camp in Bor town for people made homeless by the war. “I had no friends to share my worries. The only thing that kept me alive was the thought of my family.”
Being home was “a dream that comes true,” he says, but there have been great changes in the time between. “Before the war, I used to have more than 100 cattle and a big farm,” he says. “We used to produce tons of maize and sorghum. That land is very dear to me. I thought about it so much when I was in Bor. It is all I had to provide for my family. But because of the war, all the cows are gone.”
With the government still struggling to fund and implement programmes to encourage its citizens to return home, international agencies are determined to help plug the gap. But appeals for the money they need to do so are also significantly underfunded.
Ann Encontre, UNHCR’s Regional Refugee Coordinator for the South Sudan Situ- ation, says she is “extremely concerned that South Sudan is becoming a forgotten crisis”.
“With the regional refugee response plan funded at just 15 per cent, it is simply impossible to deliver even the most critical programmes to ensure food, clean water, education for children, health care, and shelter for newly arrived refugees,” she says.
“We hope the international community will not fail to act and stand by the people of South Sudan, especially those who continue to flee their homes.”
Back in Kakuma, Cecilia Obere cradled Karleta and gently encouraged her to drink the special milk formula prescribed by doctors from the International Rescue Committee, which manages the hospital ward for severely malnourished children at the camp on behalf of UNHCR.
“I am ready to go home to South Sudan now, but only if there is peace, and if there is help in case the rain fails again and we have no food,” she says. “We need schools there, and clinics, and support in case of problems.
“If you tell me that is there now, I will go. Until then, I have to stay here. I cannot return to a place where the children will suffer again.”
I have never run away from home because of war or hunger before. I realised there was nobody to help me, nobody to give me a cow or a goat to sell, so I thought, I have to go. People were dying. What could we do?