It’s been more than a decade since South Sudan’s steamy capital exploded in joy, with revelers singing and dancing all night long to mark the birth of their new nation as it broke away from the old enemy, Sudan.
The new country was cheered in 2011 by American diplomats who delivered it and Hollywood celebrities who supported its cause. Billions of dollars have been poured into an ambitious state-building project that offers a fresh start to a population weary of decades of war. “Free!” they cried.
But for the people of South Sudan, it now feels like a long time ago. Swallowed by civil war and floods, the world’s youngest nation has been plagued by divisions and stymied by leaders who have pocketed their substantial oil wealth. No Western leader has ever made a public visit, leaving many South Sudanese feeling forgotten.
But not by Pope Francis. He is expected to land in the capital Juba on Friday, after visiting the Democratic Republic of the Congo – an African tour aimed at illuminating some of the most troubled but overlooked countries. of the continent.
The excitement has been building for weeks. A new paved road, still a rarity in South Sudan, has been laid along the bumpy road to the papal nunciature in Juba, passing Western embassies and military checkpoints like fort, where most nights, underpaid soldiers asked for bribes from car drivers.
Anticipation is also growing in Bentiu, 330 miles north, where the women with the rash thanked the pope for a planned visit during a recent Mass at a hut church tin plate filled with refugees from South Sudan’s worst flooding in half a century.
Speaking over the loudspeaker, Pastor Joseph Makui joked that their church was as grand as the Vatican, then lashed out at the country’s sloppy leaders.
“They have money, but they don’t share it with us,” he said.
Roman Catholic leaders insist the visit is pastoral, not political. But in a weak and divided country like South Sudan, where the Christian churches still have great influence, politics is inevitable.
Francis will come with unusually prominent companions: the archbishop of Canterbury and the iconic head of the global Anglican Communion, Justin Welby, and the head of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshield. During the colonial era, Christian missionaries in Sudan were divided by the Nile, with Catholics allowed to preach on one side and Anglicans on the other.
Now, the “three wise men,” as some have named them, are uniting for a joint pilgrimage – the first of its kind, church leaders say – in an effort to attract global attention to the plight of the suffering South Sudanese.
In an interview, Archbishop Bert Van Megen, Apostolic Nuncio to Kenya and South Sudan, said the pope will come “as a pastor, speaking to his people and calling out to his people.” soul conversion. About 6 million of South Sudan’s 11 million people, he said, are Catholics, including President Salva Kiir.
On Friday, Francis will be welcomed to Juba by Kiir, a former rebel who has led South Sudan since 2011, much of the country with a deep enmity with his arch rival, Riek Machar .
In a dramatic gesture at the Vatican in 2019, Pope Francis prostrated himself and Kissing Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar .’s shoes. It was a calculated display of modesty intended to pressure the two men to settle a rivalry that sparked a civil war in 2013, which killed an estimated 400,000 people.
They also represent South Sudan’s biggest fault: Mr. Kiir is from the Dinka ethnic group, the group that dominates the government and security forces, while Mr. Machar is from the Nuer ethnic group, a fierce opponent of the Dinka people.
The pope’s kiss did little to heal their split. Although Mr Kiir and Mr Machar formed a unity government in 2020, the relationship remains highly doubtful. The merging of hand-to-hand armed groups into a unified army is not yet complete.
And local conflicts continue to play out in different parts of the country, often manipulated by national leaders, including Mr. Kiir, as a means to bring down rivals or strengthen power, analysts and diplomats said.
The crowds welcoming Francis in Juba did not seem to be as large as in the Congo: With few paved roads connecting South Sudan’s cities and so many armed groups in the countryside, the journey to Juba was too difficult or dangerous. dangerous for most residents.
Their country regularly tops the rankings for the least attractive. Last year, Transparency International rated South Sudan as the most corrupt country in the world (according to this year’s list, published on Tuesday, it was beaten in first place by Somalia). According to the United Nations, South Sudan is a country most dangerous country in there to be an aid worker.
ONE develop Pile Among the investigative reports have documented how oil revenues continue to disappear — billions and billions of dollars. However, no one seems to know where the money went – not even the official in charge.
“I don’t see money,” Puot Kang Chol, South Sudan’s petroleum minister, said in an interview. “I only see numbers on paper.”
Mr Chol, 38, an aide to Machar who joined the unity government in 2020, said that oil revenues are directed by the finance ministry, which is controlled by Mr. Kiir. He said the stalled political transition was “a disaster for the country,” and added that he hoped Francis’ visit could kickstart it.
Alan Boswell, a South Sudan expert at the International Crisis Group, said: “South Sudanese privately acknowledge that their country is essentially a black fund. “Their leaders sit on top of a failed nation, extracting oil revenues as much of the rest of the country spirals out of control.”
An uneasy feeling pervades Juba, where glitz meets gnawing poverty. Huge four-wheel drive vehicles – often the latest Toyota Land Cruisers – jostled for space with goats and trailers. Luxury hotels offer comfort at prices worthy of Manhattan.
At the Pyramid Hotel, the 11th-floor restaurant offers panoramic views of the Nile and the adjoining slums. The fourth floor houses the Las Vegas casino, where on a recent afternoon Chinese-speaking gamblers gathered around the blackjack table.
But the depth of South Sudan’s dysfunction appears only outside of Juba in places like Bentiu, the capital of the United State.
Bentiu should be a boom town: Several large oil plants are located nearby. Instead, it is like an impoverished village, without electricity, running water and a few concrete buildings. The wreckage of a crashed plane is parked at the gate of the city’s runway, mostly used by aid workers who provide survival services.
There is water everywhere. The flood started three years agorelated to climate change, which now spans an area wider than Switzerland, affecting one million people, satellite images published by the United Nations last month shows.
UN peacekeepers have built 55 miles of dikes to prevent hundreds of thousands of refugees from being flooded again. Every day, they patrol the 8-foot-high fences to check for cracks that could herald a catastrophic collapse.
Nyayien Yow, a widowed mother of five, earns her living by canoeing out into floodwaters, where she climbs semi-submerged tree trunks to collect firewood to sell at the local market.
It is dangerous work. Cobras and other venomous snakes lurk in tree branches, biting those who aren’t careful. And last month, she was brutally beaten by a man who claimed her canoe had crashed into his.
With so little law or order in Bentiu, Ms. Yow didn’t even think to report the attack to the authorities. “I can’t do anything,” she said simply. “You are a man.”
She eventually found help at a nearby shelter run by the International Relief Committee, which supports women who have experienced an alarming increase in gender-based violence in recent years.
Long-standing concerns about the health of Mr. Kiir, 71, resurfaced in December after a video showed the president peeing on his pants while singing the national anthem at an official ceremony. The embarrassing incident gained international attention after Mr Kiir’s fearsome intelligence agency, the National Security Service, accused seven employees at the state broadcaster of leaking the footage and arrest them.
Brian Adeba of The Sentry, a research group, said that to maintain his grip Mr. Kiir relied on the NSS, one of the largest such security agencies in Africa. “It’s the army within the army, the regime’s praetorian guard,” he said.
The Sentry was co-founded by George Clooney, an actor who was once a strong supporter of South Sudan’s independence and is now a fierce critic of the country’s government failures.
The US government, which grants $1 billion annually to South Sudan, has shown its displeasure with Mr. Kiir by blocking non-humanitarian grants to his country at the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of India. World goods.
Some South Sudanese, however, are determined to keep the 2011 dream alive.
On a recent evening, a local comedian named Akau Jambo, 25, was drinking at The Baobab House, a posh bar in Juba, with friends who, like him, had grown up in refugee camps in Kenya or Uganda.
Despite everything, he said, they returned to South Sudan determined to get the best out of their new country.
“We can’t wait for things to change,” he said. “We have to do it ourselves.”
