South Sudan Content

A powerful statement issued a couple of weeks ago by the Episcopal Church of Sudan is worth highlighting for the palpable frustration it conveys ...

South Sudan Vice President Riek Machar has returned to Juba after 12 days of negotiations in Khartoum with the North’s Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, and he reports that they’re making progress. According to Machar, who was quoted in the Sudan Tribune, the two sides have come closer to agreeing on the required turnout for the referendum ...

Recent accounts of the latest Lord’s Resistance Army attacks in South Sudan suggest that the rebel group has grown in numbers and is in possession of new and ample ammunition ...

Months of talks between North and South Sudan over plans for the highly-anticipated vote on South Sudan’s independence are beginning to show progress, according to both northern and southern officials ...

We thought it would be useful to plot details of major attacks in South Sudan on a map to draw a picture of the increasing violence as the clock ticks toward national elections next year and the self-determination referendum in 2011 ...

South Sudan was once again hit with violence this week when Lou Nuer militiamen attacked a Dinka village, leaving 76 dead, 46 injured and 1,800 homeless, according to officials cited by the L.A. Times. Among those dead were 20 government security officers who were defending the village. The particulars of this attack fit the pattern of the recent wave of violence in South Sudan ...

The U.N. has confirmed another attack in southern Sudan’s violence-wracked and remote Jonglei state, leaving 46 people dead and 15 in critical condition. The weekend attack forced an estimated 24,000 people to flee, according to a local official who spoke to the Associated Press. The U.N. estimates that more than 2000 people have died and that 250,000 more have been displaced by the communal violence in southern Sudan this year. This information in itself is alarming. But what is particularly significant about the recent clashes in Jonglei state and throughout the South in the past several months is one key ...

Amid the mounting political challenges in Sudan, the United Nations signaled this week that it is gearing up for a massive food shortage in southern Sudan ...

A month after the fact, the Abyei Arbitration Tribunal’s July 22 ruling remains a major topic of discussion. Voice of America’s radio show Straight Talk Africa discussed the ruling this week, with commentary by Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, the Head of the Government of Southern Sudan Mission to the U.S., and Ambassador Dirdeiry Mohamed Ahmed, the Head of the NCP’s delegation to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Both representatives reiterated their respective parties’ commitment to the ruling and to the further implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Lol, a member of the South’s SPLM, focused his comments ...

After last week’s round of Sudan-related hearings on Capitol Hill, which highlighted the life or death implications of the Obama administration’s ongoing Sudan policy review, this week started with tragic news from southern Sudan. At least 185 people were reportedly killed in inter-ethnic violence Sunday in Jonglei's Akobo County, a remote, tense, and heavily armed area in the South. As we have noted before, the upsurge in communal violence in southern Sudan in 2009 has been characterized by the indiscriminate killing of women and children, which is a disturbing shift from the historical practices of cattle-raiding and other traditional conflicts ...