MALAKAL, SOUTH SUDAN — Three years ago this week, the people of South Sudan danced in the streets to celebrate the birth of their nation.
Today, the young country is riven by a brutal civil war, largely ignored by the rest of the world. Thousands of South Sudanese have been killed and at least 1.5 million civilians have been displaced by war.
Adam, a 28-year-old community organizer, says the violence is so close to home, it's like a family destroying itself.
“We have two parents who won’t stop fighting,” explains Adam, referring to the country’s two opposing leaders, South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, and the rebel leader, Riek Machar, the former Vice President. “How they’re fighting doesn’t make any sense,” Adam said. “What are [they] going to do? Just kill all [the] kids?”
Though the country’s internal conflict at first was political in nature, violence took a dangerous tribal turn in December when the Dinka forces of President Salva Kiir exchanged fire with his Neur soldiers — the tribe of Machar. The President’s forces were also accused of shelling Machar’s home in the capital Juba and summarily executing his bodyguards. President Salva Kiir claimed Machar was plotting a coup against his government.
The United Nations warned in May that South Sudan stood on the brink of genocide and famine. A recent cholera outbreak sweeping the country has further exacerbated the dire situation in the world's youngest nation.
When I talked to him recently, Adam was sitting in a plastic tent elevated a little on crumbling cinderblocks above the thick mud that has come to characterize the refugee camp in Malakal, a city in South Sudan’s oil belt. In this particular camp, more than 19,000 people live in more than two feet of filth: a mixture of mud, water, and sewage.
For Adam, it is important to explain how he and his countrymen can live in such squalid conditions. The answer is simple, he says: “There is no choice.”
Infested with mosquitos and plagued by infection disease, the camp provides a pitiful shelter for the thousands of traumatized civilians fleeing nearby fighting — people who thought that fighting had ended in 2011, when South Sudan declared its independence after years of war.
But violence seems a grim nightmare impossible to escape. Outside the camp, rebel and government soldiers roam freely, abducting children into their forces and terrorizing the unfortunate civilians they encounter.
“There is no ‘bush’ in South Sudan,” Adam says. “Our guerrilla war [against Sudan] lasted for decades so all the fighters — the rebels and the government — know every inch of our land. There is nowhere to hide with your family. There is no where your family is safe, except for this camp.”
Last month, the rainy season began, complicating the transport and distribution of life-saving emergency aid across the country. International NGOs and their local partners are working around the clock, but the UN warns that only about 40% of their budget goals on the South Sudan crisis have been met.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Aimee Ansari, the South Sudan Country Director of CARE International, who has worked on humanitarian crises across the globe. “It is crisis on top of crisis here. There are no breaks.”
At the nation’s founding three years ago, Adam was full of hope. Then it seemed impossible that “brothers” who had fought another enemy would one day inflict so much pain on each other.
But this internecine fighting has its own logic.
“Both sides fought together for years; they know each other’s tricks and strategies,” Adam said. “It’s brothers in the same house: you always know where he keeps the knife.”
“It is senseless, but the problem is now revenge. In South Sudan, we have a long memory.”
Anna Therese Day is an award-winning independent journalist covering international conflict. Follow her @AnnaOfArabia