Life and death in South Sudan

Nathaniel Ross Kelly writes at Medium,

The culture of impunity in South Sudan — the world’s youngest nation — has spawned a civil war with no official body count. While government forces and rebels kill, rape and terrorize civilians, the United Nations refuses to estimate the death toll and ignores sites of mass burials.

Forgotten among the carnage is a new generation of trauma victims, waiting for peace and justice or, at the least, a time and a place to mourn the ones they’ve lost.

...They filled the mortuary to capacity. They were heaped together inside shipping containers, like goods that had expired or become obsolete. And they were resting one atop another out in the open, because the nurses had exhausted places to store them.

 a mother and child in a makeshift shelter at the U.N. Protection of Civilians site in Juba on June 7, 2014. The child’s father was killed at the beginning of the war. Nathaniel Ross Kelly photo.

In 2014, approximately 8,000 people succumbed to the Ebola virus, almost 2,000 were killed during Israel’s month-long assault on Hamas, and roughly 5,000 lost their lives in the fight between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists. Each of these tragedies is singular, and nothing can diminish the misery that each has wrought. Thus, a comparison will not serve to lessen their consequence. It will serve to expose the magnitude of an overlooked truth. In 2014, South Sudan’s civil war resulted in more deaths than all of the above crises combined.

Independent sources estimate that at least 50,000 people perished in the war’s first year. The International Crisis Group, a conflict think tank, reports that the actual figure could be closer to 100,000. The exact number of casualties may remain unknowable due to the fact that the country’s government, the rebel forces, and the United Nations Mission in South Sudan have all failed to record and report the deaths.

For five decades, the government of Sudan — based in Khartoum — struggled to control the resources in South Sudan and to undermine the political and religious freedom of its people. The north is primarily inhabited by Arab Muslims, while the south is mainly populated by sub-Saharan Africans who adhere to Christianity and indigenous religions.

...Imagine if the American Civil War had not ended in 1865, but had continued, off and on, until the 1920s. Imagine the casualties, the destruction to infrastructure, the setbacks to development in nearly all areas of society and the deep psychological trauma. You are starting to get a rough idea of the kinds of massive challenges that the South Sudanese face today.

More than two million South Sudanese — roughly 17 percent of the population — have fled their homes. At least a quarter of those displaced have sought refuge in neighboring countries, and 119,000 have found shelter at U.N. sites within South Sudan.

The efforts of humanitarian organizations prevented mass famine from striking the country last year, but the number of families at crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity is higher now than at any previous point in the war. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, approximately 4.6 million people are facing severe food insecurity.

Boys have been forced to fight in combat operations and to participate in the murder of civilians. Girls have been raped, repeatedly.

Read more here.