The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Wednesday warned that South Sudan is “a forgotten conflict” facing a “humanitarian crisis” made worse by the pandemic, while the UN on Thursday cautioned that 60 percent of people in the world’s newest nation are “increasingly hungry.”
South Sudan has been struggling to recover from five years of war that at least one study says killed almost 400,000 people. A coalition government formed last year between South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar is implementing a peace deal behind schedule, while deadly violence continues in parts of the country.
ICRC director-general Robert Mardini, who visited South Sudan last week, called it “one of the most complex humanitarian crises anywhere.”
Photo: AFP
“Now alarmingly we see severe food shortages and a largely unquantifiable prevalence of COVID-19, which are making an already catastrophic situation even worse,” he added.
Although hostilities between the main parties might have ceased or been reduced, Mardini said that “fighting with smaller parties and splinter groups and between communities is unfortunately continuing to cause death, destruction and displacement.”
At Akabo County Hospital in eastern Jonglei state, Mardini said he saw several people recovering from gunshot wounds, including children.
They were victims of intercommunal violence that is endemic in the country and the result of historic rivalries, often over cattle and land, but sometimes over political agendas orchestrated from the capital, he said.
Other patients’ injuries were much less obvious, because they were victims of rape and sexual assault, which has soared in the conflict, and there were several children being treated for malnutrition, some for malaria at the same time, Mardini said in an online interview from Switzerland.
“These cases are just the very tip of the iceberg,” Mardini said. “Our most recent assessment shows that last year’s harvest was around half of what it was in the previous year in nine of the 10 country’s states.”
“There is little doubt that the current crisis is on the verge of slipping into something much more frightening,” he added.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a UN Security Council meeting on conflict-driven hunger that chronic sporadic violence, extreme weather and the economic effects of COVID-19 have pushed more than 7 million people into acute food insecurity, the highest level since the country declared independence 10 years ago.
Food prices are so high “that just one plate of rice and beans costs more than 180 percent of the average daily salary — the equivalent of about US$400 here in New York,” Guterres said.
UN World Food Programme executive director David Beasley told the council he visited the country’s western Pibor county early last month and in the past few days heard that “in extreme circumstances, mothers are resorting to feeding their children with the skin of dead animals — or even mud.”
“This is a desperate situation that calls for urgent attention,” he said. “The local population call 2021 ‘the year of starvation,’ and their suffering is the result of widespread conflict, and the unprecedented floods that came in 2019 and 2020. These people are in the crossfire of conflict while bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.”
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