South Sudan has had a troubled time since it finally gained its independence from Sudan in 2011. In 2013, the country fell back into a civil war that has killed around 50,000 people and forced thousands more to flee their homes.
The new violence pitted the president, Salva Kiir, against the vice president, Riek Machar. Both men were veterans of the struggle against Khartoum, and both had sizeable forces loyal to them, but were divided loosely along ethnic lines — Kiir is a Dinka, the country’s largest ethnic group; Machar is a Nuer, its second-largest group.
A peace treaty signed in August theoretically reinstates Machar as vice president, if he returns to the capital, Juba. That was supposed to happen in mid-April, but Machar delayed and delayed for “logistical reasons”.
Those, it transpired, were the Juba government’s refusal to allow him to travel with an arsenal of weaponry, including anti-tank equipment, heavy machine guns and laser-guided missiles. Machar’s desire to travel with an army’s worth of hardware only serves to underline the ongoing mistrust between the two factions, and how distant the prospect of lasting peace is in the world’s youngest country.
Photo: Zacharias Abubeker/AFP/Getty Images
