War Consumes South Sudan, a Young Nation Cracking Apart
YAMBIO, South Sudan — Simon Burete was weeding his peanut field a few weeks ago when he saw smoke coming from his house. He ran as fast as he could.
He and his wife, Angelina, had enjoyed years of peace, he farming the fields, she selling the produce in the market. They were poor but welded to each other. Just that morning, they had talked about walking into town to buy their first mobile phones.
But as Mr. Burete made it back to the house, out of breath, red dirt still stuck to his knees, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His wife was lying on the floor, burned to death in a rampage by government forces.
“I used to call her akara-ngba,” he said, which means in the Zande language “the last word on beauty.”
He could barely choke out the words.
South Sudan’s war and its full ugliness are engulfing new, previously peaceful areas of the nation, spelling horror for the victims and signifying something deeper: This country is cracking apart.
Yambio, a midsize town of wide dirt roads and lofty kapok trees that seem to breathe tranquillity, used to be part of what was called a green state. This place was considered safe. It was not a red zone.
But now charred buildings and crushed huts line the roads leaving town. Bountiful fields — here in a part of the country known as South Sudan’s breadbasket — lie untended during a desperate national food crisis. The names of dead loved ones circulate through hastily built displaced-persons camps all around Yambio, just as they do in cities and towns hundreds of miles away.
South Sudan’s conflict started as a power struggle between the country’s political leaders before slipping into a broader feud between the two biggest ethnic groups, the Nuer and the Dinka.
But as it enters its fourth year, this war, Africa’s worst, is rapidly sucking in many of the nation’s other ethnic groups, including the Azande, the Shilluk, the Moru, the Kakwa and the Kuku. The widening conflict is imperiling nearly every pillar that this young country’s future rested on: oil production, agriculture, education, transport and most especially unity, which seemed so proudly on display six years ago when South Sudan was born in a halo of jubilation that now seems Pollyannish.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and every major cease-fire that has been painstakingly negotiated by African and Western officials has been violated.
Dangerous fissures are opening up within the South Sudanese military, and the burst of bloodshed here in the Equatoria region is both cause and effect. An Equatorian general and a colonel recently quit, criticizing the government on their way out. One said the justice system was “too deformed to be reformed.” The other accused the government of orchestrating a “tribally engineered war.”
