Women suggest sex strike to end war in Sudan.

Women suggest sex strike to end war in South Sudan.

A group of South Sudanese women peace
activists has suggested that men in the civil
war-torn country be denied sex until they stop
fighting.
The suggestion emerged after around 90
women, including several members of South
Sudan’s parliament, met in the capital Juba
this week to come up with ideas on how to
“to advance the cause of peace, healing and
reconciliation”.
A key suggestion was to “mobilise all women
in South Sudan to deny their husbands
conjugal rights until they ensure that peace
returns,” organisers said in a statement
Thursday.
Other proposals included finding ways to meet
the wives of President Salva Kiir and his arch-
rival, rebel chief Riek Machar, to “ask them to
join the search for peace and reconciliation by
impressing upon their husbands to stop the
war”.
Thousands of people have been killed and
almost two million have fled the fighting
between government troops, mutinous soldiers
and tribal militia forces.
Civilians have been massacred, patients
murdered in hospitals and people killed while
sheltering in churches.
Almost 100,000 people are sheltering in
squalid UN peacekeeping bases fearing they
will be killed if they leave.
Tobias Atari Okori, from the government-
backed South Sudan Peace and Reconciliation
Commission, acknowledged that the idea
highlighted that people were desperate for the
war to end.
“People are experiencing great suffering, and
it is the women, children and the aged who
are suffering the worst,” he told AFP.
The UN special envoy on sexual violence
Zainab Bangura said this month the levels of
rape are the worst she had ever seen.
Political and military leaders have repeatedly
broken promises made under intense
international pressure, including during visits
to South Sudan by UN chief Ban Ki-moon and
US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Earlier this month, a group of 19 major aid
agencies warned that while massive food
drops had helped avert famine for now, the
threat remained and would continue to worsen
the longer the war continues.