Reporting for VOA, Hannah McNeish describes the unexpected link between South Sudan and Cuba, which offered refuge and education to southern Sudanese child soldiers during the civil war. Now adults with skills in law, medicine, and engineering, and fluency in Spanish, many are returning to South Sudan to help build the new nation. McNeish caught up with some of these Cuban Jubans at De Havana bar in South Sudan’s capital.
These denials come more than four and a half years after UNAMID supposedly secured from Khartoum a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) (February 2008), guaranteeing complete freedom of movement throughout Darfur—yet another agreement that this cynical regime has signed without any intention of abiding by.
The Pentagon is right to see poverty, underdevelopment, disease, repression, human rights abuses, and conflict as likely drivers of future security threats to the United States. And if the Defense Department's job is to protect the United States, that mission must surely include preventing threats.