In November, experts from the UN visited the
South Sudan, the world’s newest country.
They found a conflict marked by mass slaughter
and what they described as a “warped environment,”
where rape of women and girls has “become
normal.”
What they saw was shocking.
They issued an urgent report on the conflict
and mass slaughter they witnessed, saying
that in this ‘warped environment,’ rape
of women and girls has become ‘normal’.
The UN says the world has an obligation to
intervene and prevent an ethnic cleansing,
potentially as devastating as the Rwandan
Genocide of 1994 when the world stood by and
watched the slaughter of 800,000 people .
Since the South Sudanese civil war broke out
in December 2013, over 50,000 people have
been killed.
More than 2.3 million people have been forced
to flee their homes.
Around 6 million people are currently at risk
of going hungry, and 70 percent of schools
have been closed due to the fighting.
It’s a nightmare for a country that gained
its independence just five years ago -- a
move that was supposed to bring peace to an
area that had known only war.
Before it became independent in 2011, South
Sudan was part of Sudan.
Since before colonial times, a deep divide
has existed between the predominantly Muslim,
Arabic-speaking north and people from the
south, where people are mostly Christian or
follow traditional religions.
The divide began to turn violent in the 1950s,
shortly after Sudan gained independence from
British and Egyptian rule.
Positions of power were given almost entirely
to northerners , and the Sudanese government
in Khartoum increasingly centralized around
a small group of elites.
A predatory government emerged, serving only
to enrich its members by seizing natural resources
and ignoring the desperate needs of the Sudanese
people.
The two parts of the country fought for decades
in a civil war that ended in 2005 with an
agreement allowing the south to govern itself.
It also opened the possibility for South Sudan
to officially vote to break away from Sudan
With help from the UN and international community,
that vote was held in January 2011 and passed
overwhelmingly, with nearly 99 percent of
South Sudanese voting in favor of independence.
The US had spent years pushing for the creation
of an independent South Sudan, and the Obama
administration celebrated the vote.
Susan Rice, then the American ambassador to
the UN, said it was “a day of triumph for
all who cherish the rights of all people to
govern themselves in liberty and in law.”
And then everything fell apart.
South Sudan contains more than 60 ethnic groups.
During the civil war with the north, these
groups put their differences aside in the
push for independence.
The two largest ethnic groups in South Sudan
are the Dinka and Nuer.
The new president Salva Kiir, was a Dinka,
and in an expression of unity he asked Riek
Machar, a Nuer, to be his vice president.
But the arrangement didn’t last -- and the
peace was short-lived.
Generals and warlords were put in political
positions but were ill-suited for the jobs.
To make matters worse, the international community
had essentially stepped away after independence.
Tensions between South Sudan’s many factions
had been overlooked in order to achieve independence
from the north.
So, when the fighting was over and the state-building
began, old rivalries and tensions re-emerged.
Vice president Machar started criticizing
president President Kiir’s policies, saying
he would run against him in the next election.
The conflict between the two leaders escalated
and in December 2013, when forces loyal to
Machar clashed with forces loyal to Kiir.
To mobilize support for themselves, Machar
and Kiir exploited the ethnic divides throughout
South Sudan by mobilizing sectarian militias
and having their allies use hate speech to
encourage violence against civilians.
The political fight quickly morphed into an
all-out ethnic conflict, with people loyal
to both sides taking up arms and slaughtering
each other.
More than 1,000 people were killed and another
100,000 displaced in the first week of fighting alone.
And it’s only gotten worse since then, with
other tribes joining the fight.
A cycle of violent retaliation, spurred by
the politicians, has reignited old tensions.
Fierce competition over resources, intervention
by neighboring countries, and the heavy flow
of weapons into the region have only served
to escalate the violence
while several attempted truces have failed.
And while the UN is calling for immediate
intervention from the world, there’s no
clear proposal for what the intervention would
be.
For its part, the US has proposed an arms
embargo for all weapons sales to South Sudan.
But it's unlikely to pass the Security Council
because China and Russia are deferring to
South Sudan’s neighbors, who have their
own vested interests in South Sudan and are
divided over what to do to stop the violence.
Until they agree on a solution, China and
Russia will block any sanctions or embargos
by the UN.
This crisis is also happening at the worst
possible time, as it comes right at the end
of President Obama’s presidency as well
as Ban Ki-moon’s tenure as the UN’s secretary general.
They are two of the only people in the world
with the standing and clout to push African
nations to take concrete steps to the stop
the violence.
It’s not clear that President-elect Donald
Trump knows about South Sudan at all.
And it seems incredibly unlikely that he would
make a serious effort to end the bloodshed
After the Rwandan genocide, world leaders
established an international criminal court
designed to prevent such atrocities from taking
place in the future by holding out the threat
of punishing those who’d carried them out.
Two decades later, another African country
is at risk of descending into mass slaughter.
The Obama administration is pleading for calm
and pushing the two sides to find a deal before
it’s too late.
But there isn’t much the US or its allies
can do to force South Sudan’s warring factions
to lay down their guns.
And that means the world’s newest country
could soon be ravaged by the type of carnage
its independence was designed to prevent.
