Journalist Julia Bicknell on her experiences in conflict-ridden South Sudan

Now an international affairs journalist based in London, England, Julia Bicknell spent many years in South Sudan. She trained radio and television journalists with the BBC World Service Trust, beginning in 2005. Bicknell joined Sunday's discussion on the country's growing humanitarian crisis, sharing her thoughts on what the country was like when she arrived and her hopes for the future.

Listen to her interview with host Duncan McCue:

On the current conflictThis latest conflict since independence in 2011 is primarily between two men who fought together for independence from the North. But at the same time, even while they were fighting for independence, they were at war with each other at times. And they've just carried on that war into the South Sudan independence stage. So I think it's those two and the tribal loyalties around them that have brought us to this present situation.

On the reconstruction of South SudanThe current famine is just on top of everything else. It was pretty much  a destroyed country in 2005 when I first arrived there, three weeks after the comprehensive peace agreement had been signed with the North. People often talk about what this war looked like and you often think that it's like the pictures of Aleppo today, where buildings have beenreduced to rubble. But what I noticed in Juba when I arrived, was that it was the aftermath of a war that had been raging for about 30 years. It was like everything was broken down; everything was rusty. It was almost like you'd go into houses and they'd been almost frozen in aspic since the 1950s. So in terms of reconstructing South Sudan, even before its own independence, it was already a mammoth task to do.This latest conflict is really on top of decades of a lack of development.

 On the lack of infrastructureThe people of South Sudan needed international support during their struggle for independence and international organizers did not planned for their independence. I remember when I was there, there were lots of international consultants from Europe, the United States and other parts of Africa. There was a lot of planning and discussion around what the government would look like and how power would be handed down from the North to the South. But underneath it all, you had a country that was lacking in basic development. When I arrived in Juba, there wasn't a single traffic light and barely a petrol station. I remember one small hospital that was serving 10 million people. How are you going to build a new state without adequate hospitals, schools or libraries? How do you build a nation when you're starting from that sort of a base? So although there was lots of optimism after independence, I think there was also a kind of realization that there was just so much to be done and probably that's part of the current stress.

On a political solutionI think people would put some hope in a generational change in politicians - moving on from the current leaders, people who fought in the war for independence and let their country down. The political solution may come in the next generation of political leaders. I want to use the example of one of the people that I trained, a news-reader on the Sudan national radio. He became an MP and he's now sitting in parliament. He desperately wanted peace; he desperately wanted to build his country. People who have always been warriors at the head of an army, how do they psychologically adapt when they have to bring peace and govern a country? A different mindset is needed now.

On the famine and compassion fatigueOf the four famines in Africa, South Sudan seems to be the one that has brought it upon itself the most - in the sense that there was so much optimism for the country to build itself. There is this thing called compassion fatigue, but as other people on your program already said: they are human beings. And when famine comes along, when man-made conflict happens, the women and the children are always the first to suffer and to die from malnutrition. In a world where there is enough food to go around, we can tackle the logistics. But it does take a lot of different actors, a lot of different NGOs working with local networks. It is an incredibly difficult country to bring aid, humanitarian relief and development to because of the physical and geographical factors of the country as well as the conflict.

On the human stories of South SudanWhen I think of the human stories of the crisis, I'm thinking about the cook who fed me every day when I was when I arrived in 2005. I basically lived on a diet of rice and mangoes; that was all there was there, mangoes from the trees. He somehow managed to feed me every day when we just couldn't go to a local food market and get the kind of things that we were used to.I also think of Jim Longjohn who worked in the child trauma centre. When I arrived, he had been doing amazing work. Nobody was aware of him, but he was finding child soldiers who had been traumatized and he was helping them to deal with their trauma to rehabilitate them. If somebody like him is working away in those conditions surely it behooves us to really support people like him and do what we can.

Julia Bicknell's comments have been edited and condensed. This online segment was prepared by Ilina Ghosh on May 22, 2017.