The Soldiers Are Armed with Bows and Arrows ; There's a Refugee Crisis and the Border Is Under Attack From a Band of Killers. So How Will South Sudan Cope When It Becomes the Newest Nation On Earth the Centre Holds Some Dark Secrets. One of the Children Here Is a 14-Year-Old Who Was Forced to Beat His Own Father to Death

Mail on Sunday › April 03, 2011

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Summary

The birth of this nation will take more than flags and anthems. It faces three separate refugee crises, along with the threat of a war with the North and the seizure of its oil wells. By every measure it is one of the poorest countries in the world, and by some the poorest of all. The most brutal band of killers anywhere in Africa roams freely in part of its territory. It has a home guard armed with bows and arrows. No nation has come to independence in less propitious circumstances.

They call it separation. By an overwhelming margin of nearly 99 per cent in a referendum in January, the people of South Sudan, as the country will be known, voted to separate from the North. The new nation will come into being on July 9. The onset of independence has prompted a wave of migration by returnees, southerners who had been living in the north; 250,000 have come already, hundreds of thousands more are expected.

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Extract

The Soldiers Are Armed with Bows and Arrows ; There's a Refugee Crisis and the Border Is Under Attack From a Band of Killers. So How Will South Sudan Cope When It Becomes the Newest Nation On Earth the Centre Holds Some Dark Secrets. One of the Children Here Is a 14-Year-Old Who Was Forced to Beat His Own Father to Death

Some 14,700 of them have settled in Kuajok, safely inside the new border. It hardly looks like the promised land, but a bleak and barren plain. The incomers have their possessions with them, some still piled in heaps in the open air. Flora Anthony, who is 18 and lost two children in childbirth, is here with her husband, three sisters and their seven children. Their home consists of two grass huts and a roofless stockade made of furniture, more grass and a precious strip of corrugated iron. When the rains come it will be uninhabitable.

Flora used to live in Khartoum. She fled, she tells us, because she feared for her safety. They were outsiders there and if an incident occurred anything could happen.

Her mother...

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