‘Do you hear the cry of the poor?’

The fate of millions of people in this war-ravaged corner of East Africa depends on an uncertain peace agreement signed this week. A former British government minister, just back from visiting refugee projects in the area, assesses the country’s prospects

South Sudan is a confounding place.  Certainly, it is captivatingly beautiful.  In the rainy season it is lusciously green – the flat landscape punctuated by the smallest of mountains and the tallest of trees, with vast wide trunks and tiny birds painted in brilliant chalky blue or tomato-red.
The people are tall, their bearing straight; the bright colours of the women’s clothes striking against the intense darkness their skin. The welcome was warm at the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) compound in Maban, in the remote far north of this troubled new country. Here was a South Sudan that overflows with beauty and natural glory; the slowness of pace seems scripted to encourage the savouring of each sensory surprise. The singing with its slow beat breaks spontaneously into different parts, then gathers again into its single voice. Even the coffee – rich, thick, sweet, aromatic, laced with ginger – has a medicinal, healing quality.

But there is another South Sudan that ­jostles harshly for attention: poverty, filth, hunger, disease, exploitation, corruption and self-perpetuating cycles of extreme violence. The people here have endured war on and off for 60 years. The signing of a comprehensive peace agreement between the South and the North in 2005 and the declaration of independence in 2011 heralded a brief period of optimism. Investors came. Refugees who had been scattered to Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya returned to rebuild their lives.

But in December 2013, a dispute between two men, President Salva Kiir Mayardit and his deputy, Riek Machar, sparked a civil and ethnic war that has displaced 1.6 million people inside the country and flung 600,000 outside to its neighbours once again. It is now more complex and chaotic than a fight between two tribes. Others have been drawn in, clan within clan, even in previously peaceful areas: a JRS project in Western Equatoria had to be evacu­ated briefly just a few weeks ago.

The population of the country is just under 12 million, half of them under the age of 14. Their future depends on the state of relations between the forces of President Kiir and those of the rebel leader, his former vice-president. This week, the presidents of South Sudan’s neighbours converged on Juba to witness the signing of an agreement between the two, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad) peace deal, reached after weeks of stalemate and intense US-led pressure. (Igad member states are Kenya, Uganda, Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan, as well as South Sudan.) But there is real caution on the ground about whether this deal will be followed through. At least seven ceasefires have previously been agreed and were shattered within days. Officials who follow the peace talks speak of a whole nation, from its leadership down, too traumatised by violence to make decisions, too wrapped up in pain to forgive.

Meanwhile, international donors are beginning to tire of the conflict. The regional UN appeal for South Sudan is only 13 per cent funded, leaving many development programmes out of reach, particularly for education, both in South Sudan and for refugees in Uganda and Ethiopia. The World Food Programme is reducing food rations everywhere as it struggles to respond to competing global crises.

At the same time, towns change hands between fighting groups. People flee their homes. Stories of rape and mass atrocity go uninvestigated. Almost half the population struggles to get enough to eat as crops remain unplanted, so that famine is now a real and present risk. There are long queues at petrol stations, prices are rising, businesses collapsing.

Indeed, the only industry obviously flourishing is international aid and the businesses that serve it. The roads are full of white 4x4s with international logos. In Juba, smart restaurants on the Nile cater for westerners who work in NGOs that advertise their good works on placards outside slum settlements just the other side of the river. Other ­westerners come for business that supplies the aid industry. In hotel lobbies, young local women can be seen being traded for the night between foreign workers, in full view.

Schools that were built in hopeful times now lie abandoned or overtaken by militias.  The country is awash with weapons but the Government goes on diverting money from its children into arms. Teachers go unpaid or are paid so poorly that they take work as doormen for NGOs. Illiteracy in South Sudan stood at 70 per cent before this latest conflict ­spiralled. One million children were then out of school. A further 400,000 have since been added to their number – leaving boys easy prey for rebel groups to recruit, and young girls seeking early marriage as their best option.
What hope for this country without education? How can a people hold its feckless leaders to account and demand the peace they deserve when they cannot read or write? 

Under the astonishing night sky in Maban, I thought about the contradictions of South Sudan: the ugliness of its poverty; the brutality of its suffering; the resilience of its hope. I thought of the enthusiasm I had witnessed from the children living in Hoffra camp for the internally displaced as they crowded into the makeshift classroom JRS built with their parents: children visibly malnourished, but hungry to learn.

I recalled the poise and warmth of the women from the community who cooked the meagre rations of sorghum we provided for their children to eat; the hilarity at the JRS youth club as the youngsters posed for photos – all dusty knees, gangly limbs and teenage hand gestures; the teachers being trained to serve their community – many of whom must start from scratch, having been themselves unable to finish school. I recalled the dignified determination of the elderly man, attending adult literacy classes so that he could write his name for the first time.

But it was to Doro refugee camp that my mind kept returning, to the few hours I spent with our home visits team. Here were refugees from Sudan, caught between two wars – the one they fled when Khartoum bombed its own people out of Blue Nile state, and the one they met in the South after they thought they had found safe exile. The JRS team of volunteers visits the most vulnerable in this camp ­regularly – volunteers who were themselves refugees, accompanying others in their journey just as they were accompanied before. We came to see two women, neighbours now, thrown together by circumstance, both struggling to keep life going for their children, heading their household alone.

We crossed the dust of the camp and stopped in a clearing between the huts. There was an easy familiarity to the encounter that followed; a routine to the way the home-made wooden benches and broken plastic chairs were brought out for us, arranged under the shelter of the tree, a jug of water sploshed down in the middle of our circle in costly ­hospitality. There were smiles and greetings. But conversation was slow. Not much was said and the pauses were long.

Then one of the women spoke. “What did she say?” I whispered to the young man who was translating for me. There was another extended pause. “She says they are hungry. They don’t have enough to eat.”

It was polite, sparse and matter-of-fact.  But the words were raw, a blow to the gut that lingered heavily in the heat. I felt a smart of shame, hers and mine – and then a rush of helplessness before I cried inwardly, angrily, to the Lord: “Do you hear the cry of the poor?”

The woman took her sleepy daughter out of the sling on her back and stood the little girl down in the dust in front of us. Then ­waddling unsteadily in our direction, the girl smiled the broadest of smiles, as wide as the boughs of the South Sudanese trees – a smile that gloriously and abundantly answered, “Yes. Do you?”

Sarah Teather is an international advocacy adviser for the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS). She was previously MP for Brent East/Central (2003-2015) and Minister of State for Children and Families in the Coalition Government (2010-2012).