A Turkana boy herds livestock to grazing grounds in the disputed
area of the Ilemi triangle in northwestern Kenya near the borders with
Ethiopia and South Sudan.
Image by: REUTERS
Men, women and children have been shot, speared, burned, castrated,
hung, drowned, run over, suffocated, starved and blown up, their corpses
abandoned where they fell, bulldozed into mass graves or, in at least
one case, eaten in ritual cannibalism.
But the UN has stuck to a
guesstimate of 10,000 dead since the early months of the war, even as
the killing escalated and spread across the country.
A year into
the war, in November 2014, the International Crisis Group (ICG) which
has closely tracked the fighting, told AFP at least 50,000 had died.
This month, the UN finally caught up, quoting the same figure but over a two-year span.
Sudan expert Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in the US, said failure to count the dead was a failure of morality.
"If
we give up on establishing mortality estimates we are, in one way or
another, saying that the lives don't really count," he told AFP.
Aid
workers and officials who did not want to speak on the record said the
true figure might be as high as 300,000 -- a figure comparable to the
number killed in Syria during five years of fighting.
"The level
and intensity of violence has been above and beyond what we have seen
almost anywhere else," said one worker for an international aid agency
which operates in multiple conflict zones, and who asked not to be
named. Over 30 aid workers have been killed since war broke out in
December 2013.
The minimum figure of 50,000 is of those killed in
direct conflict, but if those killed as a consequence of war are
included the numbers skyrocket.
That would include starvation from
aid blockades, such as the 40,000 people the UN warned last month were
in "catastrophic" conditions -- potentially famine, if the areas were
not too dangerous to gather the data needed to declare it -- as well as
documented atrocities such as civilians suffocated in shipping
containers.
It would also include those who died due to lack of healthcare following the targeted destruction of hospitals.
Doctors
Without Borders (MSF) has warned of "far-reaching consequences for
hundreds of thousands of people" with six of its clinics and hospitals
attacked, looted or torched -- sometimes repeatedly.
In terms of
health, easily preventable and treatable malaria has become the biggest
killer, according to World Health Organization (WHO) morbidity
statistics. The UN says recent malaria levels are "unprecedented" with
numbers doubling, even quadrupling in some areas, from previous years.
Multiple armed forces have carried out ethnic massacres, and these are no low-level bush war skirmishes.
Battles
have been fought with modern weaponry, including helicopter gunships,
rocket launchers, heavy artillery and amphibious tanks able to hunt down
rebels into once isolated swamps. State capitals have been razed.
Some
figures are clearly documented: 2.3 million people forced from their
homes, 6.1 million in need of emergency food aid, 15,000 child soldiers
recruited, 200,000 civilians sheltering inside UN 'Protection of
Civilians' camps, or the $1.21 billion the UN needs in funding.
But
deaths go largely unrecorded. "We've lost count," UN peacekeeping chief
Herve Ladsous said this month although no one -- including the
14,000-strong UN peacekeeping force -- ever kept a tally.
Counting
the dead in war zones is tricky but not impossible, and the handful of
reports that have been done indicate staggering levels of killing.
A
UN Development Programme (UNDP) survey -- based on over 1,500
interviews across the country -- reported 63 percent had a close family
member killed.
Other indicators showed 18 percent had a child
abducted, 14 percent were tortured, 33 percent had a relative
"disappear", 55 percent had their home destroyed, and 48 percent had
been sick without medicine.
In the worst battle zones, the figures are even higher.
Questionnaires
conducted by the South Sudan Law Society (SSLS) in the UN peacekeeping
base in the north-eastern town of Malakal -- home to 47,000 people
fleeing conflict -- found the number with a relative killed was 77
percent.
The UN survey also found 41 percent showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"These rates are comparable to those found in post-genocide Rwanda, post-genocide Cambodia," the report read.
Another
UN study in the northern Unity region, described its findings as
"shocking": almost three-quarters of deaths recorded were from violence.
Of
the 10,553 deaths examined, 7,165 of those were from violence, plus a
further 829 people who drowned in swamplands, where many hide from
fighting.
"Documenting the impact of war is also important for
recovery processes, including accountability, reconciliation and
healing," the January report read.
Analysts say the failure to
clarify a clear toll dishonours victims, contributes to South Sudan's
suffering staying off the international radar and enables impunity for
the killers.
As war drags on, despite an August peace deal, the evidence of those killed is rotting away.
Human
Rights Watch, which documented mass graves in the eastern town of Bor
in January 2014, warned that, "evidence is literally disappearing into
unmarked graves."
Source- Times
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