The medical aid charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says that targeted violence against civilians in southern Unity State of South Sudan is having a devastating impact and leading to an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.
“MSF teams in Unity state hear daily reports of extortions, abductions, mass rapes and killings, and witnessed villages burnt to the ground and crops looted and destroyed,” the medical group said in a press statement on Friday.
Emergency Manager Tara Newell said, “The civilian population is being subjected to repeated and targeted violence. MSF has not seen this level of violence and brutality before.”
The aid group noted that its compound in Leer, southern Unity state, was looted on 3 October, forcing their team to evacuate and the hospital to close for the second time since May. The aid group did not name the perpetrators of this attack but East African IGAD ceasefire monitors blamed government forces for the looting.
‘Constant fear’
The violence has forced the population to flee their homes repeatedly and to hide for long periods in the surrounding bush and swamplands, the aid group noted. “Unable to harvest their crops since the offensives in spring, and desperately short of food, people are surviving on whatever they can forage. Worn down by the repeated episodes of displacement, many people are at the limits of their endurance,” reads the statement.
“Patients at our mobile clinics in Leer and surrounding villages described many months of insecurity,” said MSF Emergency Manager Tara Newell. “Being in constant flight, people have had no opportunity to harvest their crops. Hiding in constant fear, they have been eating lily roots or leaves to survive.”
MSF reports that in August and September their teams in Leer and surrounding villages observed rates of global acute malnutrition estimated at between 28 and 34 percent. They say the malnutrition is likely to have worsened since then.
“Those children who were already identified to be severely malnourished are very likely to have died,” said Newell.
Aid groups have been calling for unrestricted access to southern Unity State.
Photo: Displaced people in Unity State, October 2015 (AP)
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80 South Sudanese civilians including 57 children feared dead in new attacks (25 Oct.)