WUNRN
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2015/08/peace-south-sudan-150826173535728.html
Sudan-South Sudan – Is Peace Really Possible?-Signed Peace Deal But after 20 Months Conflict-Continued Tensions-Women Call for Peace
South Sudan President Salva Kiir has
signed peace deal but after 20 months of conflict many doubt agreement
will hold.
South Sudan's President Salva Kiir has signed a peace deal that
it is hoped will end 20 months of war.
The conflict has killed tens of
thousands of people and brought the world's newest country to the brink of
famine and economic collapse.
Rebel leader Riek Machar signed the deal last week, but President Kiir
had, until Wednesday, expressed reservations.
The agreement calls for an immediate end to the fighting and the creation
of a demilitarised zone in the capital Juba.
It also calls for a transitional
power-sharing government, with Machar returning as South Sudan's vice
president.
But can the two rivals work together again? And could the deal restore peace in
South Sudan?
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Sudan Tribune - http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article56222
August 29, 2015 (ADDIS ABABA) – South
Sudanese armed opposition faction of SPLM-IO has condemned government forces
for allegedly continuing with military offensive against their bases in
violation of the peace agreement signed by the opposition leader, Riek Machar
and president Salva Kiir on 17 and 26 August, respectively.
“SPLM/SPLA condemns in the strongest
possible terms the continued military offensive by forces of the regime in Juba
against bases of SPLM/SPLA in Unity and Upper Nile states. Government forces on
Friday shelled our bases in the west bank of the River Nile near Malakal, Upper
Nile state’s capital,” said James Gatdet Dak, spokesperson of the opposition’s
leadership, in a press statement extended to Sudan Tribune on Saturday.
“This is a serious violation of the terms
of the peace Agreement signed on 17th and 26th August 2015 by the principals of
the two warring parties and declaration of Permanent Ceasefire which shall come
into effect at midnight of 29th August 2015,” he said…….
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http://www.inclusivesecurity.org/conflict-region/south-sudan-and-sudan/#.VeM7Nq3ovmI
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/10/women-in-south-sudan_n_7707560.html
SOUTH SUDAN’S CONFLICT HAS BEEN KILLING WOMEN FAR FROM THE BATTLEFIELD
7-10-2015
- KUAJOK,
South Sudan -- After 48 hours of agonizing labor pains, Nyibol Garang’s family
still refused to bring her to the hospital. So the 23-year-old woman set off by
herself -- mid-labor -- to walk four hours to the only major hospital in the
state of Warrap in South Sudan.
The
hospital is a small cluster of one-story buildings in the state capital of
Kuajok, crammed with rickety beds and mattresses lining the floors. It treats
more than 100 patients a day from all over the state, which has a population
of nearly 1 million people.
When Garang arrived at the hospital on a Friday in late May,
doctors told her she would need to have a cesarean section or her baby would
not survive. Garang said she couldn’t have an operation without her husband’s
permission. But when her husband finally joined her at the hospital the next
morning, he refused.
Nyibol
Garang in the Kuajok hospital maternity ward, May 31, 2015.
In this conservative, rural society, women have little say over
their own bodies, and many people are fearful and suspicious of modern
medicine. “If you decide to stay at the hospital, whether you live or die, you
can never return home,” Garang’s husband told her.
Garang -- at this point three days into her labor -- acquiesced
and began the walk home. A nurse from the hospital came running down the road
after her. She appealed to Garang to choose her life, and her child's life,
over her husband’s wishes.
“I agreed, because I don’t want to die,” Garang told The
WorldPost, as she recovered in Kuajok’s maternity ward a day after the
operation. “And if I have to die, I’d prefer it to be at the hands of the
doctors rather than lying at home."
After Garang agreed to let doctors operate, they discovered why
her labor had been so difficult: She was pregnant with twins. She'd had no
idea, and neither had the doctors, who couldn't afford an ultrasound machine.
Once Garang's twin girls were safely delivered, a procession of singing,
ululating nurses and well-wishers carried the newborns into the maternity ward.
South
Sudan has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world -- 2,054 deaths per
100,000 births, according to the last national survey in 2006. No other country comes
close: The next two highest-ranked countries, Somalia and Chad, have maternal
mortality rates half as high as South Sudan's. And aid workers at several
agencies told The WorldPost that they believe the official numbers actually
understate the situation in South Sudan, since many women die in their homes or
en route to hospitals, where their deaths go unrecorded.
When South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011, four years ago this
Thursday, there was great hope around the world that these kinds of devastating
figures would become a thing of the past. With the promise of peace and an
influx of aid, it seemed this remote and war-torn region would finally have a
chance to remedy its chronic lack of infrastructure and services -- issues that
have contributed to the country's sky-high rates of malnutrition and
illiteracy, among other problems.
Just two years later, those hopes were dashed by violence, as
conflict between the new nation’s leaders exploded into a civil war that is
still wrenching the country apart along ethnic lines and giving rise to a
series of gruesome atrocities.
Giving
birth, already a dangerous prospect in the region, is becoming even more
risky. According to Medicins Sans Frontieres, some 90 percent of South Sudanese women do not give birth in
formal medical facilities. Expectant mothers already had to contend with a
widespread aversion to modern medicine, as well as the prospect of a long,
difficult journey to one of the few health facilities in the country. Now they
also have war to deal with.
Mistrust in the government's medical system runs deep in South
Sudan, a legacy of years under Sudan's repressive policies. In the past two
years, public perception of the medical system has suffered even further, due
to dwindling resources and tensions with unpaid and overworked staff, Suzie
Francis Paul, a World Health Organization medical officer in South Sudan, told
The WorldPost.
Even
if they want to seek medical help, millions of South Sudanese are trapped by fighting
and more than 2 million are
on the run for their lives.
“People are constantly moving for their own security,” Martina
Fuchs, founder of the Real Medicine Foundation, told The WorldPost.
Fuchs'
foundation supports a midwife training program in Juba, the capital of South
Sudan, that's helped boost the number of registered midwives in the country
from from just eight in 2012 to 85 this year. But efforts like
these can only go so far in the midst of war. “We’ll start treating pregnant
women in one place, and by the next morning they are gone,” Fuchs said.
South
Sudan had little in the way of a health system before the war started, and as a
result it has some of the worst health statistics in the world. Some 10 percent
of South Sudanese children die before their fifth
birthday. The country's average life expectancy is just 55. South Sudan has approximately one doctor per 65,000
people -- in the U.S., the figure is about one doctor for every 400 people -- and an estimated80 percent of medical services in the country are
provided by international organizations.
Now,
the war is straining even these scant resources. In the worst-hit areas,
two-thirds of the health facilities have closed or are working at only partial
capacity, according to the United
Nations Population Fund. Last month, the government announced
a deadly outbreak of cholera, the second since the war began.
And on Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that 11 patients who needed surgery had died at a
South Sudanese hospital the ICRC supports, after doctors and nurses fled an
attack on the facility.
“War worsens everything,” Barack Malith Atem, a 55-year-old
medical director at the Kuajok hospital, told The WorldPost. “Even if something
was already at a low standard before the war, it has got even worse." The
hospital, unable to get funding from the government, is supported by
international donors, including the aid group World Vision, which funded and
organized The WorldPost's reporting trip to South Sudan. Resources are
stretched thin as the battles rage on.
The hospital at Kuajok has been flooded with the casualties of
war. The facility is short on medical staff, since would-be recruits are
fearful of the state’s proximity to the conflict -- or, if they belong to
certain ethnic or linguistic groups, they're afraid of being targeted
themselves. In late May, unidentified militia groups looted delivery vehicles
bringing beds and other critical supplies to the hospital. And health workers
are struggling to treat and counsel a growing number of rape survivors amid the
influx of soldiers and militia fighters to the area.
“Anyone who has a gun stops thinking about the dignity of others
and thinks he can do whatever he likes,” Atem told The WorldPost. “War creates
a lot of dangers for women ... When their husbands go to war, or have to flee
because their ethnic group is targeted, women are left alone with the children,
and they can’t feed them or treat them when they are sick. Even some of their
young children are going to fight in the war.”
Both
sides in the conflict have been accused of using rape as a weapon of war and forcibly recruiting child soldiers. The region has a long
history of militias abducting children for battle or pressuring families to
allow their children to fight.
“Mothers are suffering a lot,” Atem said. “They see that this is
a senseless war, that there is no reason for their husbands to die, for their
children to die. They are powerless and traumatized.”
“We often see women coming for treatment very late, and without
any relatives,” Okello Arngod, a 35-year-old senior medical officer at the
hospital in Kuajok, told The WorldPost. “More people are displaced or very poor
and they don’t have means to get to the hospital in time.”
Apieu Gatluak, 28, got lucky. Her husband, a government soldier,
is frequently away at war. But he was on leave in late May, which meant he was
there when Gatluak gave birth to the couple's son, Ayany, at their home. He was
also able to take her and Ayany to the Kuajok hospital on the back of his
bicycle when the baby’s umbilical cord became infected. If her husband hadn’t
been there, Gatluak says, she's not sure what she would have done.
“Since the war broke out, I have been completely isolated,” Gatluak
told The WorldPost at the hospital. “I am from a different state and different
tribe, and when the fighting started, people began to pretend that they don’t
know me.”
Gatluak had already had three children, but she came to the
hospital for the first time during her pregnancy with Ayany because of
complications caused by bouts of typhoid, malaria and syphilis. The prevalence
of disease and malnutrition makes pregnancy even more dangerous for South
Sudanese women. “Pregnancy adds so many demands to your body due to the growing
baby,” said Fuchs. “Malnutrition and disease take resources away from the
pregnant mother and for the baby to grow."
The
war has made things even worse. The number of severely malnourished children
has doubled since the fighting began. Nearly 200 people
have died in cholera outbreaks, and malaria rates are soaring.
Another
hidden cost of war is the additional pressure on families to marry off their
daughters at a young age, in a country where child marriage is already
widespread. Almost half of South Sudanese girls are married before they are 19
years old, according to government estimates. Doctors and aid workers told The
WorldPost that the practice appears to be on the rise due to war, although
there is little reliable data on the topic.
“It is becoming increasingly dangerous for children as most
families do not have enough resources to feed their children,” said Masumi
Yamashina, a child protection specialist for UNICEF in South Sudan, in an email
to The WorldPost. “Unfortunately in these circumstances, child marriage is seen
as a coping mechanism by the family -- which is obviously not good for the girl
-- because it reduces the numbers of mouths to feed and also brings cattle from
the husband."
Fuchs likewise noted that child marriage tends to be the
recourse of people with few other options.
“Child marriage has to do with despair,” she said. “People are
trying somehow to get their children taken care of.”
When
girls are married off young, however, that can lead to a whole other suite of
health problems. Put simply, children’s bodies are not equipped to undergo the
trauma of childbirth. Girls ages 14 and younger are five times more likely to
die while giving birth than women in their 20s, according to
the United Nations’ Children’s Fund. The problem is especially acute in South
Sudan: According to the U.N., South Sudanese girls are three times more likely to
die in childbirth than to enter high school. Nearly half of all girls ages 15
to 19 in the country are married, and at the Kuajok hospital, doctors estimate
that child pregnancies account for about one out of every 12 deliveries they
carry out.
“I was so afraid when I found out that I was pregnant, because
everyone told me if you get pregnant young you will die,” Anger Tong, a young
mother at the Kuajok hospital, told The WorldPost. Tong, who told doctors she
was 18 years old, gave birth to a daughter, Achol, in late May. She quietly
mentioned that her older sister had died in childbirth.
Tong came to the hospital with post-natal hemorrhaging, but she
was saved by a blood transfusion from her brother. “I don’t want my daughter to
be like me,” she told The WorldPost. “I was very sorry to be pregnant, because
I didn’t want to stop school."
“My daughter should be educated so she can make a change in her
life,” she said.
The staff at the Kuajok hospital take on many roles in trying to
make childbirth safer. They offer family planning advice, rape counseling and
antenatal care, and they often act as mediators for women seeking treatment
against their families' wishes. “In our society, women don’t have rights, not
even to ensure their own health,” Atem said. But Garang’s decision to have a
C-section gave him hope. “It's her life," he said, "and she has the
right to decide."
Garang is only the ninth woman to have a C-section at the
hospital. Arngod, the senior medical officer, has taken photos of each woman,
and plans to hang them in a small hall of fame at the hospital once there are
10, in a tribute to the women's bravery.
“One day," he said, "they’ll be remembered as the very
first 10."
Nyibol Garang's newborn twin daughters outside the operating theater, May 30, 2015.