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A refugee from South Sudan drinks water at a well
during celebrations to mark World Refugee Day at the Kakuma refugee camp in
Turkana District, northwest of Kenya's capital Nairobi, June 20, 2015.
REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya
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A chilling description of violence in South Sudan that left as many as
129 children dead in May comes from UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake, and
serves as a plea to the world:
“Survivors report that boys have been castrated and
left to bleed to death…. Girls as young as 8 have been gang raped and
murdered…. Children have been tied together before their attackers slit their
throats.... Others have been thrown into burning buildings.”
Civil war has raged in South Sudan for 18 months, and
the children who have survived the brutalities that Lake describes are not
faring much better. Children are being “aggressively recruited into armed
groups on both sides on an alarming scale—an estimated 13,000 children forced
to participate in a conflict not of their making,” Lake said.
The crisis in the Central African nation has been
decried by every major human rights group on Earth, and little relief is in
sight—the U.N. says 2 million people have been displaced and more than 4
million face severe food insecurity since the conflict broke out in December
2013.
The top official in the U.N.’s peacekeeping operation
in South Sudan, Hervé Ladsous, has been vocal about complaints as the country
deteriorates.
“We needed attack helicopters—request denied. We
needed [drones]—request denied by the president to me, personally, three times
last year,” Ladsous told the U.N. Security Council this week, according to the
Sudan Tribune.
Earlier
last week, the European Union and the United Nations announced US$275 million
in pledges to support victims of violence and displacement in the country. It’s
unclear if that will be enough, particularly for those who have witnessed the
worst of this conflict and who may struggle to recover at any price.
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