South Sudan melts down as we avert our eyes: Melinda Henneberger

Melinda Henneberger with Moses Amule at the Bidi Bidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda in February 2017.(Photo: David Dettoni, Sudan Relief Fund)

BIDI BIDI REFUGEE SETTLEMENT, Uganda — There are more than 700,000 refugees from South Sudan just across the border in northern Uganda. After an aid worker announces that I’m an American journalist here to hear their stories, a line forms, and woman after woman tells me about seeing her husband decapitated or shot dead in front of her.

It’s almost like I’m hearing confession, though theirs aren’t the relevant sins.

They had no choice but to run, these widows want me to know. “My husband fell down trying to leave,’’ after being shot by the government soldiers who’d surrounded their home, says 26-year-old Halima Muzammil, who fled Kajo-Keji with only her clothes and her children. “He died, and I don’t even know where they buried him.’’

South Sudan is a country on the brink of genocide, according to a new warning^[1] — its direst yet — from the United Nations. How many^[2] more people have to die before we decide to intervene? More, apparently, though UN officials told us that over 50,000 South Sudanese arrived here in January alone.

Among those at Bidi Bidi might be the most forlorn boy I’ve ever met, 16-year-old Moses Amule, who never looks up as he speaks of watching from a hiding place while his father was slaughtered. “We ran to the bush, but my father went back to get some food,” he says, chewing a stick as he talks, and rolling and unrolling the cuffs of his jeans. For three weeks, he and his mother and younger brother stayed in the bush near their home in Lainya County, but then she got sick and died, too, “and we decided to come to the refugee camp. Someone said, ‘Follow these people.’"

Twenty-two-year-old Emanuel Yok was already in Uganda, studying history and economics, when his mother and father, a policeman in Yei, disappeared. He still doesn’t know what happened to them. Until last fall, their city was one of the most peaceful in South Sudan, but there are no safe havens now, and Human Rights Watch has reported^[3] that atrocities there even include such horrors as hacking to death a mother and her 4-year-old daughter and throwing their remains in a river.

This young refugee gives as good an account as any of the reasons that the youngest nation on Earth, which won its independence from Sudan just six years ago^[4] under a peace agreement the United States helped broker, is melting down in front of our eyes — or maybe, since we prefer to avert them, safely out of sight.

“I would attribute it to poor governance — there’s tribalism in South Sudan — and the leaders’ lack of political realism,” Yok says. “There’s an economic crisis, no one to handle it, and no discipline in the army.”

The UN report^[5] issued this week, after a seven-month inquiry by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, cites ethnic cleansing, mass rape and deliberate starvation in a country where a famine was declared last month, and displaced farmers can’t plant their crops.

Some even here argue that it isn’t a genocide because the violence is multi-directional — with attacks mounted by multiple tribes and fighter groups. But a Ugandan official tells me that there’s another reason we can’t use that word: If we did, that would mean we had learned nothing from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda^[6], where the Hutu killed some 800,000 Tutsi, hacking many of their former neighbors to death with machetes, in the span of three bloody months.

As in Rwanda, South Sudanese are fleeing to churches where they hope they’ll be protected. And just as in Rwanda, they are not safe there, either. In an interview in Kampala, Bishop Eduardo Kussala, of formerly peaceful Yambio, tells me that 7 of his 22 parishes have become refuges for thousands — and in some places, tens of thousands. Father Jacinto Nangi, a priest from the village of Ezo, shows me pictures of those who have been camping near his church.

One shows a woman whose surgical bandages were ripped off by a group of marauding “arrow boys” during an attack on the parish in November, and another shows the two naked girls who were briefly kidnapped in the raid, though they were able to escape when the shooting started. A third shows the dead body of one of their attackers, says Father Nangi, who according to his bishop was threatened that night that if he didn’t get out of their way, “we’re going to nail you on that tree like Jesus.”

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media^[7] 

Like the abused who becomes the abuser, South Sudan’s so-called leaders now copy the tactics of their former Sudanese oppressors. Salva Kiir^[8], the country’s cowboy president, whose troops now rape and kill, still proudly wears the cowboy hat that was a gift from George W. Bush, who worked intensely on the Sudan peace process.

Kiir has said he looks forward^[9] to working with his new friend, Donald Trump. If there’s to be any hope of saving the South Sudanese people from those who are running what’s left of their country, the new U.S. president will have to be more engaged than Barack Obama, who said all the right words about genocide but waited until it was too late to even push for an arms embargo.

Many of the rest of us also have said more than once that we’d never stand by and let this happen again, yet we are. “The world is busy with itself,” says Bishop Kussala. But that is no excuse.

Melinda Henneberger, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is an editorial writer and a columnist for the Kansas City Star. She was one of two journalists on a trip sponsored by the Sudan Relief Fund. Follow her on Twitter: @MelindaKCMO

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors^[10] and other writers on the Opinion front page^[11], on Twitter @USATOpinion^[12] and in our daily Opinion newsletter^[13]. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines^[14].

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References

1. ^{^} warning (www.ohchr.org)
2. ^{^} How many (www.aljazeera.com)
3. ^{^} reported (www.hrw.org)
4. ^{^} just six years ago (www.bbc.com)
5. ^{^} UN report (www.ohchr.org)
6. ^{^} genocide in Rwanda (endgenocide.org)
7. ^{^} race, justice, media (www.bing.com)
8. ^{^} Salva Kiir (www.theatlantic.com)
9. ^{^} looks forward (radiotamazuj.org)
10. ^{^} Board of Contributors (preview.usatoday.com)
11. ^{^} Opinion front page (preview.usatoday.com)
12. ^{^} @USATOpinion (preview.usatoday.com)
13. ^{^} Opinion newsletter (profile.usatoday.com)
14. ^{^} submission guidelines (www.bing.com)