Tomorrow's Battlefield by Nick Turse

Author:Nick Turse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Africa
ISBN: 978-1-60846-500-2
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2015-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

10

Christmas in July and the Collapse of America’s Great African Experiment: As a Man-Made Famine Looms, Christmas Comes Early to South Sudan

August 7, 2014

Juba, South Sudan. The soft glow of the dancing white lights is a dead giveaway. It’s Christmas in July at the US Embassy compound. Behind high walls topped with fierce-looking metal impediments meant to discourage climbers, there’s a party under way.

Close your eyes and you could be at a Stateside summer barbecue or an office holiday party. Even with them open, the local realities of dirt roads and dirty water, civil war, mass graves, and nightly shoot-to-kill curfews seem foreign. These walls, it turns out, are even higher than they look.

Out by the swimming pool and the well-stocked bar, every table is packed with people. Slightly bleary-eyed men and sun-kissed women wear Santa hats and decorations in their hair. One festive fellow is dressed as Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation complete with a white sweater, black dickey, and bright white loafers. Another is straddling an inflatable killer whale that he’s borrowed from the collection of playthings around the pool. He’s using it as an improvised chair while he stuffs his face from an all-American smorgasbord. We’re all eating well tonight. Mac and cheese, barbecued ribs, beef tenderloin, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and for dessert, peach cobbler. The drinks are flowing, too: wine and whisky and fine Tusker beer.

Yuletide songs drift out into the sultry night in this, the capital of the world’s newest nation. “Simply having a wonderful Christmastime,” croons Paul McCartney.

Just minutes away, near the airport in an area known as Tongping, things aren’t quite so wonderful. There’s no fried chicken, no ribs, no peach cobbler. At Juba’s UN camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs), they’re eating sorghum and a crude porridge made from a powdered blend of corn and soybeans provided by the UN World Food Program. Children at the camp call it “the yellow food.” “It’s no good,” one of them tells me, with a quick head shake for emphasis.

I mention to a few of the embassy revelers that I’m heading several hundred miles north to Malakal. A couple of them assure me that, according to colleagues, it’s “not that bad.” But while we’re chowing down, an emaciated young girl in Malakal clings to life. This one-year-old arrived at the hospital run by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) at the UN camp there several days earlier, severely malnourished and weighing just eleven pounds. It’s uncertain if she’ll survive. One in ten children who arrive at the hospital in her condition don’t.

A Man-Made Famine

As John Kerry, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put it in 2012, the United States “helped midwife the birth” of South Sudan. The choice of words may have been cringe-worthy, but hardly divorced from reality. For more than twenty years, a bipartisan coalition in Washington and beyond championed rebel forces here.

It would be Washington’s major nation-building effort in Africa, a

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