london: The international community urgently needs to donate at least another $500m if South Sudan’s devastating slide into humanitarian crisis and famine is to be halted, a senior UN diplomat has warned.
Thousands of people have been slaughtered, more than a million displaced, and almost 5 million are in dire need of humanitarian assistance as a result of ethnic violence in the world’s youngest nation.
This week, aid and development agencies warned of a possible future famine in three violence-ridden states. Toby Lanzer, the deputy special representative of the UN secretary general in South Sudan, said the situation was the most desperate he had seen. “What we are facing is a crisis or an emergency far bigger than I have ever had to deal with - and I used to work in Darfur and the Central African Republic,” he said. “It is simply no exaggeration to say that we are currently facing one of the most severe tests that the international aid community has ever faced.”
His bleak assessment of the crisis echoes that of the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who warned last week that if the conflict continued half of South Sudan’s 12 million people would be either “displaced internally, refugees abroad, starving or dead by the year’s end”.
The violence - which began in December after President Salva Kiir accused his vice president, Riek Machar, of plotting to overthrow him - has split the country along ethnic lines, sparking clashes between Kiir’s Dinkas and Machar’s Nuers.
Machar, who has fled the capital, Juba, has denied the accusations, claiming he has been made a scapegoat for the violence that broke out when rival factions in South Sudan’s army turned on each other. The fighting has left tens of thousands of people dead or wounded.
In a report last week, the UN laid out gross human rights violations - including ethnic-based killings, rapes, revenge attacks, and the deliberate targeting of civilians - on what it termed “a massive scale”.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights and former president of the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, said she recognised in the report “many of the precursors of genocide”.
The humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly, the World Food programme (WFP) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned. The former predicts that 3.9 million people in South Sudan will face emergency or crisis levels of food insecurity between June and August, while the latter estimates that 4.9 million people are in immediate need of humanitarian aid.
The fighting has displaced almost 1.3 million people, with more than 310,000 fleeing into Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda.
To make matters worse, the international aid system is under serious pressure because of the violence in Syria, where 9.3 million people require assistance, and the Central African Republic, where 2.5 million people need help.
Lanzer, who will travel to Oslo next week to address a two-day humanitarian pledging conference on South Sudan, said he would ask donors for a rapid initial injection of $500m to help meet the needs of the country and to “stop things spiralling in the wrong direction”. The funds, he added, were needed in addition to the $540m raised so far this year.
Guardian News
