JUBA, South Sudan — Diu Tut glanced up at the gates of the displaced persons camp where he lives and shook his head.

“I can’t go out there,” he said.

“Why not?” he was asked.

“Because of this,” he said, rubbing the soft tribal scars on his forehead that mark him as a member of the Nuer ethnic group. “It’s my death certificate.”

A lot of people in this town feel the same way. Juba, South Sudan’s capital — and this whole country, for that matter — has slid so far from where its people dreamed it would go.

The Republic of South Sudan is not even five years old, but already 50,000 people have been killed in an ethnically driven civil war replete with mass rape, civilian massacres, countless people displaced, killings at hospitals and now children starving to death in sunshine-flooded pediatric wards, skin peeling off their little backs like paint chips flaking off old wood.