South Sudan, the world's newest country, has been in civil conflict for more than five years. After decades of struggle against Sudanese leadership based in Khartoum, the South Sudanese voted for independence from Sudan in 2011. But in December 2013, fighting broke out when President Salva Kiir accused his deputy Riek Machar of planning a coup. It quickly descended into ethnically-motivated violence.
During December 2013 and ensuing months in 2014, hundreds of thousands of Nuer - as well as some other ethnic groups, such as the Shilluk, who were seen as siding with the Nuer - fled the country or crowded into United Nations or NGO-controlled protection camps inside the country. Most of those people have been unable to return home.
An attempt at a peace deal between the two leaders brought Machar back to South Sudan in March 2016, delayed after negotiations over weapons and conditions of merging the government and "in opposition" armies, called the SPLA (now renamed the SSPDF) and SPLA-IO respectively.
In July 2016, a few months after Machar returned, the peace agreement broke down again with fighting beginning at the statehouse in the capital Juba and spreading across the city. It triggered a fresh wave of violence, with the fighting pushing further south into a lush and fertile region comprising three provinces known as the Equatorias, where Machar and his troops passed through while fleeing into the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. This led to nearly a million people from that region crossing the border into Uganda, registering as refugees. It is estimated that more than 383,000 people have died in the conflict, according to a report from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Since the collapse of the peace deal in 2016 alone, more than a million people are said to have fled across the border, escaping rape, murder, destruction of property, and occupation of land.
No comments:
Post a Comment