There are no reliable figures on how many people have died in aerial bombing, shelling and firefights across South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, where the SPLM-N launched its insurgency last year.
But the United Nations has reported a steadily increasing number of hungry people fleeing for South Sudan, where more than 173,000 are now encamped.
Enough Project – set up by the Center for American Progress to end genocide and crimes against humanity – also called on the African Union to act with the UN Security Council to help negotiate humanitarian access.
The survey was the first on-the-ground assessment of the situation in the region since June 2011, and its findings were independently vetted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Experts fear that without an intervention the situation will worsen. Aid groups say tens of thousands of people have died of hunger since the mid-2011 severe drought in the Horn of Africa, afflicting Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya.
“While there were early warning indicators for Somalia at that time, interventions were not fully scaled to a level that met the growing need until the situation hit crisis levels and a famine was declared”
“While there were early warning indicators for Somalia at that time, interventions were not fully scaled to a level that met the growing need until the situation hit crisis levels and a famine was declared,” the project said.
“If the international community does not respond to similar early warning indicators in South Kordofan, the situation could become as severe as the famine in Somalia, in which hundreds of thousands of people died, including 29,000 children in three months.”
SPLM-N rebels fought alongside insurgents from southern Sudan who waged a 22-year civil war which ended in a 2005 peace deal leading to South Sudan’s independence in July 2011.
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