South Sudan

[kola_yusuf]

The situation in South Sudan bears a lot of watching. The hostilities in that part of the world bear a lot of watching.

 

[High_Gravity]

The Great, Slow Road of Juba: South Sudan's Crucial Artery

If you've never thought much about pavement, take a drive from Juba to Nimule. Parts of South Sudan's busiest road have been paved, but the unfinished parts are still teeth-rattling stretches of pitted, rust-colored dirt. On a dry day, each passing truck leaves a impenetrable dust cloud in its wake; after a rain, pocks in the earth degenerate into red lagoons. The trucks whose tires don't sink into the mud veer wildly to dodge the lakes, sending lesser vehicles scattering. When you finally bounce back onto the pavement, it is so mercifully uneventful that you swear you will never take it for granted again, and before you can make any more promises you won't keep, cathunk! You're back on the dirt, splayed across the backseat like a starfish, bracing against windows and seats with all available limbs.

When it's done, the Juba-Nimule road will be the longest paved road — and by far the biggest infrastructure project — in the Republic of South Sudan, the world's youngest nation. USAID, a major donor to the three-month old country, is paying for and overseeing the work on the 192-kilometer route and the eight bridges along the way. Work began in 2008, and it's total price-tag of $220 million is $61 million over original projections. Some have questioned why only a third of the road is finished after three years; others wonder whether those millions of dollars were best spent so near the capital, instead of a more isolated area.

Few, however, would argue that the job shouldn't get done. In a country the size of France, there are less than 110 km (68 miles) of paved roads. Most of the nation's limited road network is comprised of dirt routes in various stages of disrepair. Money for infrastructure did not flow generously to the south from Khartoum, a chronic neglect that was one of many factors fueling the nation's decades of civil war. "Even before the ravages of war could set in, our country never had anything worth rebuilding," President Salva Kiir said before the United Nations last month. Now that he and his ministers are in charge, they face the enormous task of creating a road system nearly from scratch. In August, local media reported that the government aims to pave over 4,300 miles of roads — a feat they estimate could cost nearly $7 billion.

It's hard to imagine a weeks-old administration — for which everything is a priority — tackling that so soon. The logistics of building a road in a war-torn nation are daunting. Landmines plague many parts of the countryside and have to be cleared before grading can begin. Because South Sudan is landlocked, almost everything — from skilled engineers to bulldozers — has to be imported over land, a process that itself can get slowed down when, say, pirates off the coast of Africa hold up shipments. With the widespread prevalence of illegal guns, security has to be provided for road crews. On the Juba-Nimule road, USAID expects to spent $10 million alone on security and $8 million de-mining the road. Workers are still finding mines as the job continues.

Still, the young government needs to aim high. Without better roads, it won't be able to tackle some of its biggest problems. Despite its ample fertile land, South Sudan has extremely little commercial agriculture, in large part because there is, in most cases, no way to get farmers' produce to market. The nation has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world; more roads would enable more women to get to hospitals before, during or after a complicated childbirth. They could also help rein in the violence that regularly erupts in remote areas of the country. When fighting breaks out between tribes, as it did this August when over 600 people were killed in Jonglei state, troops can't always get to the site of conflict to diffuse the situation. "You put a road in place and it opens up a lot of things." says Kevin Mullally, mission director for USAID in South Sudan. "It opens opportunities... but if it's not well thought-out, it could also destroy certain opportunities."

Read more: The Great, Slow Road of Juba: South Sudan's Crucial Artery - TIME

 

[Tank]

The modern world is not natural with the African people

 

[High_Gravity]

The modern world is not natural with the African people

What does that even mean?

 

[High_Gravity]

South Sudan Says Black Market Currency Trading Fuels Inflation

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Central Bank workers in South Sudan may be involved in black market currency trading that is fueling inflation in the newly independent nation, the deputy finance minister said.

The employees are able to buy dollars at the official rate of between 2.9 to 3.3 pounds to the dollar and sell them on the black market, where the U.S. currency fetches as much as 4 pounds, Marial Awou Yol said yesterday in an interview in Juba, the capital. Ministry of National Security agents are probing all businesses that can trade in foreign currency, including banks, insurance companies and exchange bureaus, he said.

“We have ordered them to be positioned, or embedded, into mainly the central bank, because it looks like there is connivance between some staff of the central bank and these mobile bureau exchange owners” operating on the street, he said.

Consumer prices jumped 61.5 percent in September from last year as the cost of food surged, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Oct. 18. South Sudan gained control of about 75 percent of Sudan’s oil production, the third biggest in sub- Saharan Africa, when it seceded on July 9.

Police in Juba said last week they detained more than 20 people who were exchanging money illegally on the streets.

Yol said the government hoped that further investigations would lead authorities to the “invisible guys” who are profiting from illegal currency speculation.

Food Prices Soar

The price of food, the largest contributor to the inflation index with a 71.4 percent weighting, advanced an annual 65.3 percent in September, the Juba-based statistics bureau said in a statement on its website.

The central bank this month said it was doubling to $200 million the weekly amount of foreign currency allocated to financial institutions.

Yol said such measures would only be effective if security agencies are able to prevent illegal speculators from profiting on the black market.

South Sudan Says Black Market Currency Trading Fuels Inflation - Businessweek

 

[High_Gravity]

Sending U.S. Troops to Africa May Help South Sudan

(CNSNews.com) – President Obama’s decision to send 100 combat-ready troops to central Africa aims to help rid Uganda of a 20 year-old rebel scourge but could also benefit South Sudan by eliminating at least one of the most troubling security challenges facing the fledgling republic.

Last year alone, attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) displaced some 25,000 southern Sudanese, according to the United Nations.

The group’s activities in that area, where it has been killing, raping and abducting civilians for the past six years, has especially affected the southwestern corner of the world’s newest country, its most fertile and potentially productive region.

Although viewed primarily as a Ugandan group, the LRA’s deadly activities have affected security far beyond its original turf in the north of that country, operating in southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.

Obama informed House Speaker John Boehner in a letter Friday that he had authorized the deployment of about 100 troops to advise regional armies in the fight against the LRA and its leader, Joseph Kony.

Obama said that the U.S. has supported regional military efforts against the LRA since 2008. He cited legislation he signed into law last year in which Congress “expressed support for increased, comprehensive U.S. efforts to help mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the LRA to civilians and regional stability.”

“In furtherance of the Congress’s stated policy, I have authorized a small number of combat equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces that are working toward the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield,” the president wrote.

Splintered units of the Lord’s Resistance Army are reported to be located in northern Uganda, the south-western corner of South Sudan, as well as in areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic. (Map: CIA World Factbook)
The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, which received significant bipartisan support, calls for the provision of “political, economic, military, and intelligence support for viable multilateral efforts to protect civilians from the Lord’s Resistance Army, to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the continued absence of a negotiated solution, and to disarm and demobilize the remaining Lord’s Resistance Army fighters.”

Formed in the late 1980s in northern Uganda, the LRA soon became notorious for atrocities including the mutilation and murder of civilians and the abduction of children forced to serve as soldiers or sex slaves. Once estimated to have up to 3,000 fighters, researchers believe its ranks today to be 200- or 300-strong at most.

“If you ever had any question if there was evil in this world, it’s resident in the person of Joseph Kony and in that organization,” U.S. Africa Command commander Gen. Carter Ham told a Center for Strategic and International Studies forum in Washington earlier this month.

Notwithstanding its name and occasional invoking of the Ten Commandments, the LRA is less accurately described as a “Christian” organization than as a brutal cult led by a conceivably psychotic killer who claims to be possessed by spirits.

Its only known state sponsor has not been a “Christian” entity, but President Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist regime in Khartoum. Bashir began supporting the LRA in the mid-1990s in response to the Ugandan government’s backing for his arch foe in Sudan’s long and costly civil war, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Sending U.S. Troops to Africa May Help South Sudan | CNSnews.com

 

[High_Gravity]

The slow boats to South Sudan

John Latuma is one of the tens of thousands of South Sudanese stranded in Sudan as they try to make their way home to their newly independent country.

He is stuck in a makeshift camp in Kosti, a port on Sudan's White Nile hoping to get a barge nearly 1,450km (900 miles) down the river, through the swamps and over the border to Juba, South Sudan's capital.

"People are stagnant here - no food, no treatment, no drugs - the situation is very bad," he says.

South Sudan seceded from the north in July, and over the last year more than 340,000 of its new citizens have made the trip home.

But the flow of returnees has slowed, due to money shortages, the dangerous journey and a lack of transport.

Mr Latuma went to Sudan's capital, Khartoum, 20 years ago during the long north-south civil war, like many South Sudanese.

He has given up his house and job and is now staying in unenviable conditions with some 12,000 other South Sudanese at Kosti, about 300km south of Khartoum, in a way-station designed to hold 1,500 people.

There are not enough toilets, and there are only two clinics providing health services.

One man, Yacob, complains there are not enough drugs.

Although he is on crutches, he insists on hopping through the camp to show me a place he is particularly indignant about, where the shallow pool of slimy water stinks.

Children at risk

The aid agencies would like to put up more buildings to house the influx, but the Sudanese authorities do not want the camp to become permanent.

The numbers here have grown because there are not enough barges to transport all the people wishing to leave.

Barge numbers are limited because there is only one company suitable to transport passengers The journey itself is difficult too: 6,000 people leave at once, and face at least three weeks travelling through the notoriously difficult Sudd swamp before they arrive in Juba.

But the gap between barges is so great some South Sudanese have been in Kosti for several months.

"Our children are complaining of a lack of education," says Alex.

"They now have a lack of knowledge. We are appealing to our government to take us home."

About 10% of the children in the camp get some education provided by aid groups.

But their existence, in particular, is a precarious one.

"There are protection issues around sexual violence for girls," says Rein Dekker, from the War Child charity.

He goes on to list a many other problems.

"There are safety issues around the river - we have had cases of drowning and bad sickness too.

"We find issues around child labour too.

"There are also kids here who are not connected to any family, they were street children already, and they joined the movement, and they ended up here and have to fend for themselves."

Now Kosti - designed as a transit point where people would spend the night before taking the barge - has become a semi-permanent camp.

When South Sudan seceded, it agreed with Sudan that its citizens would have a nine-month period to sort out their status.

But South Sudanese have already lost their Sudanese nationality, in many cases their jobs, and often struggle to get their pensions.

BBC News - The slow boats to South Sudan

 

[High_Gravity]

Birth Pains of a Nation: South Sudan's Problematic Boom

When the first limousine in South Sudan arrived earlier this year, it was loaded onto a truck and covered in a giant tarp. "I didn't want to cause any accidents," says Latjor James Mayul, the Juba businessman who ordered the 2003 Lincoln Navigator online from a dealership in the Netherlands. Mayul understood the raw power of luxury in a nation picking itself up from decades of isolation and war. Even today — months after his rental limo has become a fixture at the weddings of the city's highflyers — the opulence of its white leather seats and LED disco lighting is hard to resist, even for Mayul. "See the lights?" he asks. "They're so amazing!"

Three months into South Sudan's nationhood, the new capital of Juba is still in the grip of postindependence euphoria. Happy citizens in roadside beer advertisements toast each other on the nation's "Fine Achievement." Yellow Humvees and black Range Rovers jockey for space on the pockmarked arteries where white aid vehicles used to reign supreme and skeletons of soon-to-be hotels and high-end apartment complexes sprout between corrugated iron shanties and makeshift tea stands. Even the egalitarian matatu — the inexpensive minibuses that ferry passengers around many African cities — has embraced the aspirational zeal, with slogans like "Time Is Money" emblazoned in stickers across their windshields.

It's a kind of material optimism that — for those who have access to it — has taken on an almost patriotic hue after years of collective sacrifice. "Our parents went through the hardship of getting us to this point," says Aisha Jore Ali, who recently started the first South Sudanese event- and wedding-management company after she noticed that more couples were getting married in the months leading up to and after independence. "Any occasion that brings happiness is a big deal." Mayul, who says he paid about $90,000 for the used limo through his coterie of other small-business ventures, isn't sure when — or if — he'll make any money on this particular whim. "I don't know how long it will take to get the money back," he admits. "But if people are happy, I feel like I'm doing a good job."

Juba's golden aura of opportunity has many knocking on its door. On a side street in an NGO-infused neighborhood, Filmon Tsegoy stands in the middle of what he says will soon be the classiest hotel in town. At 24, the Eritrean is in contention to be the youngest hotelier in the city, and he is in good company. "There are Ugandans, Kenyans, Lebanese ... they're from everywhere," says Tsegoy. Indeed, since Khartoum and Juba signed a peace agreement in 2005 ending their vicious war, entrepreneurs and skilled and manual laborers from throughout the region have been helping build a shattered Juba from the ground up. The government has mostly welcomed the foreigners — particularly those like Tsegoy who bring capital with them — to help ease the investment and labor shortage in a country where most people have been too busy avoiding AK-47s to learn skills needed to build up the economy. "I didn't want to live here," Tsegoy says. "But now I like it."

Not all newcomers give the world's newest nation such rave reviews. On a Saturday morning, a thin crowd of men and a few families mill around the dusty grounds of Juba's Episcopal Church, where the U.N. has set up a few plastic tables to register refugees. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese who have returned home since the end of the war in 2005, people from the northern Sudanese states of Darfur, Abyei, South Kordofan and Blue Nile have been heading to Juba in recent months, fleeing fighting in their hometowns or seeking a better life under a government they feel is, by definition, sympathetic to their grievances with Khartoum. "People chose South Sudan because we have the same land, the same enemies, the same color, the same culture," says Idiris Adam Abraham, who fled Darfur 10 years ago and moved to Egypt. After the South became independent in July, Abraham took his young wife and 5-year-old son to Juba, hoping the family could settle down. "Sometimes [the South Sudanese] are welcoming. Many are understanding," Abraham says. "But they are affected by the war. They've had many bad experiences ... it's like they are paying it back."

Indeed, for all of Juba's optimism, many worry whether the overloaded government has the ability to look after its own citizens, let alone an influx of refugees and foreign workers. Despite some $10 billion the South has received in oil revenues since the 2005 peace deal, basic services around the country remain scarce. Even in the capital, where poverty rates are less than half that of rural areas, people are slipping through the cracks as officials become increasingly preoccupied with the complications of urbanization. "There are so many threats — money laundering, counterfeiting, drugs. These are new to us," says Lieut. General Salva Mathok Gengdit, the Deputy Interior Minister. The police, many of whom are former soldiers without any formal police training, are ill equipped to contain a growing crime rate spurred on by Juba's rising cost of living and lack of opportunity after decades of war. At a military hospital in town, several soldiers a week are admitted after attempting suicide. "People are under pressure to support their families," says Akim Nyuon Yach, who has to perform dental work on many of the would-be suicide patients after they have tried to shoot themselves under the jaw. "They can't envision their future. Now that war is over, they don't see the purpose of their lives."

Read more: South Sudan Faces Growing Pains Amid Its Economic Boom - TIME

 

[High_Gravity]

Sudan, South Sudan Heading For War

NAIROBI, Kenya — The presidents of Sudan and the new nation of South Sudan are both predicting the possibility of a new war in an oil-rich region that has seen a spike in cross-border attacks.

Troop build-ups are being reported on both sides of the Sudan-South Sudan border, the world's newest international boundary, and rebels in Sudan announced a new alliance with the aim of overthrowing their own government, which is seated in the capital, Khartoum.

The U.S. is pleading for cooler heads to prevail, even as aid workers are withdrawing from the region after two bombing runs into South Sudan by Sudan, its northern neighbor, last week.

After two long wars that spanned decades, South Sudan formally declared independence from Sudan in July following a successful independence referendum in January that was guaranteed in a 2005 peace deal. The world celebrated the peaceful break-up of Sudan. But big disputes that have long lurked in the background are now festering, and flaring into violence.

An agreement to split the region's oil revenues was never reached. The borders were never fully demarcated. And perhaps most important, the break-up left two large groups of people in Sudan's south in the lurch, groups that Sudan has labeled rebels and that Khartoum's military has been attacking for months.

In addition, the Khartoum government is facing a financial crisis due to the loss of oil revenue and rising food prices, said John Prendergast, the co-founder of the U.S.-based Enough Project, which closely monitors Sudan.

"Each spark heightens the possibility of all-out war, and the sparks are occurring with more frequency now," Prendergast said Monday.

Sudan President Omar al-Bashir accuses the south of arming what he calls rebels in Sudan. He said this month that if the south wants to return to war, his army is prepared, as he ticked off recent clashes he said the north won.

"We are ready to teach you another lesson," Bashir said.

South Sudan President Salva Kiir responded last week, saying al-Bashir's accusation are only to justify "his pending invasion." Kiir said South Sudan is committed to peace but allow its sovereignty to be violated.

Last week U.S. and other international officials said Sudanese military aircraft twice flew into South Sudan territory and dropped bombs. In the second attack two bombs landed in a refugee camp. There were no casualties.

The U.S. demanded that Sudan halt aerial bombardments immediately.

"This is a moment where both sides need to show maximum restraint," said Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. "In the first instance, the government of Sudan needs to halt all offensive actions against the south. Immediately. And the south needs to have the wisdom and restraint not to take the bait and not to respond in kind."

The aid group Oxfam said over the weekend it was pulling out 22 staff members – mainly engineers and health workers – from South Sudan's Upper Nile state after the staff reported a bombing and heavy artillery on Friday. The staff witnessed planes overhead and a build-up of South Sudan troops, Oxfam said.

"New bombing raids and a build-up of troops along the border of Sudan and South Sudan over the past few days threaten to escalate what is already a significant humanitarian crisis," it said, adding: "Thousands of refugees are still coming across the border ... they have fled attacks and walked for days to reach a place they thought would be safe but instead they are now facing more violence."

The World Food Program also suspended activities in the Yida refugee camp – home to more than 20,000 refugees – after two bombs from Sudanese aircraft fell in the camp and three outside of it.

Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in South Sudan, said the attack "put innocent civilians at extreme risk."

A new Sudan rebel group calling itself the Sudan Revolutionary Front has emerged, adding to the dizzying array of political and military groups involved in an ethnic, economic and territorial conflict between the two countries.

The Sudan Revolutionary Front says its aim is to overthrow the Sudan's ruling National Congress Party through all means, including violence. The group consists of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North, the Justice and Equality Movement, and two factions of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army.

Sudan, South Sudan Heading For War

 

[High_Gravity]

I have a feeling South Sudan is going to go to war against the Arab government in the North.

Viewpoint: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan

"We left our homes with not even a cup like this one," recounted the woman from a Sudanese refugee camp in Ethiopia last month, gesturing toward a red plastic cup lying in the dirt next to her foot. Asma, a name we are using for her to help ensure her safety, said Sudanese government Antonov planes bombed her village and government soldiers, supported by ethnic militia, chased and killed civilians. They did not spare children and pregnant women, she said angrily. "It's all because we are black," Asma told our colleagues in the Satellite Sentinel Project. She said that the militias were shouting, "Grab the slaves!" Her subsequent week-long journey with 50 other women to the refugee camp was harrowing. "Many of the women had to leave their babies in their cribs."

Incredibly, Asma and the tens of thousands of Sudanese who have run for their lives across international borders are the lucky ones. Those left behind in the war zones within Sudan — places like Blue Nile, South Kordofan, Abyei, and Darfur — are subject to a regime whose war tactics break every international law on the books. But two war crimes in particular — aerial bombing against civilians and blocking humanitarian aid — are leading to the biggest killer of all: famine.

The strategy of using starvation as a weapon or means of social control is one of the oldest and most effective tactics of war. Around 400 B.C., the Spartans ended the Peloponnesian Wars by starving the Greeks into submission in their siege of Athens. Two centuries later, after Rome defeated Hannibal's army, Roman troops ploughed Carthage with salt to render it infertile.

You'd think by the second decade of 21st century — with the development of international accountability and prevention mechanisms — that the use of starvation would have disappeared from the arsenal of war weapons because it bears too high a cost for the perpetrator. The people of Sudan would beg to differ.

These war tactics are a backdrop to the renewed threat of war between Sudan in the north and South Sudan, which became independent of the Khartoum regime in July after an internationally supported referendum on self-determination. If that conflict explodes, it would easily become the largest conventional war on the face of the earth. After the extraordinary success of South Sudan's peaceful birth four months ago, the Sudan that was left behind has burned, as the Khartoum regime has lit every dry bush it can find to see what catches fire, an extension of the divide and destroy policy it has successfully pursued to maintain power since a coup in 1989. The U.S. and broader international community should use the cross-border bombing and threat of starvation as a vehicle to reenergize peace and protection efforts.

Read more: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan - TIME

 

[Ropey]

I have a feeling South Sudan is going to go to war against the Arab government in the North.

Viewpoint: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan

"We left our homes with not even a cup like this one," recounted the woman from a Sudanese refugee camp in Ethiopia last month, gesturing toward a red plastic cup lying in the dirt next to her foot. Asma, a name we are using for her to help ensure her safety, said Sudanese government Antonov planes bombed her village and government soldiers, supported by ethnic militia, chased and killed civilians. They did not spare children and pregnant women, she said angrily. "It's all because we are black," Asma told our colleagues in the Satellite Sentinel Project. She said that the militias were shouting, "Grab the slaves!" Her subsequent week-long journey with 50 other women to the refugee camp was harrowing. "Many of the women had to leave their babies in their cribs."

Incredibly, Asma and the tens of thousands of Sudanese who have run for their lives across international borders are the lucky ones. Those left behind in the war zones within Sudan — places like Blue Nile, South Kordofan, Abyei, and Darfur — are subject to a regime whose war tactics break every international law on the books. But two war crimes in particular — aerial bombing against civilians and blocking humanitarian aid — are leading to the biggest killer of all: famine.

The strategy of using starvation as a weapon or means of social control is one of the oldest and most effective tactics of war. Around 400 B.C., the Spartans ended the Peloponnesian Wars by starving the Greeks into submission in their siege of Athens. Two centuries later, after Rome defeated Hannibal's army, Roman troops ploughed Carthage with salt to render it infertile.

You'd think by the second decade of 21st century — with the development of international accountability and prevention mechanisms — that the use of starvation would have disappeared from the arsenal of war weapons because it bears too high a cost for the perpetrator. The people of Sudan would beg to differ.

These war tactics are a backdrop to the renewed threat of war between Sudan in the north and South Sudan, which became independent of the Khartoum regime in July after an internationally supported referendum on self-determination. If that conflict explodes, it would easily become the largest conventional war on the face of the earth. After the extraordinary success of South Sudan's peaceful birth four months ago, the Sudan that was left behind has burned, as the Khartoum regime has lit every dry bush it can find to see what catches fire, an extension of the divide and destroy policy it has successfully pursued to maintain power since a coup in 1989. The U.S. and broader international community should use the cross-border bombing and threat of starvation as a vehicle to reenergize peace and protection efforts.

Read more: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan - TIME

They have been pretty reluctant in the past and if the South forges good Southern alliances this time, then they might do well.

Otherwise, more of the past. They will start strong and once they enter the real heavy fighting the alliances break and the North moves ahead.

 

[High_Gravity]

I have a feeling South Sudan is going to go to war against the Arab government in the North.

Viewpoint: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan

"We left our homes with not even a cup like this one," recounted the woman from a Sudanese refugee camp in Ethiopia last month, gesturing toward a red plastic cup lying in the dirt next to her foot. Asma, a name we are using for her to help ensure her safety, said Sudanese government Antonov planes bombed her village and government soldiers, supported by ethnic militia, chased and killed civilians. They did not spare children and pregnant women, she said angrily. "It's all because we are black," Asma told our colleagues in the Satellite Sentinel Project. She said that the militias were shouting, "Grab the slaves!" Her subsequent week-long journey with 50 other women to the refugee camp was harrowing. "Many of the women had to leave their babies in their cribs."

Incredibly, Asma and the tens of thousands of Sudanese who have run for their lives across international borders are the lucky ones. Those left behind in the war zones within Sudan — places like Blue Nile, South Kordofan, Abyei, and Darfur — are subject to a regime whose war tactics break every international law on the books. But two war crimes in particular — aerial bombing against civilians and blocking humanitarian aid — are leading to the biggest killer of all: famine.

The strategy of using starvation as a weapon or means of social control is one of the oldest and most effective tactics of war. Around 400 B.C., the Spartans ended the Peloponnesian Wars by starving the Greeks into submission in their siege of Athens. Two centuries later, after Rome defeated Hannibal's army, Roman troops ploughed Carthage with salt to render it infertile.

You'd think by the second decade of 21st century — with the development of international accountability and prevention mechanisms — that the use of starvation would have disappeared from the arsenal of war weapons because it bears too high a cost for the perpetrator. The people of Sudan would beg to differ.

These war tactics are a backdrop to the renewed threat of war between Sudan in the north and South Sudan, which became independent of the Khartoum regime in July after an internationally supported referendum on self-determination. If that conflict explodes, it would easily become the largest conventional war on the face of the earth. After the extraordinary success of South Sudan's peaceful birth four months ago, the Sudan that was left behind has burned, as the Khartoum regime has lit every dry bush it can find to see what catches fire, an extension of the divide and destroy policy it has successfully pursued to maintain power since a coup in 1989. The U.S. and broader international community should use the cross-border bombing and threat of starvation as a vehicle to reenergize peace and protection efforts.

Read more: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan - TIME

They have been pretty reluctant in the past and if the South forges good Southern alliances this time, then they might do well.

Otherwise, more of the past. They will start strong and once they enter the real heavy fighting the alliances break and the North moves ahead.

If the South gets their shit together, I hope the West gives them backing and support, the genocide and mass murder the Sudanese government is doing against Blacks in Africa makes me sick. It sounds to me like the war is already on.

 

[Ropey]

I have a feeling South Sudan is going to go to war against the Arab government in the North.

Viewpoint: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan

Read more: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan - TIME

They have been pretty reluctant in the past and if the South forges good Southern alliances this time, then they might do well.

Otherwise, more of the past. They will start strong and once they enter the real heavy fighting the alliances break and the North moves ahead.

If the South gets their shit together, I hope the West gives them backing and support, the genocide and mass murder the Sudanese government is doing against Blacks in Africa makes me sick. It sounds to me like the war is already on.

That's the 'if' I'm also waiting on HG.

 

[JStone]

I have a feeling South Sudan is going to go to war against the Arab government in the North.

Viewpoint: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan

Read more: Famine as a Weapon: It's Time to Stop Starvation in Sudan - TIME

They have been pretty reluctant in the past and if the South forges good Southern alliances this time, then they might do well.

Otherwise, more of the past. They will start strong and once they enter the real heavy fighting the alliances break and the North moves ahead.

If the South gets their shit together, I hope the West gives them backing and support, the genocide and mass murder the Sudanese government is doing against Blacks in Africa makes me sick. It sounds to me like the war is already on.

With Israel on their side, SS will do better than the rest of the Arab Muslime shitholes.

 

[High_Gravity]

They have been pretty reluctant in the past and if the South forges good Southern alliances this time, then they might do well.

Otherwise, more of the past. They will start strong and once they enter the real heavy fighting the alliances break and the North moves ahead.

If the South gets their shit together, I hope the West gives them backing and support, the genocide and mass murder the Sudanese government is doing against Blacks in Africa makes me sick. It sounds to me like the war is already on.

With Israel on their side, SS will do better than the rest of the Arab Muslime shitholes.

Israel and the West need to throw their backing behind the South.

 

[JStone]

If the South gets their shit together, I hope the West gives them backing and support, the genocide and mass murder the Sudanese government is doing against Blacks in Africa makes me sick. It sounds to me like the war is already on.

With Israel on their side, SS will do better than the rest of the Arab Muslime shitholes.

Israel and the West need to throw their backing behind the South.

Israel is establishing alliances with African countries that are battling islime. The Jews and Christians owned the region before the scourge of islime.

 

[High_Gravity]

South Sudan Nhial Deng Nhial: We are on brink of war

South Sudan's foreign minister has warned his country is on the brink of war with Sudan following days of fierce fighting along the border.

Nhial Deng Nhial told the BBC Sudanese forces had invaded the town of Jau, which was in the south.

He urged the international community to intervene and said he hoped full-scale hostilities could still be avoided.

South Sudan seceded from the north in July following years of civil war in which some 1.5m people died.

The border between the north and south has not yet been officially designated.

Since July Khartoum and Juba have accused each other of supporting rebels in the border areas.

'Tanks and aircraft'

Mr Deng Nhial said the clashes in Jau, which he said was a town in Unity state, were the biggest threat to peace since South Sudan's independence.

"Although there have been frequent aerial bombardments of different places in the Republic of South Sudan, we think that Khartoum has raised this offensive to an entirely new level by committing ground forces to cross into the Republic of South Sudan," he told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

"We are still very much committed to the principle of dialogue with Khartoum - we are still hopeful that we can pull back from the brink of outright war."

Earlier, Col Philip Aguer, spokesman for South Sudan's army - the South People's Liberation Army (SPLA) - told the BBC that Khartoum had used tanks and long-range artillery in the offensive on Jau, which started on Saturday.

Antonov aircraft had also bombed the area, he said.

Southern troops had now recaptured the town, but Sudanese soldiers were still in South Sudan, he said.

"This is a war situation and if they don't withdraw, the SPLA will force them out," Col Aguer told the AFP news agency.

Across the border in the state of South Kordofan, Sudan's army has for several months been battling rebels, who once fought against Khartoum during the civil war.

South Kordofan is one of several border areas which failed to hold popular consultations about their future ahead of South Sudan's independence.

Mr Deng Nhial denied accusations that his government was supporting the rebels in the northern border areas, known as the SPLM-North.

"We had been associated with the SPLM-North during the years of our struggle. After independence we severed all military ties with our units in the north and we didn't provide any additional equipment," he said.

The foreign minister said it was important that the border be properly demarcated.

BBC News - South Sudan Nhial Deng Nhial: We are on brink of war

 

[Mad Scientist]

I wanted to say the war was just to split the country up into "Has Oil" and "Doesn't Has Oil" sides but I see the Civil War has been going on since 1955 so I guess it aint that simple.

 

[High_Gravity]

Sudan vs. South Sudan: The Rising Risk of a New Confrontation

The escalating confrontation between Sudan and the new republic of South Sudan is not for lack of communication: days of talks last month in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, saw negotiators from the shrunken, bitter rump Sudan and its youthfully overconfident breakaway neighbor huddle under the exasperated watch of former South African President Thabo Mbeki to try to strike a deal on oil. Several days and a flurry of warring PowerPoint presentations later, the talks collapsed with the parties still billions of dollars apart. Sudan announced it would start confiscating one-quarter of South Sudan's oil as transit payment for the use of its pipeline. South Sudan decried that as "looting" and demanded international intervention. Negotiators from both sides left the opulent Sheraton Hotel and flew home. For a couple days, nothing much happened. Then, on Dec. 3 Sudan sent troops and captured a contested border area, where the two armies continue to spar.

"An act of war!" declared South Sudan's army spokesman Philip Aguer. That may be an exaggeration right now, but soon it could be a matter of fact. The two sides have, of course, been at war on and off for more than a half century. For now, they seem content to wage an intensifying proxy war by backing rebel forces in each other's territory, along with the occasional direct skirmishes here and there along the border. The one thing holding them back from full-blown hostilities is the same thing they're currently at odds over: oil. Sudan faces a budget gap of over $7 billion over the next five years after South Sudan's secession cut it off from most of its oil reserves. But South Sudan, at least for now, has no option for getting oil to market other than a pipeline that runs through its northern neighbor. The infant South Sudan's economy is almost entirely dependent on oil revenues, while Sudan's own economic peril requires that it earn whatever it can from the pipeline.

Stopping the oil flow is not an option, says Said al-Khatib, a senior member of Sudan's negotiating team, "Otherwise, the pipeline is not an asset to us." To exploit that asset — and, it seems, to exact some revenge — they are demanding a whopping $36-a-barrel fee for the oil transiting their territory. And with South Sudan refusing to pay that sum, Sudan says it will simply seize some of the oil instead.

No surprise, then, that tensions along the border are reaching alarming proportions. Sudan's military says the frontier area of Jau it captured a week ago is inside its own territory; South Sudan blasted the move as an "invasion." The truth, as usual, is muddled. On maps, Jau is in South Sudan, barely, but it is also where the South Sudanese army had billeted allied rebels from the Nuba Mountains across the border, drawn up under the 2005 peace deal. Those Nuba fighters are now back at war against Khartoum, and Sudan accuses South Sudan of supporting their old comrades-in-arms — a charge diplomats say appears to be valid. Last January, with the South Sudan breakaway imminent, U.N. satellite photos showed Nuba rebels — then still part of the South Sudan army — hastily building a road back to their homeland in Sudan, along which those fighters stormed north months ago. By taking Jau, Sudan has cut off that link. The same road has also been used by fleeing refugees and appears to be the only route into the area for humanitarian aid — which Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir has barred, using hunger as a weapon to supplement his forces' aerial bombardment of the area's villages. The same tactic is being employed in Blue Nile, another Sudanese border state in conflict since Sudan's divorce.

The border wars are increasingly spilling into South Sudan. Khartoum blocked trade across the border months ago, and in November Sudanese planes bombed several areas inside South Sudan, including refugee camps that Khartoum says are used for rebel recruitment. Meanwhile, South Sudanese militias with apparent links to Khartoum and Eritrea continue to wreak havoc in South Sudan.

Read more: Sudan vs. South Sudan: The Rising Risk of a New Conflict - TIME

 

[High_Gravity]

I wanted to say the war was just to split the country up into "Has Oil" and "Doesn't Has Oil" sides but I see the Civil War has been going on since 1955 so I guess it aint that simple.

The Muslims in North Sudan have been comitting genocide on the ethnic Africans in Darfur, Kordofan and Southern Sudan for decades, they would still do this even if there were no oil involved at all.