Tag Archives: South Sudan

Four countries face famine threat as global food crisis deepens

Internally displaced Somali children eat boiled rice outside their family's makeshift shelter at the Al-cadaala camp in Somalia's capital Mogadishu March 6, 2017. REUTERS/Feisal Omar

LONDON (Reuters) – Global food crises worsened significantly in 2016 and conditions look set to deteriorate further this year in some areas with an increasing risk of famine, a report said on Friday.

“There is a high risk of famine in some areas of north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen because of armed conflict, drought and macro-economic collapse,” the Food Security Information Network (FSIN) said.

FSIN, which is co-sponsored by the United Nations food agency, the World Food Programme and the International Food Policy Research Institute, said the demand for humanitarian assistance was escalating.

FSIN said that 108 million people were reported to be facing crisis level food insecurity or worse in 2016, a drastic increase from the previous year’s total of almost 80 million.

The network uses a five phase scale with the third level classified as crisis, fourth as emergency and fifth as famine/catastrophe.

“In 2017, widespread food insecurity is likely to persist in Iraq, Syria (including among refugees in neighboring countries), Malawi and Zimbabwe,” the report said.

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt; Editing by Ruth Pitchford)

World has just months to stop starvation in Yemen, Somalia: Red Cross

People queue to collect food rations at a food distribution center in Sanaa, Yemen March 21, 2017. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The world has got just three to four months to save millions of people in Yemen and Somalia from starvation, as drought and war wreck crops and block aid across the region, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Wednesday.

The agency said it needed $300 million to fund its work in those countries and other trouble spots in South Sudan and northeast Nigeria.

“We have probably a window of three to four months to avoid a worst case scenario,” Dominik Stillhart, the ICRC’s director of operations worldwide, told a Geneva news briefing.

“We have a kind of perfect storm where protracted conflict is overlapped, exacerbated by natural hazard, drought in particular in the Horn of Africa that is leading to the situation we are facing now,” he said.

More than 20 million people are facing famine in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and northeast Nigeria, say aid agencies.

Cholera, which can be deadly for children, is on the rise in Somalia, while an average of 20 people in Yemen are dying each day from disease or war wounds, ICRC officials said.

The ICRC appealed for $400 million for its operations in the four countries this year, but has received only $100 million so far, it said.

The United Nations has appealed for about $5.6 billion, bringing total funding needs to $6 billion, Stillhart said.

“There are significant needs and of course there are serious concerns in terms of having funding available sufficiently fast in order to avert what I said was a large-scale starvation,” he said.

“In 2011 the response was too slow and too late leading to starvation of 260,000 people in Somalia alone,” he warned.

Robert Mardini, ICRC regional director for the Middle East, said that an ICRC team who provided aid to wounded refugees after a helicopter attack killed more than 40 on their boat off the Yemen coast last Friday had collected “evidence”.

The evidence and ICRC concerns were shared with the Saudi-led coalition as well as the Houthi side, he said, declining to give more details.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay, editing by Tom Miles)

South Sudan government to blame for famine, still buying arms: U.N. report

Women and children wait to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, February 26, 2017. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – South Sudan’s government is mainly to blame for famine in parts of the war-torn country, yet President Salva Kiir is still boosting his forces using millions of dollars from oil sales, according to a confidential United Nations report.

U.N. sanctions monitors said 97 percent of South Sudan’s known revenue comes from oil sales, a significant portion of which is now forward oil sales, and that at least half of the budget – “likely substantially more” – is devoted to security.

“Revenue from forward oil sales totaled approximately $243 million between late March and late October 2016,” the panel of U.N. monitors said in the report to the U.N. Security Council, seen by Reuters on Thursday.

“Despite the scale and scope of the political, humanitarian, and economic crises, the panel continues to uncover evidence of the ongoing procurement of weapons by the … Government for the SPLA (South Sudanese army), the National Security Service, and other associated forces and militias,” the report said.

The United Nations has declared a famine in some parts of the world’s youngest country, where nearly half its population – some 5.5 million people – face food shortages. A civil war erupted in 2013 when Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, who has fled and is now in South Africa.

“The bulk of evidence suggests that the famine … has resulted from protracted conflict and, in particular, the cumulative toll of military operations undertaken by the SPLM/A in Government in southern Unity state; denial of humanitarian access, primarily by the SPLM/A in Government; and population displacement resulting from the war,” the report said.

The United Nations says at least one quarter of South Sudanese have been displaced since 2013.

‘NOT CORRECT’

South Sudan’s government rejected the report on Friday.

“We have not bought arms for the last of two to three years,” government spokesman Michael Makuei Lueth told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

“We have rights to buy arms for self-protection or self-defense … So this idea of the U.N. saying the government of South Sudan doesn’t care about its people and they are fan of buying arms all the time is not correct,” he said.

The annual report of the sanctions monitors to the 15-member Security Council comes ahead of a ministerial meeting of the body on South Sudan next Thursday, which is due to be chaired by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

While the previous U.S. administration of President Barack Obama was heavily involved in the birth of South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011, and led Security Council efforts to try to end the civil war, the policy of new U.S. President Donald Trump toward the African state is unclear.

In December, the Security Council failed to adopt a U.S.-drafted resolution to impose an arms embargo and further sanctions on South Sudan despite warnings by U.N. officials of a possible genocide. The U.N. monitors again recommended in their report that the council impose an arms embargo on South Sudan.

The Security Council set up a targeted sanctions regime for South Sudan in March 2015 and has blacklisted six generals – three from each side of the conflict – by subjecting them to an asset freeze and travel ban.

The U.N. monitors said all parties to the conflict continue to commit widespread human rights violations “with near complete impunity and a lack of any credible effort to prevent these violations or to punish the perpetrators.”

U.N. peacekeepers have been in South Sudan since 2011.

(Additional reporting by Denis Dumo in Juba; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

U.N. says tide of refugees from South Sudan rising fast

An aerial photograph showing South Sudanese refugees at Bidi Bidi refugeeís resettlement camp near the border with South Sudan, in Yumbe district, northern Uganda December 7, 2016. REUTERS/James Akena/File Photo

By Elias Biryabarema

KAMPALA (Reuters) – Some 1.5 million refugees have fled fighting and famine in South Sudan to neighboring countries, half of them to Uganda, and thousands more are leaving daily, the U.N. refugee agency said on Thursday.

Political rivalry between South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar ignited a civil war in 2013 that has often followed ethnic lines.

The two signed a shaky peace deal in 2015, but fighting has continued and Machar fled in July after days of clashes between soldiers loyal to him and Kiir’s forces in the capital Juba. He is now in South Africa.

Charlie Yaxley, spokesman for the UNHCR in Uganda, said the agency estimated the total number of South Sudanese who have gone to neighboring countries at 1.5 million, half in Uganda.

In December there were an estimated 600,000 South Sudanese who had arrived in Uganda.

Yaxley said there were thousands of new arrivals every day. The UNHCR had planned for 300,000 this year.

“We have already in the first two months of this year received 120,00 new arrivals. If this rate of inflow continues actually that figure for 2017 will be far higher,” Yaxley said.

Refugees arriving in Uganda often say they are fleeing from ethnic violence.

“I was in Invepi … and almost every refugee I spoke to had either seen a friend or family member killed in front of their eyes,” Yaxley said, referring to the latest refugee settlement set up in Uganda.

Violence has prevented many farmers from harvesting crops and the scarcity of food has been compounded by hyperinflation, triggering famine in parts of South Sudan.

The UNHCR says the refugee crisis is the world’s third largest after Syria’s and Afghanistan’s.

(Editing by George Obulutsa and Andrew Roche)

Tens of thousands flood into Sudan from famine-hit South Sudan

A woman waits to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan.

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – More than 31,000 South Sudanese refugees – mostly women and children – have crossed the border into Sudan this year, fleeing famine and conflict, the United Nations refugee agency said on Monday.

The United Nations declared famine last week in parts of South Sudan’s Unity State, with about 5.5 million people expected to have no reliable source of food by July.

“Initial expectations were that 60,000 refugees may arrive through 2017, but in the first two months alone, over 31,000 refugees arrived,” a statement from the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Khartoum said.

More than a million people have fled South Sudan since a civil war erupted in 2013 after President Salva Kiir’ fired Vice President Riek Machar. Fighting between government forces and Machar-led rebels has caused the largest mass exodus of any conflict in central Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Women and children wait to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan,

Women and children wait to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, February 26, 2017. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola

Some 328,339 South Sudanese refugees have sought refuge in Sudan, including about 131,000 in 2016, many exhausted, malnourished and ill, having walked for days. More than 80 percent of the latest arrivals were women and children.

The fighting has uprooted more than 3 million people and the U.N. says continuing displacement presented “heightened risks of prolonged (food) underproduction into 2018”. In the fighting, food warehouses have been looted and aid workers killed.

South Sudan is rich in oil resources. But, six years after independence from neighbouring Sudan, there are only 200 km (120 miles) of paved roads in a nation with an area of 619,745 square km (239,285 square miles).

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Millions risk starvation in Nigeria, Lake Chad region: United Nations

Children attend a class at a primary school in Muna Garage IDP camp, Maiduguri, Nigeria November 7, 2016. UNICEF/Naftalin/Handout via REUTERS

By Gwladys Fouche

OSLO (Reuters) – More than seven million people risk starvation in Nigeria’s insurgency-hit northeastern region and around Lake Chad, a senior U.N. official said on Wednesday ahead of a new funding appeal.

Famine has been ongoing since last year in parts of Nigeria where the government is fighting a seven-year long Boko Haram insurgency.

An international donor conference in Oslo on Friday will aim to raise a chunk of the $1.5 billion the United Nations says it needs to address deepening food insecurity in the region this year.

“They are living on the edge, barely getting by on one meal a day,” Toby Lanzer, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Sahel, told Reuters. “My biggest concern today is starvation.”

Earlier this week the United Nations said 1.4 million children were at risk of “imminent death” in famines in Nigeria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen.

Lanzer said he was worried the Boko Haram insurgency would deter farmers from planting their crops after missing the last three planting seasons, and that the number of lives at risk could increase. He also expressed concerns the coming rainy season could harm vulnerable people.

“Hungry people without shelter when it rains die,” he said.

Lanzer said the humanitarian response needed to go beyond food aid and include seeds, tools and fishing nets.

Lanzer said he hoped a total $500 million will have been pledged by the end of February, including this week’s funding round.

Lanzer, who has also worked in South Sudan, Darfur and Chechnya, said it was difficult to estimate how many people would die from hunger in the next few months.

“If we were to lose another planting season, I dread to think how severe the crisis could get,” he said.

Some 10.7 million people in northeastern Nigeria and around Lake Chad — roughly two in every three people — need humanitarian aid, according to the United Nations.

Boko Haram militants have killed about 15,000 people and forced more than 2 million from their homes, and still launch deadly attacks despite having been pushed out of the vast swathes of territory they controlled in 2014.

Lanzer cautioned that failure to address the deteriorating situation could encourage more Africans to try and flee to Europe.

(Editing by Richard Lough)

Nearly 15,000 lost children seek parents in chaos of South Sudan’s war

South Sudan mother reunited with her children

By Siegfried Modola

BENTIU (Reuters) – In the chaos of South Sudan’s civil war, it took three years for Nyagonga Machul to find her lost children.

Machul had traveled from her village to the capital when President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, in 2013. The dismissal triggered a civil war in the world’s newest nation that has increasingly been fought along ethnic lines.

Machul found herself cut off from her son Nhial, now aged 14 and the protector of the family; 10-year-old Ruai and 8-year-old Machiey, brothers who love board games and swimming; 6-year-old Nyameer with her shy smile; and Nyawan, now four but then the much-loved baby.

For years, Machul prayed for news. In December, she heard her children were alive – but far away in Bentiu, the northern gateway to the nation’s oil fields. More than a thousand 1,000 km (620 miles) of battlefield stretched between them.

Machul had left the children with their grandmother, but one night gunmen had attacked their village.

“I was in bed sleeping. All of a sudden I heard the sound of gunshots, then people shouting, screaming,” said Nhial.

The panicked children scattered and hid near the river Nile. Wandering back, they found each other, but not their grandmother. They decided to flee.

They walked through swamps, in chest-deep water infested with snakes and crocodiles. They begged food from families with little to spare.

Then a former neighbor, Nyabika Temdor, took them in, camping with them on a tiny island in the Nile. But gunmen struck again and they ran.

“I had to pay someone to carry the little ones, as they couldn’t walk,” Temdor said.

After four days, they reached a camp for displaced families in Bentiu. The sprawling settlement of 120,000 people is bordered by barbed wire and watchtowers.

That is where CINA found them. A local organization supported by UNICEF, case workers painstakingly trace separated families. They enter the names of lost children into a UNICEF supported database that holds nearly 15,000 names.

Having a parent vastly improves the long-term chances of a child’s survival, said Marianna Zaichykova, a spokeswoman for UNICEF. But the program is chronically underfunded.

Last year, reunifications dropped by 50 percent because there was not enough money to trace families, Zaichykova said.

Machul was lucky. UNICEF arranged for the children to fly to Juba this week. Their mother waited for them, in a tent made of sticks and plastic that looked just like the one they left in Bentiu.

She dappled drops of water on her children’s faces in a traditional blessing. Her friends began to sing. And then she opened her arms for her children.

“God has answered my prayers,” she said. “I am so happy.”

For a Wider Image photo essay of the story, click http://reut.rs/2kVBzp0

(Additional reporting by Katharine Houreld; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Alison Williams)

Troops and court needed fast to avert South Sudan genocide: U.N.

Council-mandated Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan Yasmin Sooka addresses the Human Rights Council 26th Special Session on the human rights situation in South Sudan, Geneva, Switzerland,

y Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – World powers can stop a “Rwanda-like” genocide in South Sudan if they immediately deploy a 4,000-strong protection force across the country and set up a court to prosecute atrocities, the head of a U.N. human rights commission said on Wednesday.

Africa’s newest nation plunged into civil war in December 2013 after a long-running feud between President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, exploded into violence, often along ethnic lines.

“South Sudan stands on the brink of an all-out ethnic civil war, which could destabilize the entire region,” commission chief Yasmin Sooka told an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Fighting was expected to escalate again now that the dry season had started, she said. Gang rape was happening on an “epic” scale, she added, citing cases of women being raped at a U.N. site in the capital Juba within sight of U.N. peacekeepers.

Washington and other powers called the one-day meeting after Sooka’s commission reported this month that ethnic cleansing was already taking place in South Sudan, which only seceded from Sudan in 2011.

Sooka’s comparison with Rwanda referred to the killing of some 800,000 people in three months of ethnic violence there in 1994.

Kiir has denied there is any ethnic cleansing and South Sudan’s ambassador at the council, Kuol Alor Kuol Arop, said his country saw no need for the special session.

International pressure, including the threat of sanctions, has so far failed to halt the fighting in an oil-producing country at the heart of a fragile region that includes Sudan, Ethiopia and Democratic Republic of Congo.

The warring sides agreed to set up a court backed by the African Union in 2015, but one has not appeared.

General view of the Human Rights Council 26th Special Session on the human rights situation in South Sudan, Geneva, Switzerland,

General view of the Human Rights Council 26th Special Session on the human rights situation in South Sudan, Geneva, Switzerland, December 14, 2016. REUTERS/Pierre Albouy

South Sudan’s government has said it will allow a 4,000-strong regional protection force to bolster the U.N.’s existing peacekeeping mission. But it has also not arrived and Sooka said there were fears it would not operate beyond Juba.

“We urge the immediate deployment of the 4,000-strong regional protection force for South Sudan … People all across the country asked that it not be restricted to the capital if it is to protect civilians across South Sudan,” she said.

The 47-member forum adopted a resolution without a vote reminding the government of its responsibility for protecting the population against genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing and condemning the widespread violence and rape.

But it watered down the original wording, which would have extended the mandate of the U.N. human rights commission in South Sudan for a year. The commission will report back to the council in the first quarter of 2017.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Andrew Heavens)

Up to 4.8 million South Sudanese face severe food shortage

By Denis Dumo

JUBA (Reuters) – Up to 4.8 million people in South Sudan face severe food shortages in coming months, the highest level since a conflict erupted more than two years ago, U.N. agencies said on Wednesday.

Clashes have continued to flare in South Sudan even though warring factions signed a peace deal in August last year to end the conflict that erupted in December 2013.

But the deal has only been implemented slowly, leaving the country’s economic crisis to deepen. Rains at this time of year add to the challenge of supplying those in need by making many roads impassable. Most roads in the area are just dirt tracks.

“The deteriorating situation coincides with an unusually long and harsh annual lean season, when families have depleted their food stocks and new harvests are not expected until August. The level of food insecurity this year is unprecedented,” the U.N. agencies said in a joint statement.

The U.N. World Food Programme, one of three agencies behind the statement, said it expected to assist 3.3 million people this year with emergency food assistance, life-saving nutrition support and other aid.

“We are very worried to see that food insecurity is spreading beyond conflict areas as rising prices, impassable roads and dysfunctional markets are preventing many families, even those in towns and cities, from accessing food,” said Serge Tissot, representing the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation.

The conflict in South Sudan, which pitted President Salva Kiir against his former deputy Riek Machar, killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 2 million from their homes, with many fleeing to neighboring countries.

Machar returned to Juba in April to take up the post of first vice president, similar to the position he had left.

The U.N. agencies said in the last few months 100,000 people had fled South Sudan to Sudan, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. It said this figure would rise to 150,000 by the end of June.

South Sudan’s economy, already in a dire state before the fighting erupted, has faced further pressure. Plunging oil pries have hit the biggest source of government revenues, while conflict has reduced production sharply.

Inflation stood at 295 percent year-on-year in May, up from 266.4 percent a month earlier, driven higher largely by food and drink prices, figures from the statistics office showed.

(Writing by George Obulutsa; Editing by Edmund Blair and Gareth Jones)

South Sudan food crisis may almost double to 5.3 million

GENEVA (Reuters) -Up to 5.3 million people in South Sudan may face a severe food shortages during this year’s lean season, the U.N. World Food Program said on Monday,nearly double the number in the first three months of the year.

From January to March, 2.8 million people were classed as being in “crisis” or “emergency” food situations, with about 40,000 thought to be suffering an outright famine.

The rising hunger comes despite attempts to end more than two years of war, which started in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir sacked his first vice president Riek Machar, triggering ethnically charged violence.

Some fighting continues, but Kiir was able to name a new cabinet in late April, including former rebels and members of the opposition, after Machar returned to Juba and got back his old job.

“Internal food security analysis shows that South Sudan will face the most severe lean season in 2016 since its independence, driven by insecurity, poor harvests, and displacement in some areas of the country,” said a WFP report published on Monday.

“As many as 5.3 million people may face severe food insecurity, with particular areas of concern in the non-conflict affected states of Northern Bahr el Ghazal and Eastern Equatoria.”

During the 2015 lean season, which runs from March to September, about 4.6 million people were classed as severely “food insecure”, WFP said previously.

The most severe conditions are in Unity State, where a team of food security experts found a risk of “widespread catastrophe” during a visit late last year.

The United Nations says 1.69 million South Sudanese are displaced within the country and another 712,000 have fled into neighbouring countries. The U.N. humanitarian plan for South Sudan has received only 27 percent of the $1.29 billion needed.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Tom Heneghan)