Saturday February 3, 2018
By GARDINER HARRIS
An opposition fighter in Akobo, South Sudan, last month. Credit Sam Mednick/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The United States banned the export of weapons and defense services to South Sudan on Friday in a reflection of the Trump administration’s growing frustration over that nation’s grinding civil war.
The ban has little practical effect, since the United States does not sell weapons to the country. But the announcement on Friday was the first step in a broader effort to cut off weapons to a conflict that has put 1.5 million people on the brink of starvation.
Heather Nauert, the State Department’s spokeswoman, said the administration would soon resume a push begun under President Barack Obama for the United Nations Security Council to impose a global arms ban against South Sudan.
“The message must be clear: The United States, the region and the international community will not stand idly by as innocent South Sudanese civilians are murdered,” Ms. Nauert said.
Nikki R. Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, called for an arms embargo last week. Ms. Haley visited South Sudan in October, and the State Department is largely taking its cues on the issue from her.
“I was pleased to see the administration move in this direction, and I think Nikki Haley has led that movement,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who was assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the Obama administration.
The Obama administration helped midwife the birth of oil-rich South Sudan as an independent nation in 2011. When civil war erupted there in 2013 after President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused his former deputy, Riek Machar, an ethnic Neur, of fomenting a coup, the United States initially sided with Mr. Kiir.
But as government forces abrogated or ignored a peace agreement and a series of cease-fires, Washington’s frustration with Mr. Kiir grew. In the latest example, the country’s military forces captured the rebel-held town of Lasu in December, creating yet another flow of refugees, despite a unilateral cease-fire that Mr. Kiir had declared in May.
Tens of thousands of people have died in the conflict, more than two million have fled to neighboring countries and almost two million more are internally displaced, despite the presence of 17,000 United Nations peacekeepers in the country.