There is a country in Africa where, right now, thousands of families have fled such atrocious violence, rape and scorched earth tactics that they are hiding from marauding militias on uninhabitable islands in one of the biggest swamps in the world.
If that sound like science fiction, unfortunately it is the reality for many civilians fleeing relentless violence and gross abuses of human rights in South Sudan, Africa’s newest state. Neither the UN, nor the AU have been able to help them.
One of the largest swamps in the world is called “the Sud” – a massive expanse of land that floods in the rainy season, but which has enabled thousands of civilians seeking refuge from rampaging soldiers to hide on unsubmerged islands within the swamp, making it more difficult for soldiers to get to them.
And why would these militia men be hunting men, women and children like hounds? These youngsters have been told by their recruiters that while they will receive no salaries, everything they come across is for the taking - women, loot, harvest, cars. It has become a free for all that amounts to anarchy, which has unleashed untold suffering and misery on local populations.
According to credible NGO workers on the ground that travelled to the Sud recently, most of the violence is being perpetrated by the government and government- affiliated militias. It is no secret that the SPLA have mobilised youth militias to carry out their political agenda and scorched earth policy.
The tragic irony of the situation is painful, as I visited South Sudan in 1999 and wrote comprehensively about the scorched earth policy of the government in the North against its sworn enemy the SPLA, and Southern villages and towns. I saw the evidence of burnt out villages and crude holes in the ground that served as bunkers which civilians would jump into at the first sign of Khartoum’s attack helicopters coming to drop barrel bombs on Southern communities.
It felt like one had reached the end of the earth, a place that had not come face to face with any kind of development. As one travelled by 4x4 across the South, you witnessed little if any infrastructure, few wild animals due to the war, and absolute poverty and deprivation.
Even from colonial times South Sudan had been designated a closed zone in terms of development. After independence the Arabs in the north ensured that the black Africans of southern Sudan saw none of the proceeds of Sudan’s riches, and virtually none of the oil revenue that was generated after 1999, even though many of the oilfields are located in the south. Hence when South Sudan finally achieved its liberation in July 2011, after decades of fighting a brutal war against the North, most of us celebrated.
But how did it come to this that the people we supported in their struggle for self-determination, have ended up perpetrating the same crimes against their own people as the North exacted on them just a decade and a half earlier?
What is happening now is very much “back to the future”. These are the exact words of an NGO director who just walked for four days from the town of Leer into the Sud, and depicted the desperation of the local people who have almost nowhere left to hide.
As my colleague walked through this unforgiving territory, he says he encountered ghost towns, as over 100 000 people have been forcibly displaced from their homes. It is not just their homes they have abandoned, but their land on which they engage in subsistence farming, and any existing health facilities. As one would expect, those hiding kilometres from their villages are showing elevated levels of malnutrition.
The UN has one of the largest peacekeeping missions deployed on the ground in South Sudan, but it primarily operates Protection of Civilians Sites. What about the tens of thousands of people that live far from those sites, and are unable to even get to them? For them it is the law of the jungle, except the danger comes from human predators.
So how does one begin to understand the root causes of the carnage? In South Sudan it has become exceptionally complex.
One could say that there isn’t really a government in the conventional sense of the word, but a collection of individuals with interests and their security forces. These individuals stick together if they can benefit, and as a result the government has not created a coherent policy across the territory.
Governance has become a patronage system where resources are violently acquired, and where no-one can exercise real influence.
This is the AU’s worst nightmare, and its most urgent challenge.
The question is how will it even endeavour to stem the bloodshed, or prevail upon leaders that have become vultures? While we wait for someone to do something, 4.8 million are facing hunger, and earlier this year a famine was declared in some parts of the country.
South Sudan is now the third most fled from country in the world after Syria and Afghanistan.