South Sudan crisis: Increased efforts to end bloodshed

International efforts are intensifying to end the bloodshed in South Sudan, where thousands of people are believed to have died in the past 10
days.

The UN Security Council is almost doubling the number of peacekeepers to 12,500 in the world's newest state.
US Secretary of State John Kerry urged both President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar to end hostilities and begin mediated political talks.

The fighting has exposed ethnic divisions in South Sudan. Mr Kiir is an ethnic Dinka, while Mr Machar represents the Nuer tribe.

The violence erupted on 15 December when Mr Kiir accused Mr Machar, who was vice-president until his sacking in July, of plotting a coup.
Mr Machar denies trying to seize power.

In other developments on Tuesday:
the UN said it had reports of at least three mass graves Mr Kiir claimed his forces had recaptured the key town
of Bor; the rebels were believed to still be in control of the town of Bentiu the violence has caused oil production to fall by 45,000 barrels a day, Petroleum Minister Stephen Dhieu Dau said

'Welcome news'
An additional 5,500 UN peacekeepers are now preparing to deploy in South Sudan, following a vote in the Security Council late on Tuesday.

The UN international police force in the country will also increase from 900 to 1,323.

The Security Council vote authorised the temporary transfer of troops, police and equipment from UN missions in a number of African countries.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that there could be "no military solution to this conflict".
"This is a political crisis which requires a peaceful, political
solution," he added.

Meanwhile, Mr Kerry urged both sides to immediately begin political dialogue, his spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

She said the US special envoy to South Sudan, Donald Booth, was in the capital Juba to try to bring both Mr Kiir and Mr Machar to the negotiating table.

President Kiir and Mr Machar, who represent South Sudan's largest and second-largest ethnic groups, have
both said they are willing to talk.
However, Mr Machar has said his detained political allies must first be freed, while Mr Kiir says there should be no preconditions.

In South Sudan, Cathy Howard, the deputy head of the UN office for co-ordination of humanitarian affairs, welcomed the move by the UN to reinforce its peacekeeping mission.
"This is very welcome news at a time of real crisis for South Sudan and its people. The violence is impacting
primarily on civilians," she told the BBC on Wednesday.

"We have more than 80,000 people that we know have been displaced, the majority of whom are sheltering at UN peacekeeping bases.

"But the key has to be political dialogue between the president and the opposition," Ms Howard stressed.
She also said that large parts of Juba currently looked like "ghost-town" as people had fled to their villages or abroad.

Rising tensions
On Tuesday, Toby Lanzer, the top UN humanitarian co-ordinator in South Sudan, told the BBC: "I think it's
undeniable at this stage that there must have been thousands of people who have lost their lives.

"When I've looked at the hospitals in key towns and I've looked at the hospitals in the capital itself, the range of injuries, this is no longer a situation where we can merely
say it's hundreds of people who've lost their lives."

Mr Lanzer also said the number of people seeking shelter from the fighting was "tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands".
He said that the tensions between different communities in South Sudan was even evident within a UN base he had just visited where some 7,500 people are seeking protection.

Sudan suffered a 22-year civil war that left more than a million people dead before the South became independent in 2011.

Fighting erupted in the South Sudan capital, Juba, in mid-December. It followed a power struggle between President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, and his Nuer ex-deputy Riek Machar.

The fear is that the rivalry will spark a widespread ethnic conflict. According to OCHA, 81,000 people have been
forced from their homes.

Sudan's arid north is mainly home to Arabic-speaking Muslims. But in South Sudan there is no dominant culture.
The Dinkas and the Nuers are the largest of more than 200 ethnic groups, each with its own languages and traditional beliefs, alongside Christianity and Islam.

Both Sudan and the South are reliant on oil revenue, which accounts for 98% of South Sudan's budget. They have fiercely disagreed over how to divide the oil wealth of the former united state - at one time production was shutdown for more than a year. Some 75% of the oil lies in the South but all the pipelines run north.

The two Sudans are very different geographically. The great divide is visible even from space, as this Nasa
satellite image shows. The northern states are a blanket of desert, broken only by the fertile Nile corridor. South
Sudan is covered by green swathes of grassland, swamps and tropical forest.

After gaining independence in 2011, South Sudan is the world's newest country - and one of its poorest. Figures from 2010 show some 69% of households now have access to clean water - up from 48% in 2006.

However, just 2% of households have water on the premises. Just 29% of children attend primary school in South Sudan - however this is also an improvement on the 16% recorded in 2006. About 32% of primary-age boys attend, while just 25% of girls do. Overall, 64% of children who begin primary school reach the last grade.
Almost 28% of children under the age of five in South Sudan are moderately or severely underweight - this
compares with the 33% recorded in 2006. Unity state has the highest proportion of children suffering
malnourishment (46%), while Central Equatoria has the lowest (17%).
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