Catastrophe looms as famine joins war in South Sudan

NAIROBI (AP):

The rainy season is about to start in South Sudan, but war in the world's newest country has forced more than one million people to flee their homes, leaving few people to plant or harvest crops. The United Nation's (UN) top official for human rights said yesterday she is appalled by the apparent lack of concern by the country's two warring leaders that a catastrophic famine looms.

"The prospect of widespread hunger and malnutrition being inflicted on hundreds of thousands of their people, because of their personal failure to resolve their differences peacefully, did not appear to concern them very much," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, referring to the president and the former vice-president.

Pillay told a news conference in South Sudan's capital yesterday that the country is on the verge of catastrophe because it has been in the grip of a deadly mix of recrimination, hate speech and revenge killings since December. That's when South Sudan descended into mass violence after a split between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, the leaders of two ethnic groups now carrying out mass killings against one another.