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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/opinion/nicholas-kristof-starvation-as-a-product-of-war.html?emc=edit_th_20150723&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=36377513&_r=0
– Website Link Includes Video.
SOUTH SUDAN – STARVATION AS A
PRODUCT OF WAR
By July 23, 2015
WEIL, South Sudan — One gauge of the famine looming in South Sudan is that
people are simply collapsing from hunger.
As I was driving into this city, a woman was lying inert on the road. She
was Nyanjok Garang, and she said she hadn’t eaten for three days. She had set
out to look for work, maybe washing clothes, in hopes of keeping her two
children alive. After a day of fruitless walking she had collapsed.
“My children are hungry,” she said. “I’m hungry. There’s not even a cent
left to buy bread.” Her husband is a soldier in the government forces fighting
in South Sudan’s civil war, but she doesn’t even know if he is still alive. So
she left her children with a neighbor and set out in hopes of finding work —
“and then I blacked out.”
A horrific famine enveloped what is now South Sudan
in 1988, and there are some signs that this year could see a repeat. As in
1988, weather has led to poor harvests on top of civil war that has made it
difficult to plant crops and move food around the country.
President Obama will be focusing on the South Sudan civil war in his trip
starting Thursday night to Kenya and Ethiopia, both neighbors to South Sudan.
The war is not only a military crisis but also a humanitarian catastrophe, which makes it all the
more important to step up efforts to bring about peace.
You might think that what’s needed to end a famine is food. Actually,
what’s essential above all is an international push of intensive diplomacy and
targeted sanctions to reach a compromise peace deal and end the civil war. Yes,
Obama has plenty on his plate already, but no other country has the leverage
America does. And in peace, South Sudan can care for itself. But as long as the
war continues, South Sudanese will face starvation — especially women and
girls.
The gender dynamics of hunger are obvious: In Aweil, the hospital ward is
full of skeletal women and girls, looking like concentration camp survivors.
That’s because (as in many places around the world) when food is insufficient,
families allocate it to men and boys, and women and girls disproportionately
starve.
One 15-year-old girl in the hospital, Rebecca Athian, was so malnourished
that her bones pushed through her skin and she had a measure of anemia (a
hemoglobin level of 3) that in the West is pretty much unheard-of. Yet the hospital
was now forced to discharge her to make way for new patients.
Rebecca has already lost two siblings in the last year, and although the
causes of death were never fully determined, it’s a good guess that they were
malnutrition-related. Her mother would like to marry Rebecca off, because it
would then be her husband’s duty to feed her and keep her alive. But she says
Rebecca has been raped, so men are unwilling to marry her.
The United Nations says 4.6 million people in South Sudan — more than
one-third of the population — are “severely food insecure,” and the situation will
deteriorate in the coming months because the next major harvest won’t come
until October or November. Until then, there is nothing to eat.
“It is the first time we’ve seen so many cases like this,” said Dr. Dut
Pioth, the acting director of the hospital. “It’s going to be like what we saw
in 1988.”
Dr. Dut was 11 years old during that famine, and he remembers some
relatives starving to death. His family fled to Khartoum, where he thrived in
school and attended medical school. But he is frustrated because what patients
often need now isn’t so much medical care, but rather food and peace.
To see starving children is particularly wrenching. They show no emotions:
They do not cry or smile or frown, but simply gaze blankly, their bodies
unwilling to waste a calorie on emotion when every iota of energy must go to
keep major organs functioning.
It’s striking that this area of South Sudan is not directly affected by
fighting; it’s calm here. But the hunger is still war-related, for the conflict
is keeping food and supplies out. The road from the capital, Juba, has been
blocked by fighting, and disputes with Sudan have closed the border to the north.
So this area is cut off, prices are skyrocketing, jobs are disappearing, and
ordinary workers can’t afford to buy food.
The only certainty is that it will get worse in the coming months, and the
women and girls who die will be war casualties. “Those who are dying of
gunshots,” Dr. Dut notes, “are fewer than those who are dying of hunger.”
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Subject: South Sudan - Intense Fighting - Humanitarian Tragedy - Women
& Children
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South Sudan - Intense Fighting - Humanitarian Tragedy – Women & Children
Text of article follows photos. http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/africa/celebrations-forgotten-as-south-sudan-tears-itself-apart-1.2261384
SOUTH SUDAN CRISIS – WOMEN’S TRAUMA IN PREGNANCY &
CHILDBIRTH
A midwife
tends to a newborn baby girl born onto a tarpaulin on the floor, completely in
the dark except for the light of a torch
A midwife
examines an expectant mother by torchlight in the Goal clinic at Balliet, along
the Sobat RiverPicture: Julien Behal/PA
June 24, 2015 - In places where the fighting is fiercest, no one is even
attempting to count the dead. Nearly half the population of the world’s newest
nation, South Sudan, is in danger of going hungry. New atrocities are reported
almost every day. And more than 1.5 million people have fled their homes, the
vast majority to swampland villages where they hope rising waters during the
rainy season will keep them safe from marauding soldiers.
“There is no
more country,” said John Khamis (38) who has spent much of his nation’s
existence sheltered in a camp on a United Nations base. “I don’t know how the
fighting stops now.” It has been less than two years since a power struggle
between the nation’s leaders plunged South Sudan into chaos, inflaming old
ethnic tensions that almost immediately tore this new country apart. Despite
repeated attempts at peace, some of the deadliest fighting of the civil war has
erupted in the last few months. The warring leaders are unflinchingly
entrenched in their positions, and the kinds of abuses that shocked the world
early in the conflict, including the use of child soldiers and deliberate
attacks on civilians, are reoccurring with new ferocity.
“The details
of the worsening violence against children are unspeakable,” the director of Unicef, Anthony Lake, said in a statement this week.
“Survivors report that boys have been castrated and left to bleed to death.
Girls as young as 8 have been gang raped and murdered. Children have been tied
together before their attackers slit their throats. Others have been thrown
into burning buildings.”
Even the
spokesman for the military, the South Sudanese Liberation Army,
acknowledged that the conflict was pointless. “This is a senseless war,” said
the spokesman, Col Phillip Guarang. Chol Garkouth (15) can barely remember how
his family celebrated his country’s independence from Sudan four years ago. He
does not know about the support the United States gave to South Sudan’s creation, the
eight peace deals that have collapsed since his fledgling nation quickly
spiraled into civil war, or even much about the politics fueling the fire.
But he knows
why he picked up a gun. “All the other boys my age were going to fight,” Chol
said from his hospital bed, bleary-eyed, a bullet wound in his leg. “I wanted
to go fight with them.”
Many
observers argue that the humanitarian crisis seems to get worse by the day. The
country’s economy is in free fall, and the cost of food, gas and other
essentials has skyrocketed. By April, 3.8 million people did not have enough
food. Within a month, that number had grown by nearly a million.
“A
staggering number of people are going hungry,” said Joyce Luma, the director of the World Food
Programme in South Sudan. So many people are seeking refuge that in one village
north of the city of Malakal, Wau Shilluk, the population has exploded to more
than 39,000 from 3,000. For more than a month, no aid could get there because
of the fighting, and children described going as many as five days without a
meal.
International
aid groups had to cancel repeated trips last week because of shelling and
clashes. Finally, aid workers went despite the risks, but on the way back
gunmen shot at one of the boats – though it was clearly marked with an aid
group’s flag – forcing workers to dive for cover and speed back to port.
George Fominyen, the spokesman for World
Food Programme here, said it was a race against time to deliver food and other
supplies before the heavy rains. “When you look at the map and the stretches of
land these people crossed to survive, you have to ask how in the world did they
make it there alive,” he said of the displaced masses.
Tens of
thousands have sought refuge in UN camps, many for more than a year. The
compounds were never built to house refugees but are now taking on a feeling of
permanence. Here in Malakal, more than 7,000 people have arrived in the last
two months, swelling the compound’s population to more than 30,000.
With
families piled on families, much of the camp has become an open sewer. The
fighting has kept supplies from arriving from the capital, and there are
shortages of just about everything. UN officials say they face an impossible
choice: open their doors to the desperate or let people die.
This is a
far cry from what international officials envisioned when the decades of war
between northern and southern Sudan ended and a peace treaty was reached in
2005, paving the way for independence from Sudan. In 2011, when South Sudan
voted to separate from Sudan, the leaders of the new nation’s two largest
ethnic groups – the Dinka and the Nuer – joined in forming a government. Then,
in December 2013, President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, accused his former vice
president, Riek Machar, a Nuer, of plotting a coup. The
two had a history of hostility dating back decades, and their personal
political struggle quickly swallowed the country, setting off a new round of
violence.
The fighting
spread from the capital and has been most intense in two regions where there
are oil fields. For Kiir and Machar, it is not just territory that they are
trying to control. They need alliances with the nation’s many other ethnic
groups. So when the militia leader of one of the nation’s largest groups, the
Shilluk, broke from the government in May and began an assault on the towns
leading to the last remaining working oil fields in the country, it represented
a major blow to Kiir’s hold on power. The vast majority of the nation’s budget
comes from oil.
“They were
very close to taking the oil fields,” Guarang said of the rebel advance. To get
there, the rebels had to take Malakal. The fighting raged just outside the
camp, and the burned remains of cars sit just beyond the fence. Farther north,
the town of Melut was leveled, and aid workers were stranded for days. Their
warehouses and supply depots were ransacked and looted.
Villages
were torched; hundreds of thousands fled to the bush; and untold numbers of
civilians were killed. The opposing forces now sit on opposite sides of the
Nile, occasionally lobbing mortar shells at each other, the bombs flying over
this camp and the civilians huddled for safety. Before the spring offensive,
the last major fighting in this area was over a year ago.
Malakal had
changed hands at least eight times. But as fighting eased in recent months,
some people had started to go back to the city, opening a market and hoping to
rebuild lost lives.
Lual Ukuach
(43) said his brother and his children all were in Malakal when the latest
round of clashes erupted. “The troops, they came and they asked if you were
Shilluk,” Ukuach said. The wrong answer resulted in a bullet, he said. “I lost
five members of my family, including my blood brother,” he said. In the latest
round of fighting, government forces also began an offensive in Unity State,
with reports suggesting that they had reached Machar’s hometown, Leer.
“Eyewitness
accounts reported targeted rape and killing of civilians, including children,” said
a statement by the United Nations. It has accused all sides of abuses, adding
that combatants were preventing human rights workers from documenting what has
taken place in the past two months.
Guarang said
the government was not keeping anyone out of places where there had been
fighting, and welcomed an investigation. Representatives for Machar could not
be reached for comment, but his supporters argued that the fault lay with the
government.
Guarang
blamed criminals for any violations of human rights attributed to the
government but said he, too, supported accountability – just not yet. “You
cannot account when the war is on,” he said. “How do you get the suspects from
both sides when the war is flaming?” Still, he conceded that there was a major
problem with “indiscipline” fueled by alcohol.
While exact
figures are impossible to determine, international officials and human rights
activists say tens of thousands of people have been killed since 2013. “For
more than 17 months, women, men and children have been senselessly suffering
through an entirely man-made catastrophe,” the UN high commissioner for human
rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said in late May. “And now, over the past few
weeks,” he added, “the opposing parties have actually managed to make a
terrible situation much, much worse.”
The
government has not reacted well to criticism. After the UN chief relief
coordinator,Toby Lanzer, offered a scathing critique of the
government, he was expelled from the country this month. A presidential
spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, said Lanzer was kicked out
because his comments were bad for morale.
“Toby
Lanzer’s statement was not giving hope to the people of South Sudan,” he told
reporters at a news conference last week. More than a dozen Western diplomats
and officials, speaking on background because peace talks are underway,
expressed thinly veiled disgust with the situation. “Both Machar and Kiir know
that total victory is impossible; they know they cannot kill everyone from the
other side,” one Western official said. “What is happening now is that all the
parties are trying to secure as strong a position as possible before the rainy
season comes and the fighting stops.”
While many
hold out little hope for a lasting deal, it would not be the first time the two
main rivals had fought and then reconciled. In 1991, Machar split from Kiir’s
Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Forces under his command then killed hundreds
of Dinka in the town of Bor, setting off an ethnic clash similar, though
smaller in scale, to the one playing out today.
Still, after
the peace deal was struck in 2005, Machar and Kiir allied once more. The two
lived in homes just across the street from each other in Juba. Machar’s home
now sits empty, the damage where it was struck by a tank shell still evident.
Dak Ongin (54) remembers the day peace was declared in South Sudan in 2005, and when the country declared its independence six years later, becoming the world’s newest nation. “I was hoping that peace would last forever,” he said, sitting atop a mound of earth and rotting trash at the UN compound. In the distance, beyond the barbed-wire fence, lay his home in Malakal and an untold number of dead relatives and friends. Ongin no longer expects peace. “If the government keeps misbehaving, we will tear down this fence and take back the town ourselves,” he said.