200 child soldiers freed in S. Sudan, but problem continues

More than 200 child soldiers were released by armed groups in war-torn South Sudan, part of a series of releases that will see almost 1,000 children freed in the coming months.

At the “laying down of the guns” ceremony, 112 boys and 95 girls were returned to their families in areas outside the town of Yambio. It was the first community release of child soldiers where children were directly reunited with their parents and siblings instead of first going to institutions.

“Many children who come to us are traumatized by what they have seen the regime soldiers do to their parents or relatives. Many witnessed their parents molested and killed,” said opposition spokesman, Lam Paul Gabriel.

The children released will get food assistance for three months, psychosocial support and vocational training, to help reintegrate them into their communities, said UNICEF. To date, the U.N. has released more than 2,000 child soldiers, yet despite progress and the government’s commitment to halt the recruitment of children, advocacy groups say it continues.

“Demobilization and disarmament rarely stick while war is still going on,” said Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child USA, an international humanitarian organization that provides support to children and families in war zones.

Without longer term help from the international community, Nutt said many children will be “back in the bush fighting again a year from now.”

An estimated 19,000 children are believed to be in armed forces amid the country’s 5-year civil war, which has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. South Sudan has one of the highest numbers of child soldiers in the world, according to the U.N.

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In South Sudan, ‘the body of Christ is bleeding,’ bishop says

Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, privately met with representatives of the South Sudan Council of Churches (SSCC) and discussed how to promote peace in the country.

“We are here as an ecumenical body…we came as Christians to show that the body of Christ is bleeding,” Bishop Paride Tabani told Catholic News Agency (CNA). The people, he said, “[need] hope. They need healing, they are crying for peace, which cannot be brought by arms, but by love, by a sense of compassion, a spirit of love and forgiveness which God has shown to us, especially now. We would like that this Easter would also be a resurrection of people from their suffering.”

Members of the delegation included bishops and leaders of different Christian denominations in South Sudan, including Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians, among others. They updated Pope Francis on several joint initiatives of the council to provide humanitarian aid and prompt international leaders to intervene in finding a solution to the conflict.

“The Pope holds the suffering people of South Sudan in his heart,” said Council Secretary James Oyet Latansio following the Vatican meeting with Francis.

Members also touched on when a possible papal trip might take place. Francis had intended to visit the war-torn nation last year alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. However, the trip was postponed due to security concerns. According to the delegation, the pope expressed a strong desire to go, but gave no specific date.

“When he comes, we will welcome him,” said Oyet Latansio.

South Sudan’s conflict remains a humanitarian crisis, as the violence has caused starvation and the internal displacement of millions. Pope Francis has frequently called for peace in the world’s youngest nation, even declaring an international day of prayer and fasting for the country in February.

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UN threatens to consider arms embargo in South Sudan

The U.N. Security Council demanded an immediate end to fighting in South Sudan and threatened to consider an arms embargo and sanctions to prevent warring parties from violating a December cease-fire agreement.

A U.S.-drafted resolution, adopted unanimously, also expresses the council’s intention to consider sanctions “against those who take actions that undermine the peace, stability, and security of South Sudan.”

 The resolution extends the mandate of the U.N. peacekeeping force in South Sudan until March 15, 2019 and maintains the 17,000 troop ceiling, including a regional protection force of up to 4,000 troops and 2,101 international police personnel.

There were high hopes that South Sudan would have peace and stability after its independence from neighboring Sudan in 2011. But the country plunged into ethnic violence in December 2013. A peace deal signed in August 2015 didn’t stop the fighting — and a cessation of hostilities agreement this past Dec. 24 was broken within hours.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and forced over 4 million to flee their homes, more than 1.8 million of them leaving the country in what has become the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/un-threatens-to-consider-arms-embargo-in-south-sudan/2018/03/15/415bbba0-2863-11e8-a227-fd2b009466bc_story.html?utm_term=.40bd0b85378f

The Key to Making Peace in Africa

In December 2013, competing factions of South Sudan’s ruling party plunged the country into a horrific civil war as they fought over the spoils of the world’s newest state. Now in its fourth year, the conflict has ravaged the economy, resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, brought hundreds of thousands to the brink of famine, and displaced more than four million people, making this Africa’s largest refugee crisis since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. And yet, amid all the suffering, a small clique of government elites and their cronies inside and outside South Sudan have benefited financially from the fighting, siphoning off the country’s oil wealth and storing the money in their private bank accounts and in luxury real estate in neighboring countries.

Remarkably, there is currently no coordinated strategy to disrupt the illicit siphoning of money by leaders and their foreign business partners. For leaders, giving up power almost certainly means losing access to their spoils, and it might even mean facing prosecution. This is the fatal flaw of peacemaking in Africa: those supporting mediation lack the leverage necessary to stop corrupt figures from using their forces to bomb, burn, imprison, silence, torture, starve, impoverish, kill, and rape to maintain or gain power.

Serious financial pressure with real bite is not only possible; it has proved effective in the past. As a start, sanctions must be levied against entire networks, not just individuals. Sanctions that target networks in this way are powerful tools for changing behavior and pressuring targeted individuals to come to the negotiating table. These “network sanctions” work because they affect not only the primary individual themselves but also those who are acting on their behalf and entities owned or controlled by the primary individual.

By sanctioning these individuals and entities at once, or in close succession, the individual’s network does not have enough time to absorb and adjust to the financial impact of being cut off from the U.S. financial system. Systemic sanctions would have a dramatic effect in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Congo, all places where interlocking kleptocratic networks involving political and military officials, allied businessmen, arms dealers, and international financial facilitators profit from mayhem.

For these sanctions to work, however, they need to be enforced.

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Famine Stalks South Sudan

In the catalog of horrors afflicting the world’s most hellish places, South Sudan can check about every bloodied box. More than four years of civil warfare has left tens of thousands dead, two million displaced, half the population at threat of starvation without aid and a trail of atrocities — genocide, child warriors, rape, castration, burned villages. And now, warns the United Nations, famine stalks the tortured land.

A recent report by the United Nations and the South Sudan government said 150,000 people could slip into famine this year. A formal famine declaration means people have already started to starve to death. But even with food aid, humanitarian workers warn, much of South Sudan could face severe hunger by May.

With so many conflicts around the globe, it is not surprising that those like South Sudan’s attract attention only when they rise to horrific levels. But South Sudan has the dubious distinction of being the world’s youngest state and the one most likely to fail.

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Hunger Woes Escalate in War-Torn South Sudan

At least two-thirds of the residents of oil-rich South Sudan are at risk of extreme hunger as the country tries to contain a devastating four-year conflict.

Some 5.3 million people, almost half of the population, struggled to find enough food in January, as aid agencies brace to help a record number of people in need this year, a report released by the United Nations and South Sudanese government said.

“The situation is extremely fragile, and we are close to seeing another famine,” said Serge Tissot, representative for the U.N.’s food and agricultural agency in South Sudan. “The projections are stark. If we ignore them, we’ll be faced with a growing tragedy.”

The prospect of famine comes after a dry season in which South Sudan in early 2017 declared famine in two counties with a total of some 100,000 residents. Weeks of robust aid deliveries helped avert the crisis, prompting aid agencies to lift the famine declaration in June.

The hunger is one aspect of a humanitarian emergency that has uprooted nearly five million people since the conflict began, creating the region’s worst refugee crisis since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, aid officials said.

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