Südsudan

Setting a timetable for South Sudan’s general elections requires international support, a top United Nations official said. … Haysom said it was difficult for anybody to help when there is no timetable to guide the process and commitment from the international community.

With eight months remaining, the window of opportunity is closing for South Sudan to meet critical benchmarks required to complete its transition away from long-running civil conflict, the Special Representative for the country told the Security Council on Monday, pressing parties to the November 2018 peace deal, to implement their commitments in letter and spirit.

Adeyinka Badejo-Sanogo, WFP Acting Country Director in South Sudan, said they had planned to provide food assistance to 6.2 million people this year, “but faced with increasing humanitarian needs and insufficient funding, we have taken the painful step to suspend food assistance to 1.7 million people.

The UN Security Council on Thursday renewed an arms embargo and sanctions against South Sudan amid continuing unrest in the country. … When the embargo was last extended a year ago, authorities in South Sudan were given a list of political and security conditions in order for the restrictions to be lifted or relaxed. However, earlier this month, a UN expert panel recommended that the embargo remain in place over persistent ceasefire violations as well as over the government’s imports of armored vehicles in violation of the ban.

Additional peacekeepers have been deployed to Leer county, South Sudan, following a surge of violence, including rapes, gang rapes, beheadings, burning civilians alive, and attacks on humanitarians, the UN Mission in the country, UNMISS, reported on Monday. 

Matthew Hollingworth, WFP Country Director in South Sudan, spoke to UN News about how fallout from what he called the “era-defining’” war in Ukraine is being felt thousands of kilometres away.

South Sudan's government announced on Tuesday the creation of a unified armed forces command, implementing a key provision of the 2018 peace deal that observers hope will ease the country's recovery from years of war.

The United Nations warns a record 7.74 million people, or two-thirds of South Sudan’s population, are likely to face hunger during this year’s lean season between May and July. … The key drivers of food insecurity and extreme hunger in South Sudan include climate shocks.

In what has been hailed as a major breakthrough, South Sudan's rival leaders sealed an agreement Sunday on a key military provision of their stuttering peace deal. President Salva Kiir and his rival, Vice President Riek Machar, agreed on the creation of a unified armed forces command, one of several crucial unresolved issues holding up implementation of the 2018 deal to end the country's bloody five-year civil war.

[…] The Sudan People's Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) -- led by Vice President Riek Machar -- had pulled out of the peace monitoring mechanism to protest continued "unprovoked" attacks of its bases by its "peace partner", the party said.