By Steve Crawshaw Thiyet could be a flourishing little market town. With crowds of traders and bustling stalls, you can imagine how it might one day be transformed. But fortune rarely smiles in southern Sudan these days. Thiyet has a market, but there is little flourishing about it. Tea, some outdated penicillin and a handful of onions are among the few items on sale.
Life here is desolate.
Nor is there any immediate prospect of change. Thiyet finds itself in a hopeless spiral of decline, in this zone of almost-war. Sometimes, the war is all too real. Seventeen people died in a single day last year when the government's Antonov aircraft bombed the town. But the government cares little about who it kills.