Tag Archives: South Sudan

Nearly 15,000 lost children seek parents in chaos of South Sudan’s war

South Sudan mother reunited with her children

By Siegfried Modola

BENTIU (Reuters) – In the chaos of South Sudan’s civil war, it took three years for Nyagonga Machul to find her lost children.

Machul had traveled from her village to the capital when President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, in 2013. The dismissal triggered a civil war in the world’s newest nation that has increasingly been fought along ethnic lines.

Machul found herself cut off from her son Nhial, now aged 14 and the protector of the family; 10-year-old Ruai and 8-year-old Machiey, brothers who love board games and swimming; 6-year-old Nyameer with her shy smile; and Nyawan, now four but then the much-loved baby.

For years, Machul prayed for news. In December, she heard her children were alive – but far away in Bentiu, the northern gateway to the nation’s oil fields. More than a thousand 1,000 km (620 miles) of battlefield stretched between them.

Machul had left the children with their grandmother, but one night gunmen had attacked their village.

“I was in bed sleeping. All of a sudden I heard the sound of gunshots, then people shouting, screaming,” said Nhial.

The panicked children scattered and hid near the river Nile. Wandering back, they found each other, but not their grandmother. They decided to flee.

They walked through swamps, in chest-deep water infested with snakes and crocodiles. They begged food from families with little to spare.

Then a former neighbor, Nyabika Temdor, took them in, camping with them on a tiny island in the Nile. But gunmen struck again and they ran.

“I had to pay someone to carry the little ones, as they couldn’t walk,” Temdor said.

After four days, they reached a camp for displaced families in Bentiu. The sprawling settlement of 120,000 people is bordered by barbed wire and watchtowers.

That is where CINA found them. A local organization supported by UNICEF, case workers painstakingly trace separated families. They enter the names of lost children into a UNICEF supported database that holds nearly 15,000 names.

Having a parent vastly improves the long-term chances of a child’s survival, said Marianna Zaichykova, a spokeswoman for UNICEF. But the program is chronically underfunded.

Last year, reunifications dropped by 50 percent because there was not enough money to trace families, Zaichykova said.

Machul was lucky. UNICEF arranged for the children to fly to Juba this week. Their mother waited for them, in a tent made of sticks and plastic that looked just like the one they left in Bentiu.

She dappled drops of water on her children’s faces in a traditional blessing. Her friends began to sing. And then she opened her arms for her children.

“God has answered my prayers,” she said. “I am so happy.”

For a Wider Image photo essay of the story, click http://reut.rs/2kVBzp0

(Additional reporting by Katharine Houreld; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Alison Williams)

Troops and court needed fast to avert South Sudan genocide: U.N.

Council-mandated Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Yasmin Sooka addresses the Human Rights Council 26th Special Session on the human rights situation in South Sudan, Geneva, Switzerland,

y Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – World powers can stop a “Rwanda-like” genocide in South Sudan if they immediately deploy a 4,000-strong protection force across the country and set up a court to prosecute atrocities, the head of a U.N. human rights commission said on Wednesday.

Africa’s newest nation plunged into civil war in December 2013 after a long-running feud between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, exploded into violence, often along ethnic lines.

“South Sudan stands on the brink of an all-out ethnic civil war, which could destabilize the entire region,” commission chief Yasmin Sooka told an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Fighting was expected to escalate again now that the dry season had started, she said. Gang rape was happening on an “epic” scale, she added, citing cases of women being raped at a U.N. site in the capital Juba within sight of U.N. peacekeepers.

Washington and other powers called the one-day meeting after Sooka’s commission reported this month that ethnic cleansing was already taking place in South Sudan, which only seceded from Sudan in 2011.

Sooka’s comparison with Rwanda referred to the killing of some 800,000 people in three months of ethnic violence there in 1994.

Kiir has denied there is any ethnic cleansing and South Sudan’s ambassador at the council, Kuol Alor Kuol Arop, said his country saw no need for the special session.

International pressure, including the threat of sanctions, has so far failed to halt the fighting in an oil-producing country at the heart of a fragile region that includes Sudan, Ethiopia and Democratic Republic of Congo.

The warring sides agreed to set up a court backed by the African Union in 2015, but one has not appeared.

General view of the Human Rights Council 26th Special Session on the human rights situation in South Sudan, Geneva, Switzerland,

General view of the Human Rights Council 26th Special Session on the human rights situation in South Sudan, Geneva, Switzerland, December 14, 2016. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy

South Sudan’s government has said it will allow a 4,000-strong regional protection force to bolster the U.N.’s existing peacekeeping mission. But it has also not arrived and Sooka said there were fears it would not operate beyond Juba.

“We urge the immediate deployment of the 4,000-strong regional protection force for South Sudan … People all across the country asked that it not be restricted to the capital if it is to protect civilians across South Sudan,” she said.

The 47-member forum adopted a resolution without a vote reminding the government of its responsibility for protecting the population against genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing and condemning the widespread violence and rape.

But it watered down the original wording, which would have extended the mandate of the U.N. human rights commission in South Sudan for a year. The commission will report back to the council in the first quarter of 2017.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Andrew Heavens)

Up to 4.8 million South Sudanese face severe food shortage

By Denis Dumo

JUBA (Reuters) – Up to 4.8 million people in South Sudan face severe food shortages in coming months, the highest level since a conflict erupted more than two years ago, U.N. agencies said on Wednesday.

Clashes have continued to flare in South Sudan even though warring factions signed a peace deal in August last year to end the conflict that erupted in December 2013.

But the deal has only been implemented slowly, leaving the country’s economic crisis to deepen. Rains at this time of year add to the challenge of supplying those in need by making many roads impassable. Most roads in the area are just dirt tracks.

“The deteriorating situation coincides with an unusually long and harsh annual lean season, when families have depleted their food stocks and new harvests are not expected until August. The level of food insecurity this year is unprecedented,” the U.N. agencies said in a joint statement.

The U.N. World Food Programme, one of three agencies behind the statement, said it expected to assist 3.3 million people this year with emergency food assistance, life-saving nutrition support and other aid.

“We are very worried to see that food insecurity is spreading beyond conflict areas as rising prices, impassable roads and dysfunctional markets are preventing many families, even those in towns and cities, from accessing food,” said Serge Tissot, representing the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The conflict in South Sudan, which pitted President Salva Kiir against his former deputy Riek Machar, killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 2 million from their homes, with many fleeing to neighboring countries.

Machar returned to Juba in April to take up the post of first vice president, similar to the position he had left.

The U.N. agencies said in the last few months 100,000 people had fled South Sudan to Sudan, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. It said this figure would rise to 150,000 by the end of June.

South Sudan’s economy, already in a dire state before the fighting erupted, has faced further pressure. Plunging oil pries have hit the biggest source of government revenues, while conflict has reduced production sharply.

Inflation stood at 295 percent year-on-year in May, up from 266.4 percent a month earlier, driven higher largely by food and drink prices, figures from the statistics office showed.

(Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Edmund Blair and Gareth Jones)

South Sudan food crisis may almost double to 5.3 million

GENEVA (Reuters) -Up to 5.3 million people in South Sudan may face a severe food shortages during this year’s lean season, the U.N. World Food Program said on Monday,nearly double the number in the first three months of the year.

From January to March, 2.8 million people were classed as being in “crisis” or “emergency” food situations, with about 40,000 thought to be suffering an outright famine.

The rising hunger comes despite attempts to end more than two years of war, which started in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir sacked his first vice president Riek Machar, triggering ethnically charged violence.

Some fighting continues, but Kiir was able to name a new cabinet in late April, including former rebels and members of the opposition, after Machar returned to Juba and got back his old job.

“Internal food security analysis shows that South Sudan will face the most severe lean season in 2016 since its independence, driven by insecurity, poor harvests, and displacement in some areas of the country,” said a WFP report published on Monday.

“As many as 5.3 million people may face severe food insecurity, with particular areas of concern in the non-conflict affected states of Northern Bahr el Ghazal and Eastern Equatoria.”

During the 2015 lean season, which runs from March to September, about 4.6 million people were classed as severely “food insecure”, WFP said previously.

The most severe conditions are in Unity State, where a team of food security experts found a risk of “widespread catastrophe” during a visit late last year.

The United Nations says 1.69 million South Sudanese are displaced within the country and another 712,000 have fled into neighbouring countries. The U.N. humanitarian plan for South Sudan has received only 27 percent of the $1.29 billion needed.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

South Sudan rivals talk peace while killing civilians, U.N. says

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – South Sudan’s warring government and opposition are killing, abducting, and displacing civilians and destroying property despite conciliatory rhetoric by both sides, the United Nations said on Friday.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is due to travel to South Sudan’s capital Juba next Thursday to meet with President Salva Kiir. A political dispute between Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar two years ago sparked a civil war and renewed hostilities between Kiir’s Dinka and Machar’s Nuer people. More than 10,000 people have been killed.

After months of ineffective negotiations and failed ceasefires, both sides agreed in January to share positions in a transitional government and earlier this month Kiir re-appointed Machar to his former post as vice president.

“It cannot be tolerated that leaders make declarations in Juba, while the hostilities and attacks on the civilian population continue and intensify across the country,” said U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic.

He told the U.N. Security Council that the conflict threatens stability in the entire region.

Simonovich said that in the Greater Upper Nile region of South Sudan government forces had systematically razed villages and that sexual violence and abuse of children’s rights were rampant.

“During an attack on Koch county, one woman described how soldiers killed her husband, then tied her to a tree and forced her to watch as her 15-year-old daughter was raped by at least 10 soldiers,” Simonovich said.

U.N. peacekeepers are sheltering nearly 200,000 people at six protection sites in South Sudan and more than 2.3 million people have been displaced.

Eighteen people were killed in fighting on Wednesday at one of those U.N. compounds and more than 90 were wounded, the U.N. Refugee Agency said. Two Medicins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) workers were among the dead, the international medical aid group said.

“Violence continues in many regions of the country, including in areas that had previously been relatively calm,” Deputy U.N. envoy to South Sudan Moustapha Soumare told the council.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

Yemen city on the brink of famine, U.N. agency warns

Residents of one Yemen city are on the brink of famine, a United Nations agency warned Monday, as violent conflicts have prevented humanitarian workers from supplying food.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it delivered food to Al Qahira, a besieged area of the Taiz governorate, on Saturday, bringing enough food to last 18,000 people for one month. But it said Taiz remains at an “emergency” level on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification scale, one step below famine, and workers must be allowed to continue to deliver aid there.

The WFP said it has been delivering food to some parts of Taiz since December, though fighting between Houthi militants and government forces has complicated the agency’s efforts to move the supplies to the people in need. In a news release, it said about 20 percent of households in Taiz don’t have enough food, and many are facing “life-threatening rates of acute malnutrition.”

Taiz is far from the only Yemen city affected by fighting.

The UN says about 21.2 million of the country’s 26 million residents need some humanitarian aid, a 33 percent increase since violence erupted last March. The WFP says approximately 7.6 million Yemen residents are now “severely food insecure,” which requires urgent assistance.

Other countries are also in need of aid.

On Tuesday, the WFP said it was planning to deliver food this month to 35,000 people who have been affected by Boko Haram’s violent insurgency in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger. In a statement, the agency said it recently supplied food to 5,000 people in Chad for the first time.

“We were told that people have been really struggling to survive. Some said that they have been surviving only on maize for weeks,” Mary-Ellen McGroarty, the WFP’s Country Director for Chad, said in a statement announcing the increased humanitarian efforts. “We have started distributions at five sites where the needs are most critical and we are working to reach others.”

The WFP said some 5.6 million people are facing hunger as a result of Boko Haram’s violence, which has prompted 2.8 million people to flee their homes — 400,000 since December alone.

Last week, the WFP issued warnings about the food situations in South Sudan and Haiti, saying that about 6 million people in those countries were facing food insecurity. That included 40,000 residents of war-torn South Sudan that UN agencies said were “on the brink of catastrophe.”

Food insecurity on the rise in South Sudan, Haiti

More than 6 million people in South Sudan and Haiti are facing food insecurity, United Nations agencies warned this week, including thousands who could soon face catastrophic shortages.

The World Food Programme (WFP) and two other U.N. groups issued the warning for South Sudan on Monday, saying that 4.8 million of the country’s residents are at risk of going hungry. That includes about 40,000 people who the agency warned “are on the brink of catastrophe.”

The WFP issued its own warning for Haiti on Tuesday, saying the El Nino weather pattern fueled a drought that has 3.6 million people facing food insecurity, double the total of six months ago.

In a joint statement, the WFP, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said the South Sudan situation was “particularly worrisome” because the country is about to enter its lean season, when food is the most scarce.

They warn about 1 in 4 people in South Sudan require urgent assistance.

A recent Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, a barometer for measuring food security, found 23 percent of South Sudan is at risk of “acute food and nutrition insecurity” in the first three months of this year. It said the majority of them live in the states of Unity, Jonglei and Upper Nile, where ongoing violent conflicts have forced many from their homes.

The report indicated there was “overwhelming evidence of a humanitarian emergency” in some areas, noting some people were eating water lilies, and warned the situation would likely worsen as water dried up in the coming weeks. The report could not confirm if parts of the country were already experiencing famine, as fighting prevented researchers from accessing certain areas.

The report said the country is also grappling with the effects of a drop in the value of its currency, which sent prices surging. It said the price of Sorghum, a cereal grain, increased 11-fold in a year.

The agencies said it was important they be given the chance to supply aid to those in need.

“Families have been doing everything they can to survive but they are now running out of options,” Jonathan Veitch, the UNICEF representative in South Sudan, said in a statement. “Many of the areas where the needs are greatest are out of reach because of the security situation. It’s crucial that we are given unrestricted access now. If we can reach them, we can help them.”

The WFP is also looking to help Haiti.

According to the organization, the country has seen three straight years of drought and an abnormally strong El Nino weather pattern is threatening to spoil the country’s next harvest.

El Nino occurs when part of the Pacific Ocean is warmer than usual, creating a ripple effect that brings atypical and sometimes extreme weather throughout the world. It’s been blamed for creating heavy flooding in some regions and droughts in others, both of which can spoil harvests.

The WFP said some parts of the country lost 70 percent of last year’s crops, and approximately 1.5 million Haitians are facing severe food insecurity. Others face malnutrition and hunger.

U.N. panel says South Sudan needs arms embargo; leaders killing civilians

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – The United Nations Security Council should place an arms embargo on South Sudan, while the oil-rich country’s President Salva Kiir and a rebel leader qualify to be sanctioned over atrocities committed in a two-year civil war, U.N. sanctions monitors said in an annual report.

The confidential report by a U.N. panel that monitors the conflict in South Sudan for the Security Council stated that Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar are still completely in charge of their forces and are therefore directly to blame for killing civilians and other actions that warrant sanctions. A copy of the report was seen by Reuters on Monday.

The 15-member Security Council has long-threatened to impose an arms embargo, but veto power Russia, backed by council member Angola, has been reluctant to support such an action. Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said on Monday that he was concerned that an arms embargo would be one-sided because it would be easier to enforce on the government.

A political dispute between Kiir and Machar, who was once Kiir’s deputy, sparked the civil war. But it has widened and reopened ethnic fault lines between Kiir’s Dinka and Machar’s Nuer people. More than 10,000 people have been killed.

The panel wrote that “there is clear and convincing evidence that most of the acts of violence committed during the war, including the targeting of civilians … have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals at the highest levels of the Government and within the opposition.”

However, they said the government appears to have been responsible for a larger share of the bloodshed in the country in 2015.

“While civilians have been and continue to be targeted by both sides, including because of their tribal affiliation, the panel has determined that, in contrast to 2014, the government has been responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations committed in South Sudan (since March 2015),” the U.N.’s panel coordinator Payton Knopf told the Security Council sanctions committee on Jan. 14, according to prepared remarks circulated to council members.

The South Sudan mission to the United Nations in New York was not immediately available to comment on the report.

U.N. peacekeepers in South Sudan are also “regularly attacked, harassed, detained, intimidated and threatened,” the report said.

The conflict in South Sudan, whose 2011 secession from Sudan had long enjoyed the support of the United States, has torn apart the world’s youngest country. The U.N. panel reported that some 2.3 million people have been displaced since war broke out in December 2013, while some 3.9 million face severe food shortages.

The U.N. report described how Kiir’s government bought at least four Mi-24 attack helicopters in 2014 from a private Ukrainian company at a cost of nearly $43 million.

“They have been vital in providing an important advantage in military operations, have facilitated the expansion of the war and have emboldened those in the Government who are seeking a military solution to the conflict at the expense of the peace process,” according to the report.

Knopf told the council that Machar’s rebels were now trying to “acquire shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to counter the threat of attack helicopters, specifically citing the need to continue and indeed escalate the fighting.”

Both sides signed a peace deal in August but have consistently broken a ceasefire, while human rights violations have “continued unabated and with full impunity,” the panel wrote.

According to the report, those violations include extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual violence, extrajudicial arrest and detention, abductions, forced displacement, the use and recruitment of children, beatings, looting and the destruction of livelihoods and homes.

The panel said that almost every attack on a village by the warring parties involved the rape and abduction of women and girls and that “all parties deliberately use rape as a tactic of war, often in gruesome incidents of gang rape.”

Knopf told the council committee that the human cost of the war was comparable to the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen relative to South Sudan’s population of 12 million. And he said there was “a real risk of even larger scale mass atrocities within South Sudan.”

The panel asked the council to blacklist “high-level decision makers responsible for the actions and policies that threaten the peace, security and stability of the country.”

The names of the individuals the panel recommend for sanctions in the form of an international travel ban and asset freeze were not included in the body of the report.

(Reporting by Louis Charbonneau and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

U.N. seeks $1.3 billion in humanitarian funding for South Sudan

NAIROBI (Reuters) – The United Nations is seeking $1.3 billion in humanitarian aid for South Sudan, where two in ten of the population have been driven from their homes during two years of conflict.

More than 10,000 people have been killed and 2.3 million displaced since the country’s civil war broke out in December 2013, when soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir first clashed with troops who backed his deputy, Riek Machar.

Eugene Owusu, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for South Sudan, said $1.3 billion would be the “bare minimum” needed to support 5.1 million people in the country facing life-threatening circumstances. “The challenge we face is unprecedented,” he said.

The U.N. said more than 680,000 children below the age of five are believed to be acutely malnourished.

Much of the fighting has been along ethnic lines between Kiir’s Dinka community and Machar’s Nuer people.

Progress on a peace deal signed last year has been slow, with both sides accusing the other of violating the agreement and dragging their heels over plans to form a government of national unity.

The war has also devastated South Sudan’s economy, slashing the oil production that funds most public spending.

(Reporting by Drazen Jorgic; editing by John Stonestreet)

South Sudanese Pastor Jailed, Beaten

A pastor in South Sudan says that he has had his strength increased after an ordeal where he was jailed and beaten by Islamists.

Adam Haron, 37, a convert from Islam who was born in West Darfur, Sudan.  On November 9th and 10th, Islamic extremists began calling and harassing him about his evangelism work in South Sudan.

Evangelism is legal in the nation where Christians are in the majority.  The country withdrew from Sudan in 2011 partially because of religious freedom issues.

Six days later, six armed men in military uniforms came into his hotel room and seized his items.  They forced him into a car where they began to beat him.  He was held at gunpoint and questioned about being a pastor.  When he said he was a pastor of Jesus Christ, he was taken to a detention center.

Pastor Haron was then kept in jail through February 18th.

Haron said that he was beaten 364 times with a tree branch as a whip.  He was thrown into a narrow cell with his legs bound in chains.  He had over $820 dollars stolen from him by his captors.

Haron says he will return to his church made up of mostly converts from Islam.