Oil-rich South Sudan seeks hope in ashes of Africa’s worst war
Thousands of civilians return after a war that at its height rivalled Syria for the dubious title of the world’s worst conflict
Torched homes, gutted shopfronts and fields of rotting corn greeted Laker Betty as she returned to the town in South Sudan’s breadbasket she fled in terror a year ago. She is one of the thousands of civilians tentatively returning to the East African nation after a war that at its height rivalled Syria for the dubious title of the world’s worst conflict, claiming almost 400,000 lives. As President Salva Kiir prepares to welcome rebels into a new government, South Sudan’s pillaged towns and villages show the scale of the challenge in rebuilding even a country endowed with sub-Saharan Africa’s third-biggest oil reserves. “There is nothing to eat here, the soldiers cleaned up everything,” said Betty, a 30-year-old mother of three whose looted home in Pajok once sported the relative luxuries of a solar-power system, TV and refrigerator. “What they did here in Pajok has reduced us to zero.” Spared for much of the half-decade civil war that unleashed a refugee crisis, Pajok was overwhelme...
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