The discussion will be preceded by a UNICEF supported press briefing at 5:00 PM for all members of the media.

Chaired by William Patey, former British Ambassador to Sudan.

Speakers

Chris Trott is FCO special adviser on the Sudans

Peter Martell has reported on South Sudan for more than a decade. He lived in Juba from 2009-2011 for the BBC, helped set up one of the South’s biggest radio stations, and was AFP’s East Africa deputy bureau chief from 2011-2016. He is now writing a book on the history of South Sudan.

Mawan Muortat is a South Sudan political analyst, with an interest in development, democracy and peace issues. He has lived in the UK since 1984, and has travelled back and forth to South Sudan since 2008.

Marianna Zaichykova is a researcher for UNICEF South Sudan

On Wednesday 18 November, the Frontline Club hosted photographer Giles Duley to discuss the themes and individual images in his latest project, One Second of Light. Duley was joined by Roger Tatley, director at the Marian Goodman Gallery, and Jon Levy, a photo editor currently working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

One Second of Light is a diverse collection of photographs that Duley has taken over the last seven years. He explained to the Frontline Club audience that he began to work on self-funded projects ten years ago, in order to maintain more control over the content and time dedicated. The project features photographs from a wide range of countries, including Angola, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Jordan and Ukraine.

Duley told the audience that the images chosen for the book are those that have stories attached to them, and that haven’t been published or received exposure previously. In reference to the title of the project, he explained that as he was compiling the collection, he noticed that – despite there being 100 photos included – the shutter speeds of all photos combined only amounted to roughly one second of time.

“I was interested in this idea that we see photos as permanent records, and really they are only fleeting moments of others… They can give us a little window, a little insight into those people’s lives, but really we have to accept that that is just a fraction of a second.”

Fascinating talk by @gilesduley @frontlineclub last night. Incredible images and interesting debate on the ethics of conflict photography

— Dominique Cutts (@domcutts) November 19, 2015

Duley explained that he prefers to spend a substantial period of time with the subjects featured in his work, who are often in extremely difficult situations. In response to an audience question about whether the photographer worried about the psychological impact of witnessing such harrowing scenes, Duley replied that the stories and names are “etched in [his] brain,” and that he would be concerned if such stories no longer affected him.

In explaining why he decided to work largely on self-funded projects, Duley said that he was interested in finding the story behind the photo, rather than taking the more provocative images often sought by NGOs and news publications. “For me personally that’s often not the story, those are often not the people you find.”

Duley then discussed his current project – photographing refugees in Lesvos for UNHCR.

He has continued to purposefully avoid taking the “obvious” photographs, and will not take a photo without permission of the subject. However, he did reveal that he is often frustrated that his photographs “don’t shout… and sometimes I wish I was taking photographs that were more angry.”

In discussing Duley‘s preference to focus on the complex stories that surround his photographs and their subjects, Tatley described him as a “conduit for the story,” rather than “imposing the story” of those who commissioned it.

As a result, Duley commented that many of his photographs become a crucial “part of the text.”

'Someone asked me if I was a war photographer, I said no, I'm an anti-war photographer' @gilesduley @frontlineclub

— Susie_Coen (@SusieCoen) November 18, 2015

Duley commented that he often looks to present his subjects carrying out day-to-day tasks, without their obvious labels, in order that they become more relatable.

This has its difficulties, as Levy pointed out: “How do you reconcile your role? You can’t be a refugee.”

Duley responded that ultimately he is not “looking for the ‘truth’, I’m looking for a narrative.”

Florian Schewe

On Friday 10 April, the Frontline Club hosted a screening of We Were Rebels, which was followed by a Q&A with director Florian Schewe. The film focuses on the struggles of South Sudan, the word’s youngest country, following its independence and through the eyes of Agel, a former child soldier during the civil war. Agel was able to flee Sudan and become a professional basketball player in Australia. On his return to South Sudan following independence, he joined his national team as captain and, after injury forced him into early retirement, focused on helping to build the country through his new development NGO.

We Were Rebels was well received by the Frontline Club audience, with many wanting to know about the film’s key protagonist, Agel. The former child soldier, portrayed as an active and patriotic member of his community, was optimistic about the future of his new country but also reflective on its shortcomings and limitations.

Schewe explained that he had met Agel in 2010, and had originally intended to include him, as captain of the new national basketball team, in a series of short films about South Sudan. When this project fell through, Schewe and co-director Katharina von Schroeder decided to work on a new documentary focusing solely on Agel.

Despite his height, Schewe told the audience that the project felt more like a collaboration with Agel rather than a standard protagonist/director dynamic; they saw “eye-to-eye” throughout. However, Agel was also very conscious of the power of the media in relation to the portrayal of the conflict in South Sudan, and was motivated by using the documentary as a “tool.”

Schewe also discussed the many restrictions and obstacles encountered during filming. The team were forced to apply for endless permits in order to film in South Sudan, and every visit to a new village or town involved a substantial amount of bureaucracy before filming could commence. As the country was still so new, many of the areas requiring administration were still being developed. Schewe also told Frontline Club audience members that the government and the “foundation of the society” in the nation were largely ex-military.

In response to a question on the general attitude towards former child soldiers, Schewe said that he encountered very little bitterness or resentment from general society towards the ex-military members of the government. The South Sudanese instead targeted their anger at the attacking North, and viewed the use of child soldiers as legitimate. Schewe said:

“Every family was affected. In the society there are now many ruptures. The current ruling party was once the rebel army and every powerful government person was once in the military. But there is no blame on the military for making them child soldiers, it is viewed by most as a just cause.”

However, much corruption remains within the government in South Sudan. An audience member enquired into the infrastructure of the government. Schewe responded that, unfortunately, he had been witness to huge amounts of corruption and that, due to the lack of resources and the difficult relationship with Sudan, the country remained underdeveloped.

We Were Rebels also highlighted the re-starting of violence in the young country. This was largely due to difficulties relating to oil, South Sudan’s main source of income, which was increasingly becoming inaccessible due to sanctions put in place by Sudan. Schewe ended the Q&A session by explaining that oil had since started to again be distributed, and that South Sudan had also begun talks with Kenya and China.

Click here for more information on the film and upcoming screenings.

We Were Rebels tells the story of Agel, a former child soldier who returns to South Sudan to help build his country. The film accompanies him over a period of two years – from South Sudan gaining its independence in 2011 to the renewed outbreak of civil war in December 2013.

As a child soldier, Agel was taught to kill and lost almost all of his male relatives to violence. Later he managed to flee via Kenya to Australia, where he became a professional basketball player and returned to South Sudan a free man. As the captain of the national basketball team, he coaches his fellow teammates through their very first international match against Uganda. The conflicts within the team bear a striking resemblance to the political problems festering across the country.

Directed by Katharina von Schroeder and Florian Schewe
Duration: 92′
Year: 2014

A compelling Frontline Club event on Wednesday 25 June showcased film and photographic work from across the globe that revealed both the depth of suffering and the strength of human spirit in some of the world’s most devastating internal conflicts.

Featured at the event was a series of photographs from Tim Freccia in South Sudan, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala in Venezuela, Eman Mohammed in Gaza and Daniel Berehulak in Afghanistan, curated by multimedia photojournalist and filmmaker John D McHugh.

The event culminated in a screening of Ground Zero Syria, a dramatic film by Robert King featuring unprecedented footage of the brutal conflict in Syria, and an impassioned interview with King by The Times journalist Anthony Loyd that offered some chilling conclusions about the future of the conflict.

Robert King and Anthony Loyd at the Frontline Club.

All of the showcased work shared a common theme: that of the determination of each journalist to bring to light the plight of people facing oppression or armed struggle in their home countries, and to reveal the characters of those individuals caught up in some of the world’s most dangerous conflicts.

Among Freccia’s work was a set of portraits of soldiers from the White Army, a ruthless militia group fighting alongside former Vice President Riek Machar in his campaign against the government of South Sudan.

In Freccia’s unique portraits, presented against a white background, he aimed to show through the expressions and postures of his subjects the “humanity present in these characters, for good or bad, which is often neglected”.

Zavala’s photographs were captured in Caracas and San Cristobal in February and March this year as the protests against Venezuela’s government escalated.

A picture of a woman slumped over the coffin of a lost loved one revealed the sacrifices made by the protestors, while another featured a combatant in plastic protective glasses making Molotov cocktails to take into the fray.

Mohammed took up photojournalism at the age of 19. In a narration of her photographs, she explained how she had to overcome cultural barriers to a woman pursuing such a career.

“I thought I had what it took to be a career photographer,” she said. “I was wrong. To gain acceptance in a male dominated field was next to impossible.”

Covering the war in Gaza in 2008-09 and under fire from aerial bomb attacks, the ground “shaking like a swing beneath us”, Mohammed was abandoned by the two male journalists with whom she was travelling. “Terrified, humiliated and feeling sorry for myself”, she learned a valuable lesson.

Mohammed‘s career has been characterised by a constant tension between capturing her own agony and that of others:

“You can freeze, but your camera cannot. If you don’t document history, it never happened.”

Her work included touching portraits of Mohamed Hodr, who along with 22 members of his family lived for several years beneath the rubble of what was once his home.

The only surviving remnant of what was to be a retirement retreat was a jacuzzi, which he hauled up to the roof of his shattered home so that each morning he could give his children a bubble bath.

Berehulak’s work focused on the terrible impact that the rapidly rising use of heroin in Afghanistan is having on the local population. One in 10 urban households in the country has at least one drug user, and in rural areas heroin use is as high as 30 per cent.

A set of photographs of one hospital ward that was admitting 200 children a month for severe malnutrition featured pictures of young children so wrinkled with starvation that they looked more like the elderly than the newly born. At a year-and-a-half, Mohammed weighed just 10 pounds.

“Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here,” said Berehulak in his narration. “Women are kept away from everyone except those in their immediate family.

“Farmers can’t grow crops because of mines, and doctors can’t get to children until the situation is already severe. Women can’t nourish their own children [because of the heroin use].”

At the country’s premier children’s hospital in Kabul, a five-year-old boy weighing just 20 pounds was being treated on a bench because the infusion line wouldn’t reach to a bed. The drug problem, said the director of demand reduction at the ministry of health, is a tsunami for his country.

Ground Zero Syria

Screened in the second half of the event, King’s film gave a unique insight into the fighters of the opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) in their efforts to survive the brutal attacks of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“For six to seven months we didn’t even think about picking up weapons,” said one.

“We started out with olive branches, but [in the end] the only option was to take up arms and put him [Assad] out of office.”

At a field hospital in Al-Qusayr, southwest of Homs near the border with Lebanon, a young boy looked forlornly up at the camera with a single streak of blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Across the ward, another child’s guts were bursting through his sundered stomach.

“If I die when I help people it is good for me,” said a doctor at the hospital. “I’m a doctor, I must help people.”

At the Dar al-Shifa field hospital in Aleppo, Dr Osman, a physician at the hospital, explained how he had nightmares about amputating children’s limbs, but each day resisted the urge to return to normal life because there was no one else to help these people.

According to Osman, about 80 per cent of the patients at Dar al-Shifa are civilians. At the time of the interview, the hospital had already been bombed five times, with another 15 bombings nearby.

“The Syrian regime considers medical staff as a perfect target, as a military target,” he said.  “When you kill one doctor it is better than killing a thousand fighters.”

In November 2012, King was there when the hospital was hit yet again, but still hope was not vanquished.

“Dar al-Shifa is not a building, it’s not a machine; it’s people, it’s doctors, nurses,” said Osman, speaking amidst the rubble.

“We will continue. We will build this hospital again and we will work again.”

In one striking scene, Dr Abaman, a former veterinarian working as an assistant physician at the hospital, appealed directly to the camera, emotion cracking his voice:

“We have enough shown TV. Do something. Do something. We are suffering here alone.”

The film also featured the tragic burning of Aleppo’s market, a world heritage site and one of the world’s best-preserved souks.

King asked Ahmed Alhaji, who had witnessed the fire, to explain what he had seen.

“I saw a lot of things that make me cry,” he said. “I saw Assad destroy our history. My heart is broken, I was crying blood.”

Towards the end of the film, King asked an FSA fighter what he thought of the West’s Syria policy. The West’s inaction before – and even after – evidence came to light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he said, was a sign to Assad that:

“Whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it. You want to kill 100,000 people that’s okay; you want to drop 100,000 tonnes of bombs that’s fine. Chemical weapons? Just keep 20–30 per cent of them.”

Most of the characters featured in the film, said King, are now dead.

Beyond the obvious perils of filming during an almost constant artillery bombardment, King faced his own challenges in shooting the film, not least the very lack of engagement from the West and its media that was alluded to by the film’s characters.

“I had to reassess why I was risking my life to cover slaughter,” said King in the Q&A with Loyd.

“I’d been there for four months and had photographed 5,000 dead bodies and nobody cared. No one would buy my photographs, so I started shooting video.”

The politics within Syria were also a source of frustration for King. He saw a shipment of powdered milk he had helped facilitate first held up in customs and then less than welcomed by those who had been benefiting from the black market in the product.

Those people who had helped him gain access to the country started to try to influence his material and, when he refused, banned him from going back.

“In the first year I figured that their politics were holding up the medical needs of the community,” said King. “Then they wanted to control the message.”

Asked by members of the audience whether his work could be used to try the perpetrators of the violence, King expressed his frustration with the absence of a more effective international legal system:

“If there was an international court of law that could hold people accountable for their war crimes . . . but why give my stuff to some organisation that fantasises that it can prosecute people?”

Loyd and King agreed that the future for the country is bleak and the potential fallout dire.

“The war launched against Al Qaeda was one thing,” said Loyd, wearing a cast around his leg after sustaining gunshot injuries in the latest of many reporting trips to Syria.

“Now something far worse [Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS)] has taken up a huge block of the Middle East running almost to the Mediterranean, and the West is aghast as to how to deal with the situation.

“Syria has raised a huge question mark and nobody knows what to do.”

King is convinced that chemical weapons have been smuggled out of Syria and have already reached Western European capitals. Asked whether he was planning to go back to Syria, he said:

“I don’t have to go to Syria. It’s done. It’s here. It’s over. I’m going to sit and wait.”

From left to right: Agnes Odhiambo, Gauri van Gulik, Liz Ford, Liesl Gerntholtz, Rothna Begum and Samer Muscati.

The Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch joined The Guardian’s Liz Ford on Tuesday 13 May to discuss the highs and lows of the challenges faced in improving the lives of women and girls around the world.

The event took place as the world’s attention focuses on Nigeria’s kidnapped schoolgirls and subsequent failure to free the more than 200 victims from militant group Boko Haram.

Shining a spotlight on this specific issue is important, but everyday, harrowing realities are being lived by 39,000 girls subjected to forced marriages globally, said Agnes Odhiambo, researcher for women’s rights in Africa.

“You see it happening so much every day that actually you don’t stop to ask yourself what kind of suffering, what kind of abuses do these girls go through? In South Sudan, some girls actually think that death is better than a forced marriage. There are many cases of girls committing suicide.”

In the African context, she added, children being born into the family are of course celebrated but behind the scenes there may be a far more disturbing story, particularly around the issues of sexual violence and maternal health.

The panel was also keen however to point out successes in the fight for women’s rights, highlighting international treaties and conventions moving forward in earnest as well as grass roots initiatives that aim to tackle abuses against women and girls.

Director of HRW’s Women’s Rights Division Liesl Gerntholtz explained that the work her team is doing by collecting accurate information and evidence across some 90 countries is about “the long game” in making positive change.

“We believe, perhaps naively, that if you can just get the information in front of the right people that of course they will want to stop what is going on on the ground, and sometimes they do and sometimes not so much,” she said. “Particularly in human rights, those of us who work have to be willing to play the long game because change is always incremental.”

The fantastic @hrw women's rights division talk at @frontlineclub "It's all about the long game." pic.twitter.com/Xazvauj17c

— Alex Glynn (@alexglynn1) May 13, 2014

In some instances, the significant advances made grow out of local anger at terrible abuses, which HRW is able to take to the policy makers. In Yemen, marriages were happening at extremely young ages and both local and international outrage were ignited when an eight-year-old girl, Rawan, died of internal bleeding after being married to a man five-times her age.

The incident came in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings and after a transitional government took hold. HRW recognised an opportunity to bring gender issues to the negotiating table in the midst of a national constitutional dialogue.

Yemen now has a Child Rights Act, which includes setting a minimum age of marriage at 18 and criminalising those who take part in child marriage. Additionally, FGM [female genital mutilation] has been criminalised. The Act is going to cabinet, and HRW is pressuring them to pass it and send to Parliament along with other constitutional guarantees, said Rothna Begum, researcher for women’s rights in Middle East and North Africa region.

Still, hard and long fought for rights can be very fragile and quickly rolled back, particularly in post-conflict environments, said researcher for women’s rights in emergencies Samer Muscati, pointing to Iraq as an example where the space for women has shrunk considerably despite constitutional guarantees of parliamentary representation set at 25 per cent.

In Somalia’s Mogadishu, Muscati describes a conflict in which sexual violence is an every day fact of life for women and girls with a backdrop of stigma and lack of services to help them.

“They are on their own. One of the positives is that the international community has worked with Somalia to develop joint commitments. The challenge is trying to ensure that those commitments are met,” he said.

Pressure from developed countries could go far in changing the lives of millions of girls and women around the world, however, the UK is cited as playing a negative role – specifically in the recent initiative to tackle issues of forced labour that includes such categories as domestic workers as well as trafficked sex workers, said Gauri van Gulik, global advocate in the Women’s Rights Division at HRW.

“We hear a lot on one hand from Theresa May and others about how they want to end modern-day slavery. But in these negotiations and at this important moment the United Kingdom is saying we don’t want binding standards we just want a recommendation, or guidelines, which is extremely negative,” she said. “There is actually a lot of work to do in the United Kingdom when it comes to foreign policy.”

The audience was invited to ask questions and issues were raised around gaps in services for elderly women, women living with disabilities, or even highly privileged women bound by strictly patriarchal societies. Also, the audience heard how HRW tries to manage compatibility between the complicated relationships inherent to traditional laws where they may be in conflict with human rights laws.

Ultimately, people questioned how they could get involved apart from sending money to a charity and being directly involved to make a difference.

Gerntholtz replied: “Change is local. The most important thing anyone can do is work in their own communities . . . it creates a community of activists that you are a part of.”

Watch and listen to the full event here:

[vimeo clip_id=”78344420″ width=”630″ height=”354″]

The meeting of the Blue and White Nile in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, is referred to as ‘the longest kiss in history’. As the Arab Spring was in full bloom, Sudan, straddled between the Middle East and Africa, was about to split in two.

Facing conflicting identities, the youth in north Sudan are faced with a stale leadership while others in south Sudan hope to start over. Focusing on the stories of six people searching for a place to call ‘home’ ahead of the south’s secession, director Alexandra Sicotte-Levesque paints an intimate and detailed portrait of the country’s complex fragmentation.

James Copnall was the BBC Sudan correspondent from 2009-12, covering South Sudan’s independence, the Darfur war, rebellions, and clashes between the Sudans. He has reported from over twenty African countries. His book A Poisonous Thorn in our Hearts – Sudan and South Sudan’s Bitter and Incomplete Divorce is due for publication on 5 March.

Alexandra Sicotte-Levesque worked as a radio producer for the United Nations radio in Sudan (Radio Miraya) and was the country director for the BBC World Service Trust in Sudan. In her first feature documentary, When Silence is Golden she followed the gold mining activities of a Canadian mining company near a small town in Western Ghana.

Directed by Alexandra Sicotte-Levesque
Duration: 2013
Year: 74′

On Monday 10 February, the Frontline Club hosted a BBC Storyville Preview screening of Coach Zoran and His African Tigers, an at once inspiring and saddening tale of the exploits and frustrations of the national football team of the world’s youngest nation, South Sudan.

The film tells the story of Zoran Djordjevic, the Serbian who in June 2012 took on the challenge of becoming the coach of a team that a year after it won independence on 9 July 2011 was yet to play its first international.

Within a few weeks, this had changed, and on 10 July, South Sudan hosted its first international friendly, a 2-2 draw with Uganda.

Coach Zoran congratulates the scorer of South Sudan’s first ever goal in international football. Photo Richard Nield

But this was just the start of the challenge for coach Zoran, who had ambitions to take the team first to the Council for East & Central Africa Football Association (Cecafa) regional tournament in December 2012 and then to the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro in 2014.

Directed by Sam Benstead and edited by James Gold, Coach Zoran and His African Tigers reveals just how much of a challenge the itinerant Serbian coach had taken on. A passionate and determined man, Djordjevic faces the challenge of coaching in a country that lacks the will and the means to provide the support he demands, bringing him frequently into headlong battles with the head of the national Football Association.

Sam Benstead, director of Coach Zoran and His African Tigers (centre), with editor James Gold (right) and chairman Nick Fraser (left)

As Djordjevic tries desperately to access the Cecafa tournament, he must hurdle bureaucratic obstacles ranging from the unexplained absence of the sports minister to a lack of essential equipment.

In one memorable scene, after protracted negotiations with government officials, the team is finally granted access to the national stadium in Juba to train ahead of the Cecafa tournament, only to find the goalposts are on the other side of town.

Almost miraculously, and down to the sheer bloody-mindedness of Djordjevic, the team makes it to Cecafa, only to find on the way back that there aren’t enough tickets for the whole team to return. Djordjevic himself is stranded in Uganda for several days.

After a string of defeats, though, the FA finally loses patience with Djordjevic, and his dream of World Cup glory is over.

After the screening, Benstead cast light on the sometimes difficult, often eccentric, but always passionate character of Djordjevic.

“I met Zoran in a shipping container,” said Benstead. “He’d given me his CV, which was 62-pages long. When we met he tested me on it.”

Through all his clashes with the football administration and the government in South Sudan, Djordjevic remains determined throughout.

“He had extraordinary ambition for the football team,” says Benstead. “He wanted to take them to the World Cup. He had this win or die attitude that was quite inspiring.”

Summing up the difference between Djordjevic’s attitude to his players and the bureaucracy with which he had to contend, Benstead said:

“He loves the players and they love him. He hates the officials and they hate him.”

Coach Zoran and His African Tigers is the story of South Sudan’s football team, but is also the story of the new nation itself.

A story of the inspiring determination of individuals to prevail over seemingly unsurmountable barriers. And a story of the tragedy that, as the nation tears itself apart with war once more, many of those barriers refuse to go away.

BBC Storyville will broadcast Coach Zoran and His African Tigers on Thursday 27 February at 10PM on BBC4.

Following almost 50 years of civil war, South Sudan became an independent state in July 2011. The young nation formed a national soccer team with the aim to make it on the international stage. The man recruited to get them there is a dynamic and hugely ambitious veteran Serbian coach, Zoran Djordjevic.

Director Sam Benstead follows the team over its first year, from the hunt for new players to the first international games. Zoran’s aggressive and even dictatorial style soon leads to conflict with the chair of the soccer federation and several senior politicians.

As the euphoria of independence subsides, the team finds itself hit by bitter infighting, malaria and a financial crisis that threatens the state itself.

Directed by Sam Benstead
Duration: 75′
Year: 2013

This screening is in partnership with BBC Storyville, the BBC’s international feature documentary strand.

L-R: Mukesh Kapila, James Copnall, Lindsey Hilsum, Heather Pagano and Thomas Mawan Muortat discuss South Sudan.

The audience packed out the Frontline Club for the first event of the year on 8 January, a testament to the subject that has been dominating international headlines for the last few weeks – the crisis in South Sudan. A panel of experts from different fields, chaired by Channel 4 international editor Lindsey Hilsum, discussed the current fighting in the world’s youngest country, each offering valuable opinions on where it came from and where it’s going.

The BBC’s South Sudan and Sudan correspondent, James Copnall, gave some context to the recent fighting and imparted what he has seen on the ground first hand. When Hilsum asked if it was an attempted coup that started the fighting, as President Salva Kiir has claimed, or a mutiny amongst the presidential guard, as alleged by former vice-president Riek Machar, Copnall said it is still too early to tell, but “the key objective is to get both sides to stop fighting and at least start talking.”

Heather Pagano from Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) added a humanitarian perspective: “The situation is quite concerning… the speed with which everything changes on the ground, which makes it incredibly difficult to plan a proper aid response, especially in such a big country with very little logistical capacity.”

“I’ll share with you MSF’s main humanitarian concerns at the moment,” Pagano added. “In Juba, we are working in a UN camp where there is 30,000 displaced. It is so cramped that people are taking turns sleeping at night. A physic on the team worked out that the population density there is 10x the population density in Mumbai.”

MSF’s other concerns for those in refugee camps are ethnic based attacks, a lack of water (“wells are running dry by 10am”), and a high risk of disease outbreak.

Hilsum asked Thomas Mawan Mourtat, a South Sudanese political analyst, how South Sudan has come to this so quickly after the jubilation of independence in 2011. He explained that there were many underlying factors that led to this: “The population feels it has be let down and agitated by the ruling party. It was not surprising to many people that it blew up – the extent of the violence was a surprise, but people were feeling something was going to happen.”

Professor of Global Affairs Mukesh Kapila, who prior to teaching at the University of Manchester was the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, pointed out that history suggests new countries go through a level of instability.

“The international community needs to be tolerant. The idea that you could impose a western style democracy, a winner takes all approach, and the rituals of a mature state and expect everything to work is complete nonsense.”

“Peace and society is built from the bottom up, not top down. You need a much more grassroots approach, local democracy and local governance.”

Mourtat agreed with Kapila that a resolution could be best reached through the grassroots, specifically through the strengthening of local councils: “During the war, one of the most successful campaigns was organising grassroots district councils.” He explained, “the SPLA has lost its way since it came into power. This local administration has been lost and that needs to be re-established.”

When an audience member asked if more UN peacekeepers were needed, the former Sudan UN coordinator, Kapila, went as far to call the current peacekeeping response “abominable”.

“If you look at the case of Darfur, the biggest UN peacekeeping operation” said Kapila, “the situation is as bad as ever. Why are [global taxpayers] paying a billion dollars a year, yet there is ongoing violence. How is a UN peacekeeper force going to bring about peace between a sovereign government and an armed insurgency?”

He reasoned: “Spend it on trying to build grassroots to build community reconciliation and community peace building capacities.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/first-wednesday-south-sudan