Peace-Keepers?

On 11 July, around 80 to 100 rebel soldiers attacked a compound in Juba where they gang-raped at least five international aid workers, physically or sexually assaulted at least a dozen others. They also executed a South Sudanese journalist –apparently because of his Nuer ethnicity.

The UN mission in South Sudan (Unmiss) gave orders for peacekeepers to intervene but none “ever tried to leave their bases”, the report said, with the Chinese and Ethiopian battalions refusing to go.

The failings in July were nothing new. In an incident in February, at  the northern town of Malakal, peacekeepers from Ethiopia, India and Rwanda stood by as government soldiers attacked and killed at least 30 civilians. The UN admitted to peacekeeper “inaction, abandonment of post and refusal to engage”, but failed to hold any commanders or troops to account.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/06/un-peacekeepers-refused-to-help-south-sudan-rebels-raped-aid-workers-report

Tragedy in South Sudan

The number of people who have fled South Sudan because of the country's civil war has passed the one million mark.

More than 1.6 million people are also displaced within South Sudan

Which means about 20% of South Sudan’s population have been made homeless since December 2013.

Many children have lost one or both of their parents, the UNHCR says.

South Sudan refugees:

Uganda: 373,626 - more than a third of these have arrived since July; 20,000 over last week. New arrivals report fighting in south, attacks on civilians by armed groups, who loot, sexually assault women and girls and recruit boys

Ethiopia: 292,000 - 11,000 crossed into Gambella over the past week. New arrivals are from the Nuer group, including 500 children travelling alone, fearing renewed conflict after seeing troop movements

Sudan: 247,317 - 1,800 arriving each month in White Nile state, floods preventing others

Kenya: 90,000 - 300 a week fleeing insecurity, economic instability and drought

DR Congo: 40,000 - current influx is to Ituri province.

South Sudan's Kiir and Machar profited during war

South Sudan's political and military elite have made themselves rich while the country has struggled under a civil war of their making, a report says.

The document accuses President Salva Kiir, opposition leader Riek Machar, and top generals of profiteering.It follows the trail of money with links to the families of both Kiir and  Machar.

Entitled "War Crimes Shouldn't Pay", the report has found that "top officials ultimately responsible for mass atrocities in South Sudan have at the same time managed to accumulate fortunes, despite modest government salaries. Some have been involved in questionable business deals while others have apparently received large payments from corporations doing business in South Sudan."

 A fall-out between President Kiir and former Vice-President Machar - the most powerful members of their respective Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups - led to the civil war which erupted in December 2013.
Terrible atrocities have been carried out by both sides - often along ethnic lines.
Mass rape has been used as a weapon of war and United Nations reports have detailed human rights abuses.We reported on this here.

Some 2.5 million people have been forced from their homes, and millions more need food aid.

 When a peace deal between the two men fell apart amid heavy fighting of the streets of the capital Juba in July, any chance of a quick resolution to the crisis crumbled.
"This war is about rival factions of a kleptocratic network trying to gain control of the state," said JR Mailey, the author of the report by The Sentry, which is a collaboration between The Enough Project, Not On Our Watch, and C4ADS.

 It says President Kiir's wife and at least seven of his children were linked to a whole range of businesses, and has evidence that Kiir's 12-year-old son had a 25% share in a holding company.
It says a company linked to his brother-in-law, Gen. Gregory Vasili Dimitry, supplied fuel to the military while he was a senior officer.

 It details business connections between Gen Vasili and the Kiirs, and says that the two families hold interests in almost two dozen companies.
"I was mostly struck by the breadth of sectors in which these top officials are involved," said JR Mailey, the author of the report."We're talking everything from airlines, to banks, oil companies, mining companies, casinos. It seems that a very small number of people control a large swathe of South Sudan's economy - and many of these people are also the people that are in power," he said.

 Machar is accused of dealing with a Ukrainian arms company through a Russian intermediary with multiple aliases.
"What we found on Vice-President Machar, he had been engaged in negotiations to sell the country's oil production for defence products - for weapons in order to fuel his rebellion," said Mailey. "We also found evidence that a nephew of his was involved in a violent and hostile takeover of a security company operating in South Sudan."

It says both President Kiir and  Machar have luxurious homes in the same upmarket neighbourhood of Nairobi.

Top generals are also implicated in business deals, with large amounts of money going through their bank accounts. Army chief of staff Gen. Paul Malong Awan is accused of having close business connections to President Kiir and his family and having luxury villas.

 The report says Deputy General Malek Reuben Riak, and a general sanctioned by the US, Gabriel Jok Riak, had millions of dollars passing through their foreign bank accounts, despite salaries of less than $50,000 (£37,730).

The Sentry recommends using a "new approach to countering mass atrocities...That involves using the tools of financial pressure that were developed to counter nuclear proliferation and organised crime and terrorism," said Mr Mailey. "We want those tools to be deployed aggressively in South Sudan. In the past these sanctions have only been applied in a piecemeal fashion and we think sanctions need to be accompanied by robust anti-money laundering measures," he said.

 An expanded international peacekeeping force for South Sudan is due to help bring a peace deal back on track, but there's little confidence the crisis - affecting so many millions of people - will be resolved any time soon.

"There are few people in the world who have suffered as much during the past half century as the South Sudanese who suffered three major wars and watched their leaders and international enablers profit from their misery," Don Cheadle, co-founder of Not On Our Watch said at the news conference.

Compiled from a BBC article here

More from this blog on South Sudan here

South Sudan's Misleaders

One year after South Sudan's peace agreement, the head of the truce's monitoring group has said the country is worse off today than it was before.

Festus Mogae, head of the Joint Monitoring and Evaluation Commission (JMEC) and former Botswanan president, said that the largest problems stemmed from "security... that is where we've made the least amount of progress."

Mogae said the main reason behind the peace agreement's failure stems from the "bad blood" between Kiir and Machar, rather than the deal itself.  "It was never with the agreement...We were trying to persuade him [Kiir] that they were leaders and they should think of the welfare of the people, but they failed to do that…the leaders as a whole have duty to work together to bring about peace and being to develop this country," said Mogae. "For now, the people of South Sudan are worse off than before."

Tens of thousands of people died in the conflict that followed. Many starved to death. More than two million people were displaced.

More refugees

The United Nations says over 37,000 people fleeing the conflict in South Sudan have entered Uganda over the last three weeks.

"In the past three weeks there have been more refugee arrivals in Uganda than in the entire first six months of 2016," which was 33,838 people, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a statement released on Tuesday.

The UNHCR added that over 90 percent of the refugees were woman and children as adult males were being forced to join armed groups.

It noted that most of the refugees had fled from South Sudan's Eastern Equatoria region and the capital Juba.

The UN body also stressed that refugee camps in Uganda were being overwhelmed by the surge of people.

Thousands of people have been killed and more than three million forced to flee their homes in the war that started in December 2013, when President Kiir sacked Machar only two years after the country seceded from Sudan.

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/07/26/477071/south-sudan-un-refugees-uganda

The Blue Nile

In the southeastern corner of Sudan a little-known struggle has succeeded in depopulating an entire region. Blue Nile sits on the southern frontier of Sudan, where war has raged for more than 60 years. The fight is a continuation of the struggle that birthed the world's newest nation, an independent South Sudan, in 2011. Blue Nile holds great promise. It sits on a literal gold mine and the land is the most fertile in the country. But a lifetime of war has bought nothing but suffering. There is not yet a path to peace – all attempts have fizzled.

 It’s also a humanitarian crisis that has been compounded by the evacuation of all international aid organisations. A spluttering peace process, is denying people desperately needed food aid; and explains how the economic lifeline of locally mined gold and gum arabic is smuggled north, to profit a government trying to crush the rebellion.

The notorious Janjaweed militia are being redeployed to Blue Nile as a paramilitary wing of the regular army.

http://www.irinnews.org/special-report/2016/06/21/forgotten-conflicts-blue-nile

The soil not the oil

“South Sudan has virgin land. Yet we import most of our food from neighbouring countries,” South Sudan’s finance minister, David Deng Athorbei, complained.  South Sudan has ignored agriculture since it achieved its independence in July 2011. Up to 75 per cent of the country’s land area is suitable for farming. During the first two years of independence, the country was producing nearly 245,000 barrels of crude oil per day, raking in billions of dollars in revenue annually. As a result, the elite saw no value in labour-intensive activity like farming. “The business of trade is over. We now need to embark on the business of production. We have to change our ways of doing business. Let’s start with agriculture,” Athorbei advised.

Before the fall of oil prices below $30 a barrel in the international market, oil-rich South Sudan used to import virtually all of its basic requirements from overseas. Chicken came from Brazil. Tomatoes, onions, maize flour, cooking oil, dairy products and beans are still being imported from neighbouring Uganda. China and Dubai export a variety of goods such as soft drinks, smart phones as well as construction materials. In South Sudan prices have continued to spiral beyond the reach of the poor. The crisis has prompted parliament to urge government to reduce inflation to mitigate the sufferings of ordinary persons.

Every year, South Sudan spends between US$200-300 million on food imports, according to estimates for 2013 provided by the Abidjan-based African Development Bank (AFDB). “South Sudan currently imports as much as 50 per cent of its needs, including 40 per cent of its cereals from neighbouring countries, particularly Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia”, according to AFDB.

Campaigners are now focusing on food production to mitigate the impact of a devastating civil war. South Sudan has vast fertile lands, abundant water and climate suitable for production of wide variety of food and cash crops. Experts estimate that up to 300,000 metric tonnes of fish could be harvested on a sustainable basis from its share at the River Nile swamps and tributaries. What food South Sudan produces often is left rotting in the bush due to poor road network to transport the commodities to the market.

South Sudan's Bloody Civil War

A United Nations reports that militias allied to the South Sudanese army have been allowed to rape women in lieu of wages during fighting against rebel forces. Army-affiliated militias, made up mainly of youths, raped and abducted women and girls essentially as a form of payment, under an agreement that allowed them to “do what you can and take what you can,” the UN team reported. The militias stole cattle and other property under the same understanding, the team said.

Investigators found that 1,300 women were raped last year in the oil-rich Unity state alone. The scale and type of sexual violence committed in South Sudan is the most horrendous human rights abuse in the world, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said. “This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war, yet it has been more or less off the international radar,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said in a statement.

The UN said government fighters abducted and gang-raped girls, and cut civilians to pieces. One woman said she had watched her 15-year-old daughter being raped by 10 soldiers after her husband was killed. The United Nations assessment team recorded gruesome accounts of civilians, including women and children, being hanged from trees, burned alive, shot and hacked to pieces with machetes. Churches, mosques and hospitals came under attack, the team said.

 “Crimes against humanity and war crimes have continued into 2015, and they have been predominantly perpetrated by the government,” David Marshall, the coordinator of a United Nations assessment team, said in an interview

Amnesty International says more than 60 men and boys were suffocated in a shipping container by government forces. Amnesty International said bodies of those suffocated were dumped in a field after they were killed last October in Leer Town, Unity State. Amnesty International reported that government soldiers arbitrarily arrested dozens of men and boys in the villages of Luale and Leer in October of last year. The men rounded up were students, traders and cattle keepers rather than fighters. They then forced them into unventilated shipping containers with their hands tied behind their backs. Witnesses told researchers they heard the detainees crying, screaming in distress and banging on the walls of the container while officials watched. "Dozens of people suffered a slow and agonizing death at the hands of government forces that should have been protecting them," said Lama Fakih, Amnesty International senior crisis adviser.

South Sudan - a failed state?

South Sudan is on the verge of famine and there is $6bn missing. More than four million people, a third of its population, face serious food shortages and tens of thousands are on the cusp of catastrophic famine. South Sudan is in economic crisis – and is approaching the status of a failed state. South Sudan has run out of money, having squandered the billions of its own oil wealth and that of international donors that were intended to help give the young, and supposedly oil-rich, state a chance, but not everyone is suffering.

In Juba smart black SUVs can be seen parked outside the handful of smart hotels and restaurants, or driving along the pot-holed roads that lead to grand residences, government ministries and military compounds. The Cadillacs. Mercedes GLs and luxury Hummers would not look out of place in a Belgravia or Knightsbridge square. In neighbouring Kenya and Uganda, property records show some of the best houses in the smartest suburbs are registered under the names of high-profile South Sudanese politicians and bureaucrats. Many such homes are worth more than $1m. In Washington DC the names of South Sudanese individuals or holding companies are publicly listed against homes worth more than $3m. In Colorado, where the world’s rich ski, and in Melbourne, Australia, rated one of the world’s most “liveable” cities, it is no secret that a small number of elite South Sudan business and political leaders have properties. Details of this hidden wealth appropriated by South Sudan’s elite have been collated by United Nations investigators.

The UN’s special representative in South Sudan, Toby Lanzer, said last year that the government was struggling to pay for even the most basic necessities; under its own rules the IMF is not allowed to intervene while the civil war continues. Sources within the Paris Club group of creditor nations that provide debt relief to developing countries, estimate that some $4bn is missing, unaccounted for. One of them told The Independent: “There may simply be no books to examine.” Other agencies that have tried to calculate the scale of embezzlement in what is now South Sudan say it could amount to as much as $10bn over the past 11 years.

President Salva Kiir appointed and paid 745 generals who each had their own network of loyalists to finance. By 2013, when the civil war erupted, the military payroll had climbed to 240,000, six times its size a few years earlier. Supposed defence spending may now consume close to half the national budget. Meanwhile senior commanders commonly steal the salaries of low-ranking personnel, while others pocket the pay of “ghost soldiers” who exist only on paper, investigators say.

Over the past two years, the US has spent more than $2bn; China has offered extended lines of credit; and last year Qatar offered $500m to help South Sudan’s struggling banking system. Britain has contributed £242m for humanitarian aid and a further £93m to help refugees and displaced people over the past two years, with a further £200m in aid earmarked for this year. The World Bank approved a $38m loan to build rural roads and highways, but almost none of that promised work has even been started, and a country almost the size of France still has barely 60 miles of metalled roads.

The Hell of South Sudan

South Sudan is the world's newest country. In a country almost the size of France there is only 100 kilometres of tarmac road. A two-year bloody conflict between mainly Dinka and Nuer groups, allied to warring government and opposition forces, and now spreading into other inter-ethnic struggles, is destroying the country’s once potentially oil-rich future. With the 2015/16 harvest non-existent, and nothing being planted because of the conflict, all of South Sudan’s food has to brought in from neighbouring states.

2.3 million people, one in five of the population, have been forced from their homes. 185,000 people have sought refuge in UN-designated protection camps. The International Crisis Group estimates 100,000 people, possibly more, have been killed. The UN estimates that 2.8 million people are currently facing "acute" food and nutrition insecurity in South Sudan’s Greater Upper Nile states. 25 per cent of South Sudan’s population who are in urgent need of food aid. Just over 6 million require basic humanitarian help.

War-Crimes in South Sudan

"The oppressed love the oppressors and can't wait to be just like them..." - Joseph Michael Linsner

South Sudanese government forces are guilty of burning civilians alive, running them over with tanks, and carrying out rapes and abductions, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian property during the offensive carried out between April and June 2015 amount to war crimes, while the killings and rapes may also constitute crimes against humanity.

HRW said that they had documented the burning of homes and food stocks, and the theft of animals, food, clothes, and cooking utensils. The organization also recorded at least 60 unlawful killings of civilian women, men, and children, put to death by hanging, shooting, or being burned alive. At least 63 counts of rape were documented, though researchers suspect that this is a small fraction of the total number. Those that were reported included brutal gang rapes, public rapes, and rapes that occurred alongside the threat of murder.

Akshaya Kumar, South Sudan Policy Analyst for the Enough Project, told VICE News that recently "there's been a real escalation in the brutality and the nature of the killing and the targeting, with both sides really adopting a scorched earth kind of attitude." 

More than 2.25 million people have been displaced as a result of the civil war.

South Sudan: Food Crisis and Refugees

Almost 700,000 South Sudanese now live as refugees in neighbouring countries. The vast majority fled their homes since civil broke out in December 2013

 

Through 17 months of conflict, tens of thousands of people have been killed in South Sudan and two million more displaced. Schools, health centres and markets have been looted and destroyed. It took a $1.8 billion humanitarian response last year for the country to avoid a famine.
And it’s about to get even worse.
At least 40 percent of the country’s population – 4.6 million people – faces acute food insecurity within the next three months, according to a new analysis. While the most severe shortages are predicted for the country’s northeast where the fighting has centred, the hunger belt now spreads across much of the country’s northern half.
At the same time, economists are warning that the combination of conflict and a global downturn in oil prices – the country’s main source of revenue – has brought South Sudan’s economy to the brink of collapse. Skyrocketing costs and a tanking currency are especially threatening to urban communities where people must buy most of their food. Some can already not afford to eat.
“All of this means a crisis is arriving very, very quickly,” said Shaun Hughes, the head of programme for the World Food Programme in South Sudan – and on a scale the already suffering country has not yet seen.
 
On the move
 
Ramsey Bol Lang is twice displaced. In December 2013, the 20-year-old was going to secondary school in Juba when fighting broke out. His neighborhood, on the capital’s outskirts, was the scene of door-to-door killings allegedly perpetrated by troops loyal to President Salva Kiir.
Three days later, Lang took advantage of a lull in the shooting to flee across the city. Though the fighting in the capital ended as rebel soldiers backing former vice president Riek Machar retreated into the country’s northeast, Lang decided it wasn’t safe to return to his home and rented a new place.
Months later, his mother, seven siblings and two cousins arrived in Juba to live with him. There had been protracted fighting near their home in northern Unity state and a brother and an uncle had been killed. Lang’s father had decided it was best to send the rest of the family to Juba.

 Except now, a steep rise in prices means they can longer afford to live in the capital. “Everything has become expensive there,” Lang said. “If you want to rent a home, even, it’s too expensive.” Which is why, in late April, they gathered their belongings and hired a minibus for the hour-and-a-half drive to the Ugandan border. They were met by officials from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), who then took them on to a transit camp. Within a few weeks, they will be permanently resettled in Uganda.
Lang did not want to see his family become refugees. “That is our homeland,” he said, pointing to South Sudan, its border with Uganda visible from the Nyumanzi Transit Camp. “I don’t have a home here.” But at least he will have something to eat.
To stay in Juba was financially impossible. And to move back to the family’s village in Unity state’s Pariang County meant dealing with food shortages, in addition to the threat of violence. In the newly released Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which measures food security and nutrition, Pariang is predicted to reach “crisis” level as early as this month. And a cluster of counties to its south will likely hit the “emergency” threshold before the end of July – one level below famine. “The situation of Juba right now, all over South Sudan, even, it is not good for us,” Lang said.
 
Draku Godfrey Uhuru is the centre supervisor at Nyumanzi. Over the past few weeks, officials have been registering an average of 70 new arrivals to the camp each day. A month ago it was only 30 or 40.
Uhuru said most of the new refugees have fled from fighting in Unity and Upper Nile states. But for the first time, a noticeable number are not on the run from recent battles. Instead, they tell Uhuru, “It is hunger that is now attacking them.” 
 
A predictable crisis
 
The figures in the new IPC report are jarring. Nearly 70 percent of the country will not get enough to eat through July. At least 80 percent of the counties across the country’s north are at a critical level of malnutrition, which is particularly dangerous for pregnant women and children. And the report does not even fully account for the people who might be in the worst position of all – stuck in the midst of ongoing fighting in Unity and Upper Nile states. Until the clashes stop, it is impossible for humanitarians to reach them – or even gauge the extent of their need. 

WFP’s Hughes said the current situation was sadly predictable. In the early days of the conflict, if South Sudanese did not have enough to eat, they could sell livestock or barter supplies for food. “As the crisis goes on, those coping strategies become increasingly depleted,” he said. “They have nothing left to rely on, no assets left to sell.”
 
With the arrival of the lean season – the months when people are planting for August and September harvests – South Sudanese would usually supplement what food they were able to store from the previous year with goods from the markets. Except tens of thousands of people were unable to plant last year because of the fighting. And prices in the market – where markets even still exist – have shot up.
Barack Kinanga, the International Rescue Committee’s economic recovery and development coordinator, has seen the price for maize in some parts of the country surge 70 percent higher than it was at the same time last year. And he warns, “The prices are likely to rise further and even peak at unprecedented levels.”
The search for food is driving people across borders, he said. UNHCR has recorded more than 9,000  new arrivals in both Sudan and Ethiopia over the past month. Uganda received around 7,000 South Sudanese in May – the most of any month this year.
Nyankuch Akuma is one of them. Her husband, a soldier, was shot and killed and she was left on her own outside Bentiu, the capital of Unity state. “It was so bad. Up to now there was no planting,” which is why she decided to leave and travel to Uganda. Even before she was placed in a permanent settlement, Akuma had decided, “I will stay here forever.”
 
Economic collapse

South Sudan’s unprecedented level of hunger is the most alarming signal of the country’s larger economic collapse. South Sudan’s currency, the pound, is trading in Juba’s black markets at nine and a half to every dollar – less than half of its value a year ago. Fuel is scarce. And the casual jobs that many people rely on for income are disappearing as the currency depreciates.
It is against that backdrop that the food insecurity has spread beyond the country’s northeast. The rest of the country also depends on markets during the lean season, Kinanga said, and “steepening commodity prices are having a far-reaching effect for the communities not directly affected by the conflict.”


This includes as many as 600,000 people living in urban areas. And a sudden rise in food insecurity in towns will force overstretched humanitarian agencies – now largely focused on rural communities – to recalibrate their response.
 
The fighting is the obvious culprit for the country’s economic spiral, said Dr. Kenyi Spencer, a South Sudanese economist. The government is spending much-needed reserves on “the war, hardware, this and that. It has displaced the local economy.” And with long-term consequences.
“There is a real risk the economic choices the government is making now will destabilize the country for generations to come,” said Emma Vickers, a campaigner with the corruption watchdog group, Global Witness. “If, when the conflict ends, there is no money left for infrastructure projects, education or job creation, South Sudan faces a future where the only choice for its youth is to pick up arms again.”
 
At the same time, the country’s oil fields have suffered repeated attacks, forcing production cuts that the country – which is almost completely dependent on revenue from oil sales – can ill afford. And international conditions – including a strengthening dollar and a global drop in oil prices – are hastening South Sudan’s economic collapse, Spencer said. “All these have really arrived to put the economy in a bad place right now. In the next two to three weeks, if nothing happens to change the situation, it could be catastrophic.”
It already is for the hundreds of thousands of people who are now all but guaranteed to face some level of food insecurity in the coming months. The IPC projection that 4.6 million people will see severe food shortages takes into account the ongoing humanitarian response.
And if the warring parties continue to limit access, as they currently are in parts of Unity and Upper Nile states, or if requested funding doesn’t come through, then “the number of people we’ll be able to assist will be vastly diminished,” Hughes said. WFP, alone, is currently looking at a $230 million funding shortfall. Unless the money comes through, “we simply won’t have the resources to be able to provide assistance on the scale that’s required.”

from here

When The War Came Back - South Sudan

KANDAK, South Sudan, 18 May 2015 (IRIN) 

Kandak, a small village in South Sudan’s Jonglei state, eight days walk from the Ethiopian border, has paid a high price for its unfortunate location in the midst of Sudan’s civil wars.
In the early 1990s, as southern Sudanese rebels battled Khartoum’s forces, the war brought starvation to Kandak and the surrounding area. Heavy fighting prevented much humanitarian aid getting in and thousands of people died.

Now, nearly four years after South Sudan gained independence, the people of Kandak yet again find themselves bearing the harsh consequences of nearby conflict. 
Since civil war broke out in South Sudan at the end of 2013, Kandak has received thousands of people displaced by the fighting. 
The latest influx has hit Kandak hard. Resources were already scarce. A lack of clean water forces the population to drink from muddy pools. Rising malnutrition combined with insufficient health care and the risk of water-borne disease make this a very vulnerable community.

With ongoing fighting in the area and no peace in sight, the humanitarian situation is predicted to deteriorate. Few aid agencies can make it here, to one of the most dangerous and remote parts of South Sudan. It is all a chilly reminder of what led to the devastating famine almost 25 years ago.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BAgvT2WAIno

from here

Child Soldiers In South Sudan

President Obama couldn’t have been more eloquent.  Addressing the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, he said:
 “When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed -- that’s slavery.” 

Denouncing Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, and offering aid to Uganda and its neighbors in tracking Kony down, he said,
 “It's part of our regional strategy to end the scourge that is the LRA and help realize a future where no African child is stolen from their family, and no girl is raped, and no boy is turned into a child soldier.” 

In support of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he has lauded as “not only a great champion of democracy but a fierce advocate against the use of forced labor and child soldiers,” he’s kept her country on a list of nations the U.S. sanctions for using child soldiers in its military.  And his ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, has spoken movingly in condemnation of the use of child soldiers, which she’s termed a “scourge,” from Syria and the Central African Republic to South Sudan. 

Only one small problem, as Nick Turse, author of Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, points out in his latest reportage:
 the young, desperately divided nation of South Sudan is something of an American-sponsored creation, its military heavily supported by Washington, and so its child soldiers -- and it has plenty of them -- turn out not to be quite the same sort of scourge they are in Burma, Syria, or elsewhere.  Somehow, they’ve proved to be in the American “national interest” and so, shockingly enough, as Turse reveals today, were the subjects of a presidential “waiver” that sets aside Congress’s 2008 Child Soldiers Protection Act.  

The willingness of a president to sideline a subject he’s otherwise denounced in no uncertain terms is worthy of a riddle that might go something like: when is slavery not slavery?  And the answer would be, when it gets in the way of U.S. policy.  With that in mind, let Turse take you deep into South Sudan, where children tote AK-47s and the sky is not cloudy all day. 

read on here

South Sudan - Famine Warning

The United Nations says over 2.5 million people in South Sudan are on the brink of famine amid the destructive civil war in the country.

UN emergency relief coordinator Valerie Amos issued the warning on Monday during an international donor conference in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where the world body launched a 1.8-billion-dollar aid appeal.

The UN official referred to “the continuing widespread devastation and destruction,” in South Sudan and called for restoration of peace in the war-torn country.

According to the UN, 2.5 million people – about 20 percent of South Sudan’s population of 12 million -- are in a state of emergency or crisis, only few steps short of famine. More than half of the country’s population are in need of aid.

The UN predicted that the conflict would worsen in the dry season when military vehicles could move around more easily.

Amos, who has recently returned from a three-day visit to the African country, added, “The conflict has had a devastating impact on South Sudan but if peace doesn't come quickly, it will also have a significant regional impact.”

Uncertain Future For South Sudan

The failure of peace talks and the end of South Sudan’s wet season could unleash fresh fighting between government forces and rebel factions, propelling millions of people in the world’s youngest nation back towards a man-made famine, analysts and humanitarian workers warn.

Nine months of bad-tempered negotiations have yet to produce a firm ceasefire, let alone a political deal to end a conflict punctuated by atrocities. Skirmishes have continued in areas close to where thousands of civilians are crammed into UN bases. There are fears that both sides have used the seasonal lull to re-arm.

Surging violence would roil plans by the UN and humanitarian partners to use the dry season to patch up roads and other infrastructure and pre-position critical supplies before the meagre returns from the current disrupted harvest run out in early 2015. The rains usually begin to ease by late October.

“It is going to be a combination of a quieter environment for the people of this country, plus the continuation of a large aid operation, that will help people get through the dry season,” Toby Lanzer, the UN humanitarian coordinator in South Sudan, told IRIN. “If either of those two are absent, disaster will occur.”

more here

The Fate of South Sudan

More than 50,000 children in South Sudan face death from disease and hunger, the United Nations has warned. War has already killed thousands and forced more than 1.5 million people from their homes, and aid agencies warn of the risk of famine should fighting continue.

"Cholera has broken out, malaria is rampant and many children are malnourished. Millions of people need emergency healthcare, food, clean water, proper sanitation and shelter to make it through the year."   UN aid chief for South Sudan Toby Lanzer said. 

Development Or Fraud? Another Coastal Paradise To Die For Big Oil

A new 32 berth port, to ship South Sudanese oil to China, is planned for the Lamu archipelago, a stunning green field heritage site in northern coastal Kenya, teeming with rare species, coral reefs and marine biodiversity and, of course, people. But none of this richness, or the indigenous people for whom this is home, seem to matter to the Government of Kenya and private developers.

In April 2013 the Kenya government granted a $484 million contract to a Chinese firm to put up the first three berths for the new Lamu Port in the first phase implementation process of the project. This followed the uprooting of prime mangrove trees in February, to pave the way for the construction of the first three berths and port administration office at Kilalana, a clearance that is nearly complete. The land was created from the felling of mangrove trees, comprising 30% of tree cover in Kenya.

 However, the developers and their government cronies paid scant regard to an environmental impact assessment, while those who lost their land are still waiting for compensation a year later. Indeed, only fraudsters are getting rich, while the port development has already made thousands of families destitute and hungry. With another 100,000 people potentially in the way of the gigantic development, the first phase portends badly for the rest of the development, since neither project affected persons nor the natural capital and biodiversity have been give the respect they are due by right, and by international law and convention.


Read the full, detailed article here

South Sudan's Civil War - In Whose Interest?

If one asks the question “who benefits from the South Sudanese civil war?” the answer is clear. The USA is presently the ONLY beneficiary of the ongoing horrors in South Sudan for this latest round of conflict has once again shut down the Chinese run oil fields in the country.

The USA has determined that its in its “national interests” to deprive China of access to Africa’s oil fields and has succeeded in its goal of again shutting down Chinese oil production in Sudan, the only majority Chinese owned oil field in Africa.

What other evidence links the USA to the South Sudanese civil war? Thanks to Wikileaks we know that the USA via the CIA has been paying the salaries of the South Sudanese Army (SPLA) since 2009. In other words, both the soldiers (“rebels”) supporting Riek Machar and the soldier supporting President Salva Kiir are being paid by the USA, paid to kill each other? Don't take my word for it, go check Wikileaks.

Another question NOT being asked by the international media is how is Riek Machar funding his army? Where is he getting the funds to pay for his soldiers ammunition, the fuel to run their trucks and equipment, to pay for their food? Where is this money coming from in a country complete destroyed by the ongoing fighting? If its coming from funds stolen by Riek Machar while he was Vice President of South Sudan, where are the funds deposited and how is he accessing them?

The USA prefers proxies to do its dirty work so as to keep its self insulated from charges of foreign interference and to keep its “hands clean” so to speak. The fact that “rebels” supporting Riek Machar have been receiving weapons from Ethiopia is a matter of public record with reports from the past year exposing what is just the tip of the iceberg in the matter.

What is Ethiopia’s interest in this, isn't the Ethiopian regime a “neutral party” hosting “peace talks”? The fact that Ethiopia has some 10,000 soldiers/peacekeepers on the Sudan/South Sudanese border this past year including the oil fields is another matter being ignored by the media. Again, thanks to Wikileaks, we know that Ethiopia has an ongoing fuel crisis and spends up to 75% of its foreign currency earnings on fuel imports. The Sudanese oil fields are the only immediately available supply for Ethiopia’s problem and with Brazil promising to build a $1 billion railway from the South Sudanese border to Addis Ababa this would be the quickest solution to Ethiopia’s major headache.

I for one am really, really sick of Africans being portrayed as tribalistic animals murdering each other in never ending slaughters when the only real beneficiary of such are foreign powers, mainly the USA and its western vassals. If one does just a little research into these holocausts one begins to see who really benefits and when it comes to the civil war in South Sudan the only party presently benefiting from these crimes is the USA. How this will play out will be an omen of things to come for the USA and China are certain to be at odds in the future when it comes to exploiting Africa’s oil fields which today supply half of the USA’s oil imports.

by Thomas C Mountain from here

 

Not all that glitters is gold

60,000 people mine for gold in South Sudan, many driven to it by hunger. They hunt for gold in deep, claustrophobic mines with no safety equipment. The holes are so narrow, they can barely turn around. Wearing no safety jackets or helmets, the miners have just a headlamp to guide them in the bleak darkness.

Gold mining is big business in Sudan, particularly in the south. The land is endowed with many resources, many of which are undiscovered.  As well as gold, there is also believed to be copper, uranium and marble.

Many use their bare hands which they once used to harvest crops. The back-breaking labour is even carried out by women, children and elderly people who are driven to work because of widespread hunger.

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