It’s been more than a decade since South Sudan’s steamy capital exploded in joy, with revelers singing and dancing the night away to mark the birth of their country as it broke away from the old enemy, Sudan.
The new country was cheered in 2011 by American diplomats who delivered it and Hollywood celebrities who supported its cause. Billions of dollars have been poured into an ambitious state-building project that offers a fresh start to a population weary of decades of war. “Free!” they cried.
Now feels like a very long time ago. Swallowed by civil war, famine and most recently by floods, the world’s latest nation has been plagued by divisions and stymied by leaders who have pocketed significant oil wealth. tell his own. No Western leader has ever made a public visit, leaving many South Sudanese feeling forgotten.
But not by Pope Francis. He arrived in the capital Juba on Friday, after visiting the Democratic Republic of the Congo – an African tour aimed at shedding light on some of the continent’s most troubled but still overlooked countries.
Pope Francis immediately made an urgent appeal to the leaders of the country whose violent dispute plunged South Sudan into civil war in 2013, and continues to sow chaos despite an agreement. peace is faltering.
“No more bloodshed, no more conflict, no more violence and mutual accusations about who is responsible for this,” Francis said in the garden of the Presidential Palace, seated next to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir. and other authorities. “Leave the wartime behind and let the dawn dawn!”
Excitement has been growing for weeks in Juba, where colorful murals of Pope Francis appear on the ramshackle streets, and authorities have routed to the nuncio with a new paved road. , is still a rare road in South Sudan.
At Juba International Airport, Francis was greeted by Kiir, a former rebel who has led South Sudan since 2011, much of the country with a deep enmity with his arch rival, Riek. Machar.
The last time the pope met both of them was at the Vatican in 2019 when, in a dramatic gesture, he prostrated himself and kiss their shoes — a calculated display of modesty intended to pressure them to resolve the rivalry that sparked the civil war and resulted in the deaths of some 400,000 people.
The two men also represent South Sudan’s biggest fault: Mr Kiir is from the Dinka ethnic group, the group that dominates the government and security forces, while Mr Machar is from the Nuer ethnic group, a fierce opponent of the Dinka people. .
If those leaders had expected that Francis would be a completely sympathetic guest, they received a rude shock Friday when he lashed out at the massive, notorious corruption that has been witnessed. billions of dollars in oil revenues went up in smoke – much of it the fault of the leaders gathered around him.
“Future generations will honor your names or destroy their memories, based on what you are doing,” he said.
“Unfair distribution of funds, secret schemes to get rich, patronizing transactions, lack of transparency: all these pollute the riverbeds of human society; they divert resources from what is most needed.
Francis arrives with unusually prominent companions: the archbishop of Canterbury and the iconic head of the Anglican Communion, Justin Welby, and the head of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields. During the colonial era, Christian missionaries in Sudan were divided by the Nile, with Catholics allowed to preach on one side and Anglicans on the other.
Now, the “three wise men,” as some have named them, are uniting for a joint pilgrimage – the first of its kind, church leaders say – in an effort to attract global attention to the plight of the suffering South Sudanese.
Sudan is a predominantly Christian country of 11 million people, of which the Catholic Church claims 6 million, including the president, Mr. Kiir. Even so, the pope’s kiss in 2019 had only a modest impact on the deadly division of the country.
Analysts and diplomats say that, although Kiir and Machar have formed a unity government in 2020, local conflicts continue to be bitter, often fought over by leaders. National leadership, especially Mr. Kiir, manipulated, as a means of bringing down rivals or consolidating power. A plan to merge armed groups into the national army is incomplete.
In a brief speech on Friday, Mr Kiir said the pope’s gesture of kissing shoes “was not in vain”. But he acknowledged that “not everyone is satisfied with the speed” of progress toward peace and repeated his pledge to resume talks with some of the entrenched rebel groups — negotiations being held by the Communist Party. Council of Sant’Egidio, a group close to the organization, convened. Pope Francis.
In the latest violence, at least 27 people, including five children, died in clashes on Thursday in the state of Central Equatoria.
Lamenting the “massacre,” Archbishop Welby admonished Sudan’s divided leaders on Friday. “We expect more than that. You promised more, he said. “The answer to peace and reconciliation does not lie in visits like these. But it’s in your hands.”
South Sudan regularly tops the list of least desirable. Last year, Transparency International named it the most corrupt country in the world (in this year’s list, published on Tuesday, it was beaten in first place by Somalia). The United Nations calls it most dangerous country for aid workers.
And a develop Pile Among the investigative reports have documented how billions of dollars in oil revenue continues to disappear. However, no one seems to know where the money went – not even the official in charge.
“I don’t see money,” Puot Kang Chol, South Sudan’s petroleum minister, said in an interview. “I only see numbers on paper.”
Mr Chol, 38, an aide to Machar who joined the unity government in 2020, said that oil revenues are directed by the finance ministry, which is controlled by Mr. Kiir.
An uneasy feeling pervades Juba, where glitz meets gnawing poverty. Huge four-wheel drive vehicles – often the latest Toyota Land Cruisers – jostled for space with goats and trailers. Luxury hotels offer comfort at prices worthy of Manhattan.
At the Pyramid Hotel, the 11th-floor restaurant offers panoramic views of the Nile and the adjoining slums. The fourth floor houses the Las Vegas casino, where on a recent afternoon Chinese-speaking gamblers gathered around the blackjack table.
The extent of South Sudan’s disorder is evident only in places like Bentiu, the capital of Unity State, 330 miles north of Juba.
With major oil plants nearby, Bentiu will be a thriving town. Instead, it is like an impoverished village, without electricity, running water and a few concrete buildings. The wreckage of a crashed plane is parked at the gate of the city’s runway, mostly used by aid workers who provide survival services.
There is water everywhere. The flood started three years agorelated to climate change, which now spans an area wider than Switzerland, affecting one million people, satellite images published by the United Nations last month shows.
UN peacekeepers have built 55 miles of dikes to prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees from being flooded again. Every day, they patrol the 8-foot-high fences to check for cracks that could herald a catastrophic collapse.
Water is not the only danger. Most days, Nyayien Yow, a widowed mother of five, sails out into floodwaters, where she climbs semi-submerged tree trunks to collect firewood to sell at the local market.
Cobras and other venomous snakes lurk in tree branches. Then, last month, she was brutally beaten by a man who accused her of hitting his canoe.
With so little law or order in Bentiu, Ms. Yow didn’t even think to report the attack to the authorities. “I can’t do anything,” she said simply. “You are a man.”
She eventually found help at a nearby shelter run by the International Relief Committee, which supports women who have experienced an alarming increase in gender-based violence in recent years.
Long-standing concerns about the health of Mr. Kiir, 71, resurfaced in December after a video showed him urinating on his pants at an official event. Weeks later, the fearsome intelligence agency, the National Security Service, arrested seven employees of the state broadcaster, accusing them of leaking the footage.
Brian Adeba of The Sentry, a research group, said the incident showed Mr Kiir was increasingly dependent on the NSS. “It’s the army within the army, the regime’s praetor guard,” he said.
Sentry’s co-founder, actor George Clooney, was once a strong supporter of South Sudan’s independence and is now a fierce critic of the government.
The US government, which grants $1 billion annually to South Sudan, has shown its displeasure with Mr. Kiir by blocking non-humanitarian grants to his country at the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of India. World goods.
Still, some South Sudanese are determined to keep the 2011 dream alive and act, as the pope said Friday, “from word to deed.”
On a recent evening, a local comedian named Akau Jambo, 25, was drinking at The Baobab House, a posh bar in Juba, with friends who, like him, had grown up in refugee camps in Kenya or Uganda.
Despite everything, he said, they returned to South Sudan determined to get the best out of their new country.
“We can’t wait for things to change,” he said. “We have to do it ourselves.”
