No Agenda Saturday Memo

The Saturday Memo

Dear Producers, The next show has Adam in Europe and John in California where you’ll get another good International report along with the attached memo from out International economic hitman in Sudan. You can read this for yourself and extrapolate what’s coming. Another mess that the USA will have to be involved with. That seems to be a theme with your No Agenda Show and as the Show enters its seventh year all you are asked is for continued support by visiting the support page here or contributingany amount here. A remember everything over $200 gets you a bona-fide producer credit. Your co-host, John C. Dvorak PS The Sack of Sevens is off to a good start. Click here. The report follows: Exclusive report to No Agenda Producers and Newsletter Subscribers. Dispatches from Juba, South Sudan ­ the youngest country in the world. I wish I could say I was excited to be going to South Sudan but I wasn¹t, even if it meant I could increment my country counter from 114 to 115. Traveling alone just holds no appeal to me any longer. People in my world, that of International Development, were all telling me I would really like it there. After all, it was like the Wild West of development projects. This country has so little going for it that it is a dream come true for people, like myself, seeking to make a difference. Throw a stone anywhere and you will find a problem needing to be fixed. My orientation to Juba did not take long since it is closer to being a town than a city, let alone the capital of the newest country in the World. With just about 350,000 people living mostly in rough built corrugated or cinder block housing, Juba sits at the terminus of the navigable Nile which provides a huge source of drinkable water to the area. Juba is always HOT sitting just 4 degrees north of the Equator. My Arrival corresponds with the end of the rainy season and the beginning of the hottest part of the year. The heat is relentlessly hot. People live indoors where the air conditioners are continuously trying to fight back the ever encroaching heat. Step outside and it is an instant dry heat that hits you in the face. Today it was only 95 degrees, next month it will average over 100 degrees and reach 110 quite often. From what I saw at the airport, and what people told me, the International Development community was young, and globally dispersed. The American and Europeans seem to be all under the age of 30 with the exception of the senior staff who run the USAID and EU funded activities meant to support the survival of this country which was carved out after years of war. This information, borrowed from Wikipedia, explains the humanitarian rationale for being here: South Sudan is acknowledged to have some of the worst health indicators in the world. The under-five infant mortality rate is 135.3 per 1,000, whilst maternal mortality is the highest in the world at 2,053.9 per 100,000 live births. In 2004, there were only three surgeons serving southern Sudan, with three proper hospitals, and in some areas there was just one doctor for every 500,000 people.   The Chinese are here as well, playing their role in taking over Africa one country at a time. I could go on for paragraphs about the Chinese presence in Africa, but that is a different conversation. After working for half a day, I went to a late lunch at one of the Local haunts and it was buzzing with music, TV¹s and ex-pats everywhere. The restaurant is said to be owned by someone from Sudan, therefore, no alcohol is served. Sitting in this restaurant you could easily forget that you are in South Sudan and, instead, be in Nairobi or even Kampala. I could immediately see that watering-holes like this support the development community who are the only ones with enough money to afford to eat there. Everything is imported and therefore very expensive. It is the development community which is fueling the growth of Juba while at the same time providing the expertise to the South Sudanese to raise their country out of extreme poverty to plain old poverty and hopefully few unintended deaths at birth. My week in Kenya was marked by a lot of work, both Kenyan and East Coast time zones leading to a distinct lack of sleep. I do not often get to the point of complete exhaustion, but last night I fell asleep at 630 PM until I was awoken by what I thought was a freight train running through my room. The prefab housing units all have metallic roofs and I quickly realized that the loud sound was rain. I got out of bed and went outside to see a deluge of rain. It was a hurricane without the winds. It felt like it rained 6 inches in a span of 30 minutes. I have never heard it rain harder. So that is how my first 24 hours in South Sudan played out. By the way, I am receiving hazard pay for being here. It is considered an active war zone. Again taking liberally from Wikipedia I will close with this: Campaigns of atrocities against civilians have been attributed to the SPLA (Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army). In the SPLA/M's attempt to disarm rebellions among the Shilluk and Murle, they burned scores of villages, raped hundreds of women and girls and killed an untold number of civilians. Civilians alleging torture claim fingernails being torn out, burning plastic bags dripped on children to make their parents hand over weapons and villagers burned alive in their huts if rebels were suspected of spending the night there. In May 2011, the SPLA allegedly set fire to over 7,000 homes in Unity States. The UN reports many of these violations and the frustrated director of one Juba-based international aid agency calls them "human rights abuses off the Richter scale". In 2010, the CIA issued a warning that "over the next five years,...a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in southern Sudan." The Nuer White Army has stated it wished to "wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth as the only solution to guarantee long-term security of Nuer¹s cattle"[28] and activists, including Minority Rights Group International, warn of genocide in the current Jonglei conflict. More to come. (photos from Internet archives)