“How the World’s Newest Country Went Awry: South Sudan’s War Genocide and Potential Famine”

South Sudan has been at the epicentre of the scramble for Africa’s resources, its leaders contributing to a veritable “looting machine,”...South Sudan may be one of the poorest countries in the world per capita, but it is fabulously wealthy resource-wise: oil, gold, livestock (which are sources of wealth, savings, status, and social standing), the Nile River, and land. The favoured tactic for imposing will and exploiting resources throughout this history has been the recruitment and use of ethnic-based militias conducting scorched-earth operations.

Resources have been at the center of war and state violence in the territory comprising present-day South Sudan. In 1983, at the outset of the second North-South war, the first two targets of the southern opposition Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) forces were the Chevron oil installations and the Jonglei Canal rig, which was digging a canal to increase water flow to Egypt. Some of the worst violence occurred during the 1990s as the Khartoum government and its allied ethnic-based militias laid waste to the oilfield areas run by Chinese, Canadian, and Swedish oil companies in strategic population-clearing operations to repress resistance to oil development. These oil fields had been developed with heavy investment by Chinese, Malaysian, Swedish, and Canadian oil companies, some of which were accused of complicity with Bashir's regime in the pacification efforts. Oil exploitation was ultimately unlocked primarily by the deal between the Khartoum government and militias loyal to Riek Machar. Against all odds, in the middle of a war zone, the Khartoum government’s oil consortium started pumping oil in 1999.