Johannesburg
The risk of famine and genocide in the coming months is dire, international aid agencies have warned. The number of refugees pouring from South Sudan into Uganda peaked earlier this month at 7,000 a day.
But the United Nations Security Council on Friday failed to pass a U.S.-proposed arms embargo on South Sudan that many see as crucial to preventing escalated fighting and the threat of genocide.
South Sudan has seen growing ethnic tension since the July collapse of a peace deal that was supposed to end a civil war that began in 2013.
The latest report of the Food and Agriculture Organization predicts “an unprecedented deterioration of the food security situation across South Sudan in 2017. The risk of famine is real for thousands of people.”
As the crisis unfolds, South Sudan, a country whose spending on health and education is a fraction of what it spends on the military, has been hampering humanitarian agencies and expelling international aid workers and journalists. In recent weeks, for example, the government expelled two officials from the Norwegian Refugee Council without explanation.
The crisis has been caused by the collapse of the economy, the world’s highest inflation rate (835 percent per year) and the spread of fighting to central and western Equatoria, two regions in the south and southwest of the country that form the breadbasket of the nation.
South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011, but civil war broke out on ethnic lines in December 2013, pitting the Dinka tribe of President Salva Kiir against the Nuer tribe of his archrival, Riek Machar. A peace deal was signed in August last year, but after repeated violations, renewed fighting gripped the capital, Juba, in July, and Machar fled the country. Three million people have been driven from their homes since 2013.
Until this year, the Equatoria region had been peaceful. But fighting and a proliferation of rival militias have seen farmers flee their land, and trade routes have often been cut.
“That has implications for the entire country,” Fred McCray, CARE’s director for South Sudan, warned in a phone interview. “Farmers have not been planting, which means that the country as a whole is less able to feed itself because some of the most productive land has gone offline. But as the conflict has spread, less (donated) food is getting in because the roads are insecure and dangerous.”
“The South Sudanese people are very strong, resilient people, but this is pushing them to the brink,” McCray said.