South Sudan’s Agony

South Sudan must rank among the most astounding failures in Africa, if only because the country is not even four years old. Already a political and ethnic struggle between the president, Salva Kiir, and his former vice president, Riek Machar, has escalated into one of the cruelest, most intractable and most senseless wars on the African continent, one that has grown relentlessly worse.

A report in The Times last week describes unspeakable atrocities against children and civilians. It describes how more than 1.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes and how almost half the population of 12 million is facing hunger, often because aid workers cannot reach them through the fighting.

What makes the South Sudan tragedy all the more astounding is that the country was initially hailed as a triumph of American foreign policy. During the long and bloody civil war between southern separatists and the Sudanese government in the north, President George W. Bush and many lawmakers supported the predominantly Christian and animist southerners against the Muslim northerners, and the Bush administration played a key role in negotiating the peace agreement in 2005 that led to independence for South Sudan in July 2011. Mr. Bush became personally close to Mr. Kiir, and a Stetson hat he gave as a gift became the trademark of the first South Sudanese president.

A child at the United Nations compound on the outskirts of Malakal in South Sudan.

It all began to unravel in December 2013, when Mr. Kiir, of the Dinka ethnic group, accused Mr. Machar, a Nuer, of plotting a coup. Others of the country’s many ethnic groups took sides, and before long the world’s youngest state was in chaos, its economy in free fall, defying all attempts at peacemaking. Though President Obama never invested as much personal attention in South Sudan as Mr. Bush had, his administration has made considerable efforts to bring the sides to the negotiating table. But the war has swirled out of Washington’s control and continues maddeningly to defy all efforts by the United States, the United Nations or the African Union to bring it to an end.

The collapse of South Sudan, despite billions in American aid, offers a stark lesson on the limits of American state-building powers. South Sudan was a long shot from Day 1, and despite Republican charges that Mr. Obama could have prevented its unraveling, it is not clear what Washington could have done. South Sudan had virtually no government institutions or infrastructure at independence, its population was fragmented into diverse ethnic groups and it had oil revenue to tempt the greedy.

The United States recently pledged an additional $133 million in humanitarian assistance. Beyond that, the administration must continue to actively push the warring sides to the table, whether through direct diplomacy, by supporting the mediating efforts of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, the East African regional grouping, or through the imposition of progressively tighter travel bans and asset freezes on those most responsible for the atrocities. Carrying the major responsibility for the creation of South Sudan, the United States must also bear a special responsibility to help end the country’s agony.

Source http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/opinion/sunday/south-sudans-agony.html?ref=opinion&_r=1