The government of South Sudan announced this week the extension until 2025 of the political transition leading to elections. But power struggles and violence between communities continue, the country still has no Constitution or unified army.
The difficulties of this country, created in 2011 after thirty years of guerrilla warfare, are still very numerous. Peace is still elusive even declared the first vice-president of the country, the former rebel Riek Machar, at the beginning of the month. The main obstacle to the normalization of the situation, for him, is the slow implementation of the 2018 peace agreement, signed after five years of civil war and which came to bloody an independence which had only two years.
At the beginning of the week, several ministers tried to reassure an audience of diplomats, members of NGOs and journalists of the political will of the authorities. Pope Francis, who came to Juba with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland earlier this month, lectured the South Sudanese leaders well. However, the problems are immense.
The World Bank estimates that 82% of South Sudanese live on less than two dollars a day. Power struggles in Juba and fighting between Dinka and Shilluck, this time in the Upper Nile, since August have further weakened an already very precarious situation. The United Nations also launched an appeal on Tuesday to raise $1.3 billion to help this year 2.2 million South Sudanese refugees in neighboring countries.
Faced with the difficulties of South Sudan, this ” transition » so difficult to reach, the writer and researcher emeritus at the CNRS Gérard Prunier advocates a radical solution. Because for him, the creation of South Sudan in 2011 is quite simply a failure.
This is the very image of the disasters that happen when guerrilla movements become governments and this is exactly the case in South Sudan […] What we see there, that is to say the roadmap for I do not know what restoration of a democracy which has never existed elsewhere and which is just the power of a guerrilla over a people [….]I don’t know what we’re going to write about it.