As evacuation operations go, the one to bring back about 300 Indians from civil war-wracked South Sudan must be considered a small one. India has had considerable experience in running such operations, with its evacuation from Yemen drawing universal appreciation. With two IAF transport planes in mission “Sankat Mochan” and MoS for external affairs V.K. Singh present, the operation should be a logistical success. The Germans have already withdrawn 100 of their citizens and other countries too are preparing to help their people return from the capital Juba where heavy fighting has broken out.
There is no guarantee that the world’s youngest country, born in 2011 when Sudan split into two on the south insisting on breaking away, will get back to normalcy soon despite a ceasefire being technically in place in the last couple of days. The friction between the President, Salva Kiir, who is from the largest ethnic group of Dinka, and his one-time deputy Riek Machar, from the second-largest group, the Nuer, is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon. More than a million people have fled their homes since December when the fighting first broke out.
The peace agreement has at best been tenuous, as is obvious from the thousands starving to death in an oil-rich but vastly underdeveloped nation in which less than 15 per cent own mobile phones, the modern index of progress. Ideally, if India tends to its domestic economy and makes space to keep everyone usefully employed at home, there would not be so much immigration to potential danger zones. But, tending to the security of Indians earning their livelihood abroad is a national duty, one which India has been carrying out diligently.
