Where the Soldiers Are Scarier Than the Crocodiles

A brutal civil war here in the world’s newest country has led government forces to burn villages, kill unarmed farmers, castrate boys, rape women and girls, and pillage hospitals. Rebels engage in similar behavior. Aid workers and journalists are under attack, with armed men breaking into a Catholic compound and raping a 67-year-old American nun.

More than two million South Sudanese have been forced to flee their homes, many into the perilous swamps, and United Nations officials estimate that at least 50,000 may have died in the last two years.

All the figures are dubious, but it may be that as many civilians are dying in South Sudan’s war as in Syria’s, and growing hunger may make the situation worse. Yet South Sudan hasn’t received the diplomatic or media attention the crisis merits. There was zero coverage of South Sudan’s civil war on American weekday evening network television news shows in 2015, according to the Tyndall Report, a news monitor.

After I reached the island, Nyakier was the first person I met. She told me that she fled her village last May after uniformed government soldiers attacked it, shot dead some women and children, and gang-raped her sister. Nyakier eventually found a place to hide on this island, whose name and location I’m not disclosing for obvious reasons.

Her 3-year-old son, Banyieny, became sick from hiding in the water and died. Now her 8-month-old son is suffering from severe acute malnutrition and is in danger as well. She is breast-feeding him but doesn’t have much milk because she herself is starving; it was midafternoon when we met, and she had had nothing to eat so far that day.

Multiply this family’s tragedy by millions and you get a window into the catastrophe faced by South Sudan, already one of the world’s poorest nations. Even before the civil war started two years ago, a girl was much more likely to grow up to die in childbirth than to finish high school.

The United States helped South Sudan achieve independence from Sudan in 2011 and has been its most important backer. I’m hoping President Obama, who in the past showed great interest in Sudan and South Sudan, will apply every possible diplomatic and financial lever to get a signed peace deal here carried out. 

All sides in this civil war have engaged in atrocities, and it has unfortunately taken on an ethnic dimension. In one small market town, I found a 6-year-old boy from the Nuer tribe, Gaiy, playing with astonishingly realistic toy guns he had made from clay, including a machine gun on a tripod, with an ammunition belt feeding it.

His creativity and skill made me think that he would make a great engineer, but he had different ambitions. “I want to be a soldier,” he explained. “I want to shoot Dinka,” he added, referring to members of a rival tribe that dominates the government.

I asked why, and he was blunt: “Because they are coming to kill us.”

What has evolved is an ethnic cleansing that sometimes seems to be inching toward genocide, and those at greatest risk are not combatants but women and children suffering from hunger and disease.

In one remote area, I came across a mother named Yapuot Ninrew who before the civil war had owned 60 cattle and enjoyed a decent life. Then a few months ago, government soldiers attacked. They seized Yapuot, and although she was five months pregnant, they tied her hands behind her back and hanged her by the neck from a rafter in a hut. After a minute or so, the troops laughingly cut her down but burned her hut and stole her clothing, her cattle and everything else she owned. They also kidnapped two of her sisters as sex slaves; the sisters later escaped.

Yapuot fled into the swamps with her five children, staying neck deep in the water all day and crawling out on islands to sleep at night. Two of her children, ages 4 and 8, drowned in the swamps while fleeing soldiers, she said (other villagers confirmed her account).

All this is unfolding in remote areas, without outside witnesses, without a global outcry. The victims are among the most voiceless on the planet, which is one reason the killing continues.

A new United Nations report suggests that government-affiliated soldiers were allowed to rape women in lieu of wages, and adds that the abuses may constitute crimes against humanity. “This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war — yet it has been more or less off the international radar,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights.

Aid groups are working heroically to try to help, but in an impossibly difficult environment, and at a huge cost: A humanitarian worker is killed here at a rate of once every two weeks. The U.N. has said its humanitarian appeal for South Sudan is only 3 percent funded, and some aid groups are expected to pull out of the country this year just as needs escalate.

There are no ideal policies, but it would help to have an arms embargo and sanctions aimed at the assets of individuals on each side of the civil war: Make leaders pay a price for intransigence, instead of profiting from it. “Go after their assets,” advises John Prendergast of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group. “Stinging financial pressure that targets the top leaders on both sides will impact calculations more than anything else.”

High-level international pressure on the government and the rebels to implement their peace accord would be useful. And it would help if the American public called on elected officials to do more: The late Senator Paul Simon once said that if each member of Congress had received letters from 100 people protesting the Rwanda genocide, that would have been enough to push Washington to act.

Obama was outspoken about the Darfur genocide as a senator, calling on President George W. Bush to do much more, and he has clear concern about mass atrocities (he has done a fine job trying to reduce the risk of a slaughter in Burundi, and he did the same in the run-up to South Sudan’s independence). But today his administration can and should do more.

We can’t stop every atrocity, and I’m not even sure we can stop this one. But when people are being singled out because of their ethnicity and killed, raped, mutilated and starved, when a government that we helped put in place is regarded by citizens as more dangerous than hungry crocodiles, then surely we can try a little harder.

Background

Ignited by a political struggle between Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, violence erupted between presidential guard soldiers in December 2013 and immediately took on an ethnic character. Soldiers from the Dinka ethnic group, one of the two largest ethnic groups in South Sudan, aligned with President Kiir and those from the Nuer ethnic group, the other largest ethnic group, supported Riek Machar. In the midst of chaos, President Kiir announced that Machar had attempted a coup and violence spread quickly to Jonglei, Upper Nile, and Unity states. Since the outbreak of conflict, armed groups have targeted civilians along ethnic lines, committed rape and sexual violence, destroyed property and looted villages, and recruited children into their ranks.

Violence has prevented farmers from planting or harvesting crops, causing food shortages nationwide. In July 2014, the UN Security Council declared South Sudan’s food crisis the worst in the world. It warned that some four million people—a third of South Sudan’s population—could be affected and up to fifty thousand children could die of hunger.

In late December 2013, the UN Security Council authorized a rapid deployment of about 6,000 security forces, in addition to 7,600 peacekeepers already in the country, to aid in nation building efforts. In May 2014, the Security Council voted in a rare move to shift the mission’s mandate from nation building to civilian protection, authorizing UN troops to use force. Since reprioritizing protection, the UN Mission in the Republic of South Sudan has faced extreme challenges due to the deterioration of the security situation and its complex relationship with the government of the Republic of South Sudan, which is a belligerent to the conflict.