Crisis in South Sudan: The World’s Youngest Nation Struggles to Survive

People arrive to Minkammen, South Sudan having crossed over the Nile River by night, Jan. 9, 2014. Thousands of exhausted civilians are crowding into the fishing village of Minkammen, a once-tiny riverbank settlement of a few thatch huts 20 miles southwest of Bor. Some say they had spent days hiding out in the bush outside Bor as gunmen battled for control of the town, which has exchanged hands three times in the conflict, and remains in rebel control.
Nearly a month after fighting erupted in the capital, Juba, pushing nearly 200,000 people from their homes, the political power struggle between loyalists of President Salva Kiir and his ex-deputy Riek Machar rests on a knife’s edge, threatening to spiral into a deadly ethnic conflict. The world welcomed South Sudan’s birth in July 2011, but if thousands of peacekeepers and pressure from superpowers can’t influence a truce at the negotiating table in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, it may end up lamenting its tragic collapse.
- Andrew Katz