UDRM/K Press Statement
Commemorating 15th December 2013
December 15, 2023 (SSNA) — Today is the anniversary of the South Sudan civil war clocking straight 10 years. Right from the start, over twenty thousand South Sudan ethnic NUER were massacred in three days (16-18 December 2013) by their own government turned predator.
Three million people were exiled to neighboring East African countries and beyond. 1.7 million people are internally displaced, with 34,000 of them living in displacement in protection of civilian (POC) sites. 1.4 million children suffer from malnutrition. 483,000 women are suffering from malnutrition.
War may have subsided, with some fighters formerly in rebel movements already returned into the folds of the regime in Juba under the guise of the currently unraveling 2018 Revitalized Peace Agreement. However, mistrust and unhealed wounds of conflict still hold back peace parties from cuddling in a warm embrace.
20,000 people killed in Juba and an alleged 400,000 people have perished in the whole conflict are just a minute sample of an estimated one million people deemed to have died as the result of indirect consequences of civil strife ever since 2013.
Sudan’s ongoing conflict forcefully returned South Sudanese who went there in search of protection and a better life, making already scarce resources scarcer.
Global high prices and donor fatigue plucked thousands of South Sudanese refugees out of their once-comfort zones and involuntarily forced them back home where they face more harsher economic conditions.
The government continues to be self-serving in the midst of this chronic suffering.
Guns are not silent as communal violence runs a mock in the countryside, with Juba remaining a corrupt elite island of semblance tranquility under siege of lingering unease. South Sudan is a Hobbesian state of war of everyone against another.
Solutions to perennial conflict:
1- Turning a new page on a genuine resolution of 10-year-old conflict through an open dialogue on unattended to the root causes of conflict.
2- Guns are only a violent means of expression, not an end to winning wars.
3- Meaningful and lasting peace requires genuine reconciliation, healing, and forgiveness, not a choreographed cobweb of deceptions.
4- Compensations to wipe tears of families whose loved ones perished in an inferno of South-South’s many internal conflicts since October 1983.
5- An inclusive transitional justice system via speedy and expanded hybrid court establishment to fairly put on trial perpetrators of a series of internal conflicts right from October 1983 to date free from vengeance and neither victor justice as deterrence to premeditated future atrocities.
6- Those indirectly affected on all sides of the conflict are to be compensated through countrywide equitable delivery of basic and necessary social services and infrastructural development.
7- Only then, all South Sudanese shall be equal winners of peace rather than a handful of few claiming it and enjoying wholesale its dividends.
8- Concluded with absolute forgiveness of the past to light the future’s path, but not forgetting it as an integral part of our history that will remain to inform our governance policies and crucial decision-making processes against a repetition of terrifying past experiences.
Best regards,
UDRM Forward!
Signed:
Cde Gatluak Reath Long,
Secretary for Information, Publicity, and official Spokesman,
United Democratic Revolutionary Movement/Kui’lueel,
UDRM/K
Email: [email protected]