In an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal, actor and activist Mia Farrow voices her concern for South Sudan.
South Sudan is set to become the world’s newest nation on July 9, 2011, but celebrations are premature (forhastede), she writes and continues:
The situation remains, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said, ‘a ticking time bomb.’ A January referendum for independence passed without incident. But South Sudan is riven by crises along two of its borders.
The epicenter of tensions is Abyei, an impoverished but resource-rich area between northern and southern Sudan. A 2005 agreement ended years of war but left the area’s contested border undefined and stipulated that residents of Abyei – who are of the southern-based and Christian Ngok Dinka tribe – should have a referendum of their own.
They would surely vote to join their tribal brothers in the South, but the vote never took place.
While Abyei hangs in the balance, another of South Sudan’s border-lands is convulsed (gennemrystes) with violence of a different kind.
The dense brush near the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo harbors an infamously brutal Ugandan militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army. In improvised camps in and around the city of Yambio, mothers keep their children close. Here everyone has a story of murder, torture, mutilation or abduction.
UN peacekeepers are present in both Yambio and Abyei, but they have not provided any protection…. The world is about to witness the birth of South Sudan, but whether this new nation survives and stabilizes will depend on whether the UN insists that its peacekeepers fulfill their mandate and truly protect civilians, she notes.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
