Rains cool off war in South Sudan (+video)
(Read article summary)The six month rainy season gives time for Sudan and South Sudan to make progress in resolving differences. But the wet weather will strain the sanitation systems in refugee camps.
The onset of rains may accomplish what senior diplomats and elder statesmen have been unable to achieve: an end to fighting between Sudan and South Sudan.
When the six-month long rainy season comes to this part of the semi-arid Sahel region of Eastern Africa, hard meandering dirt roads become muddy and impassable. Troop trucks and tanks stay where they are, largely to prevent getting stuck up to the axles in mud. In a part of the world where asphalt roads exist only in the posh parts of larger towns, rainy season brings a natural halt to all traffic, warlike and otherwise.
Fighting doesn’t stop entirely, of course, and six months may not be enough time for these two sides to come up with compromises that they couldn’t come up with during the past seven years of relatively peaceful coexistence in the coalition government of a then-still-unified Sudan. But the respite is welcome.
As South Sudan Brig. Gen. Abraham Jongroon Deng told the Associated Press, “They relax and we relax. We wait until December. It will stop the war.”
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