South Sudan war taking devastating toll on civilians: UN
A senior UN official for humanitarian affairs has warned about the “devastating” burden on the civilians South Sudan as a result of the persisting conflict between army troops and rebel forces in the deeply-divided African state.
In a Thursday statement, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien described the food security situation in South Sudan as “alarming.”
“Nearly 70 percent of the country’s population - 7.9 million out of 11.6 million people - are expected to face food insecurity this rainy season,” he added.
According to the statement, O’Brien is on a four-day tour of the war-ravaged nation to see “first-hand the humanitarian consequences of the conflict and efforts by aid organizations to respond to escalating needs.”
The UN official saw a number of the 166,000 civilians crowded into UN peacekeeping bases for fear of being attack by the warring parties since the conflict began backed in December 2013, the statement added.
“From speaking to communities displaced in Juba, it’s clear the brutal war has taken a devastating toll,” said O’Brien following his visit to a camp in the South Sudanese capital, where aid workers are facing difficulty to eradicate a cholera outbreak that has killed at least 39 people so far.
The bloody conflict in the newest African country started in December 2013 after President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of plotting a coup against him, triggering a cycle of retaliatory killings that has split the poverty-stricken nation along ethnic lines.
Tens of thousands have so far died in the war, according to the UN, but no official death toll has been maintained.
This is while the South Sudan peace talks, led by the eight-nation East African IGAD bloc, have continued in Ethiopia nearly as long as the civil war, leading to at least seven failed agreements and ceasefire deals that were all violated within days or even hours after being signed.
On Thursday, African mediators gave the two sides an August 17 deadline to sign a deal, the latest in a string of ultimatums issued since the conflict began.
The conflict has further forced 2.2 million people to flee their homes, as more than 600,000 of those are now in refugee camps in neighboring nations of Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda.
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