95,000 children killed by preventable diseases in south Sudan in 2003
NAIROBI, June 16 (AFP) — Some 95,000 children under the age of five died last year as a result of preventable diseases in war-ravaged southern Sudan, UNICEF said in statement on Wednesday to mark the Day of the African Child.
“Some 95,000 under-fives are estimated to have died last year in southern Sudan — an area with a population of 7.5 million people — most of preventable diseases,” said the statement sent to AFP in Nairobi.
Twenty-one years of civil war between successive Khartoum governments and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) have wrought “widespread loss of life, population displacement, food insecurity, ill health and chronic underdevelopment.”
“The net result is that children in SPLM-controlled southern Sudan, who form more than half the population (about 3.9 million), face multiple threats to their healthy development while their rights are neglected wholesale,” UNICEF said.
“After 21 years of war, southern Sudan ranks as the worst place in the world for many key indicators of women and children’s well-being, including its rates of chronic malnutrition, primary school completion, immunisation and antenatal care. The state of southern Sudan’s women and children is shocking,” the statement added.
“A girl born in southern Sudan has a better chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth than of completing primary school. To put it another way, one in nine women dies in pregnancy or childbirth but only one in a hundred girls completes primary school,” it added.
Sudan’s government and SPLM/A last month signed accords in Kenya crucial to ending the civil war, which erupted in 1983 when the largely Christian and animist south took up arms to end domination by the wealthier and Arabised north.
Together with diseases and famine, the war has claimed at least 1.5 million people and displaced another four million.
“We know we can make huge improvements in the lives of Sudanese children if the peace process is a success. This generation might be the lucky ones,” Bernt Aasen, UNICEF chief of operations for southern Sudan said in the statement.