THE KILLING FIELD OF SOUTH SUDAN.

LEER, South Sudan is marked as the killing edge of town with skulls, bones littering the ground, attracting vultures and hyenas.  Soldiers stripped the men and boys they seized. Spines have been sliced in half and clavicles shattered, suggesting that victims were clubbed to death or hacked apart with machetes. Some of the skulls might even belong to five staff members of Doctors Without Borders who were murdered here.
                    But these were
crimes committed by the government of South Sudan that the United States helped to install.

Quit impossible to calculate the death toll but, with what is happening the rate of death is in accordance with that of Syria. One reason it’s hard to estimate is that many civilian deaths here come not from bullets or barrel bombs, but from starvation and disease arriving as a direct result of war and ethnic cleansing. Fighters mostly don’t confront each other, for that would be dangerous. So they kill, rape, rob and torture unarmed villagers.

It’s time for an international arms embargo on South Sudan, and sanctions aimed at the assets of top leaders on both sides, while greater support is given to humanitarian organizations and efforts to protect civilians. South Sudan is running out of money, and that, too, should be used as leverage to force implementation of the peace accord.

Senior American officials are frustrated and fatigued by South Sudan. But if a country that the U.S. supported so strongly collapses into genocide because they didn’t do all they could, that will be part of the Obama legacy.