NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — An aid agency says health facilities have been attacked in South Sudan in contravention of international law since December, leaving at least 58 people dead, some of whom have been shot in their hospital beds.
Doctors Without Borders said Tuesday the attacks on the health facilities are denying medical assistance to hundreds of thousands. The group says of the 58 killed, 25 were patients, 27 had sought shelter, four remain unidentified and two are government officials.
Thousands have died and more than 1.3 million people were forced to flee their homes since the conflict erupted in mid-December between forces loyal to former Vice President Riek Machar and those loyal President Salva Kiir. Fighting between two factions has reduced significantly since latest cease fire agreement signed on June 10.
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All of this was predicted – by the leadership of the SPLA, who were brushed aside by a generation of politicians who saw independence as a licence to, well, to be politicians.
The friction between Nuer and Dinka has been rubbed raw for fifty years by the Khartoum government, who saw division as necessary to their dictatorial rule. peoples who bump into each other on a seasonal basis as they move their cattle to summer grounds were encouraged to see economic competition as a basis for tribal hatred – and that in turn as a grounds for gunning each other down.
The unity of the period of fighting against the “revolutionary” religious-nut government evaporated with peace, Now long nurtured wounds have surfaced in blood.
Oddly we have seen bad boys being good, and the opposite. The secret services of the Soviet Union, then Russia, of Israel, Britain, and the United States have all played roles in the last fifty years of war, all of them helping the Southerners defend themselves. Only China has played a wicked military role, commercially rather than militarily. China has been the main supplier of outside arms to the North since 1991, and is the one outside country that has done more harm than good – which it now tries to make up for, with difficulty since its aid is transparently oil motivated.
Well meaning churches who moved in to “redeem” slaves taken by Northerners succeeded only in perpetuating the slave trade, which was pretty much doomed by the fact that indentured Philippinas are cheaper than Dinka slaves in the markets of Saudi Arabia.
-dlj.