Südsudan

The United Nations said Tuesday that a second aid worker had been murdered in South Sudan this week in a vast and isolated region scarred by armed violence and lawlessness. The fatal shooting on October 30 brings the number of aid personnel killed this year in South Sudan to nine, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA said, triple the death toll of 2019.

The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said it evacuated some 32 humanitarian workers following threats and violent attacks by youth groups in Renk town of Upper Nile State.

Starvation is being intentionally used as a war tactic in South Sudan’s brutal conflict, an UN-backed human rights panel said on Tuesday, releasing its latest report on the country.

The United Nations special envoy to South Sudan on Tuesday said almost no progress has been made in unifying the country’s warring forces under one army, as promised under a hard-fought peace deal.

While some South Sudanese experts recommend the government adopt a new economic system used by developing states to cut off black market currency exchange and stabilize skyrocketing prices, a new U.N. panel report says the real problem in South Sudan is deeply entrenched government corruption.

[….] “South Sudan also remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to be an aid worker. At least 122 aid workers have been killed since 2013,” he [United Nations aid chief Mark Lowcock] further said.

Although the transitional government in South Sudan continues to function, with state governors now appointed, among other developments, progress on the 2018 peace agreement “limps along”, the top UN official in the country told a virtual meeting of the Security Council on Wednesday.

[…] Political violence has reduced significantly across the country in the wake of a peace deal and formation of a new Government. As a result, the United Nations Mission in South Sudan has begun to progressively withdraw its troops and police from the POC [Protection of Civilians] sites in Bor and Wau and will gradually do the same at other camps.

A temporary peacekeeping base is being established at Lobonok, in the Central Equatorian region of South Sudan, to help deter violence after a surge in armed attacks on civilians and humanitarian convoys.