EDITORIAL: South Sudan falling apart before our eyes
Aug. 29 Featured, Uncategorized 2 comments
BY: The EastAfrican Editor, JUL/29/2017, SSN;
In Summary:
“What started as political differences between President Salva Kiir
and his deputy Riek Machar in December 2013, has now morphed into a
free-for-all war of survival in the face of a collapsed economy, high
unemployment among the youth and famine caused by many years of war.
South Sudan is heading into the political abyss. The country is
disintegrating before our eyes as it sinks into unstructured fighting
in various states.”
The international community should now wake up to the horrors in South
Sudan, where new ethnic militias are emerging to fight each other and
use rape as a weapon of war.
The latest report released by Amnesty International chronicles
widespread rape where in some instances assailants mutilate women’s
private parts with knives after raping them, leaving them to suffer a
slow death.
Men have not been spared in the now widespread revenge attacks, where
some have been sodomised, while others have been castrated or tortured
with needles.
Amnesty International chronicles gruesome acts committed against
citizens of South Sudan by government soldiers.
All these are happening while the world appears to have forgotten
South Sudan, and regional states are too divided to come up with a
workable solution to end a civil war that has gone on for almost four
years, claimed over 60,000 lives and left over four million displaced
— two million are displaced within the country and another two million
have fled to neighbouring Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Sudan.
What started as political differences between President Salva Kiir and
his deputy Riek Machar in December 2013, has now morphed into a
free-for-all war of survival in the face of a collapsed economy, high
unemployment among the youth and famine caused by many years of war.
In the past two weeks, fighting has intensified in Upper, Bentiu and
Unity States, Keji-Keji in Yei along the border with Uganda and
Imatong town, near the border town of Nimule, where both parties
continue to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with
abandon.
Yet partner states of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development
(Igad) appear to have given up on South Sudan.
The August 2015 peace agreement cannot be implemented, while the
country is in no shape to hold elections in 2018 as per the agreement.
If the world does not come to the rescue, South Sudan is likely to
turn into another Somalia where ethnic militias will dismantle the
country into small enclaves.
The people of South Sudan are hoping that the fact-finding mission by
Igad that begins work on July 24 will revive commitment by the region
and the international community to come up with workable solutions to
stop the war.
It is now obvious that the experiment common in Africa of forcing
warring parties to share power has failed miserably in South Sudan.
Igad continues to insist on the implementation of the August 2015
peace agreement, which both parties agree is dead and cannot be
implemented in its original form since more armed groups have emerged,
fighting for reasons far removed from what sparked off the civil war
in 2013.
It is time the international community accepts that President Kiir and
Dr Machar will not work together, and comes up with a completely new
political solution that involves all the stakeholders.
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2 Comments
Son of Western Bahr el Gazal
August 30, 2017 at 2:47 am
Freedom for Everybody or Freedom for Nobody.
Reply
Samuel Atabi
August 30, 2017 at 12:45 pm
Those who plunged the country into this war do not show any
restraint. Human sufferings are nothing to them. They go from one
atrocity to another without care. And now they have killed a citizen
of a country who gave so much that we may be free. The killing of the
American journalist by the Kiir’s militia should send a clear message
to the US government that the Kiir regime is devoid of any civilized
value. We continue to be perplexed by the attitude of the government
towards the Americans: it accuses the Americans of pursuing regime
change in South Sudan; it tried to kill American diplomats and
citizens; and it targets American citizen for rape, humiliation and
imprisonment. It is time the US government stood up to this tin pot
dictatorship and applied real sanctions. Barbaric government as that
now exists in Juba responds to the application of sticks rather than
carrot; bring it down!
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