UN: South Sudan has one month left before worst starvation in recent African history

RT

South Sudan – the world’s youngest country, will face one of the most devastating famines to date in a matter of weeks, if radical action to alleviate widespread hunger isn’t taken before the planting season, UN agencies have been saying in April reports.

The Deputy Special Representative to the Secretary-General for the UN Mission in South Sudan, Toby Lanzer, said in April that the next two months are crucial and would require an injection of an estimated $230 million in international aid. If this is not done quickly, South Sudan stands on the brink of the worst outbreak of starvation since the 1980s, when Ethiopia lost hundreds of thousands of people. Similar conclusions were echoed by UN agency heads for the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on visits to IDP and refugee sites and towns, as well as the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). 

Almost a third of South Sudan’s nearly 10.8 million people face imminent starvation, the UN believes. If these assessments are correct, a little over a month remains before the crucial planting season ends, the rain hits, and the international community will be too late. 

The country’s problems are complex and multi-faceted, but the same obstacles keep popping up. A sharp resurgence in tribal violence that started in mid-December 2013 has displaced 800,000 people in a country where access to resources was already scarce, not to mention regulated by political interests.
Add to that the onset of the wet season, which complicates humanitarian access to far-flung communities spread out across South Sudan’s vast landmass, and one gets a recipe for disaster. 

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How the United States was midwife to the mass slaughter in South Sudan

Stop the War Coalition
Peter Van Buren 
23 December 2013

History is just one of those hard things to ignore, especially in South Sudan.

In 2011, the US midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying US motives, isolating the rest of Sudan as part of the war on terror, and securing the oil reserves in the south for the US

The State Department rushed to open an embassy in South Sudan, and US money poured in to pay for the new government.

Like his counterparts from Iraq and Afghanistan when the US was still in charge of those places, the new South Sudan president was brought to the White House for photos, all blithely pushed out to the world via the Voice of America. The two leaders were said to have discussed “the importance of maintaining transparency and the rule of law.”

In 2012 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the nation as part of an extended effort at creating B-roll footage for her 2016 campaign, and Obama publicly applauded a deal brokered between Sudan and South Sudan on oil pipeline fees that the White House claimed would “help stem the ongoing violence in the region.”

However, like in Iraq, Afghanistan and so many other places that fell apart while being democratized and stabilized by the US (one also thinks of Libya, itself part of the African continent), the rush to mediagenic proclamations without addressing the underlying fundamentals led only to catastrophe. 

A scant few years later, South Sudan is at the brink of civil war and societal collapse, the US is evacuating another embassy and indeed one variety or another of “rebels” are shooting at US military aircraft arriving in their country in violation of their national sovereignty. Those who believe that the US efforts in South Sudan do not involve special forces on the ground and drones overhead no doubt will have a nice Christmas waiting up to catch a glimpse of Santa.

Obama, apparently unwilling to remember how he stood aside while an elected government recently fell apart in Egypt, went on to double-down on hypocrisy by stating in regards to South Sudan, “Any effort to seize power through the use of military force will result in the end of long-standing support from the United States and the international community.”

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World War III: The Launching of a Preemptive Nuclear War against Iran

Global research

By Michel Chossudovsky

The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran has been on the active drawing board of the Pentagon since 2005.  

If such a war were to be launched, the entire Middle East Central Asia region would flare up.  Humanity would be precipitated into a World War III Scenario. 

World War III is not front-page news. The mainstream media has excluded in-depth analysis and debate on the implications of these war plans. 

The onslaught of World War III, were it to be carried out, would be casually described as a "no-fly zone", an operation under NATO's "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) with minimal "collateral damage" or a "limited" punitive bombing against specific military targets, all of which purport to support "Global Security" as well as "democracy" and human rights in the targeted country.  

Public opinion is largely unaware of the grave implications of these war plans, which contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, ironically in retaliation to Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program. 

Moreover, 21st Century military technology is at an advanced stage of development combining an array of sophisticated weapons systems.   

We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in World history. 

The future of humanity is at stake.  

The present situation is one of advanced war planning by a formidable military force using nuclear warheads.

The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest.

The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the World simultaneously.

Militarization at the global level is instrumented through the US military's Unified Command structure: the entire planet is divided up into geographic Combatant Commands under the control of the Pentagon. According to (former) NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, the Pentagon’s military road-map consists of a sequence of war theaters: “[The] five-year campaign plan [includes]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.” 

Military action is waged in the name of the "Global War on Terrorism" and Global Security. It has a stated "humanitarian" "pro-democracy" mandate. 

It is predicated on the notion that the West's arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons are (in contrast to those [nonexistent] of the Islamic Republic), according to expert scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, "harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground."

Irresponsible politicians are unaware of the implications of their actions. They believe their own war propaganda: nuclear weapons are heralded as an instrument of peace and democracy. 

War is heralded as a peace-keeping making operation carried out with the support of the "international community". 

The victims of war are described as the perpetrators. Iran and Syria constitute a threat to Global Security thereby justifying pre-emptive military action. 

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