Daily Times

The United Nations on Wednesday warned that entrenched suspicion clouded a newly-minted deal to restore peace to South Sudan, as Amnesty International accused government forces of war crimes.

“There’s currently a key ingredient that is lacking. That’s trust,” said David Shearer, head of the UN mission in South Sudan, referring to the September 12 peace accord. “Those who signed the agreement have in the past been former friends and foes,” he said. “From my discussions with them, suspicion is still widespread.”

The agreement was signed by President Salva Kiir and rebel leader and former vice president Riek Machar.

“We also need to see clear evidence that all the warring factions have the political will to stop the violence,” Shearer said.

“We have not seen any thing concrete at the moment. What needs to happen first, we need to see a disengagement of the forces.”

He noted the recent clashes in southern region of Central Equatoria that were currently being investigated.

Government security forces had also shot a Nepalese peacekeeper in the southern town of Yei over the weekend, he added.

Bloodshed

South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, broke away from Sudan in 2011 after a long and bloody independence struggle.

But just two years later, war broke out, triggering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

A struggle for power between Kiir, a member of the Dinka tribe, and Machar, a Nuer, meant the conflict quickly took on an ethnic character with civilians targeted by both sides for massacre and widespread rape.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions pushed to the brink of starvation or forced to flee their homes.

Separately, Amnesty International on Wednesday said it had uncovered evidence of “war crimes” in a brutal government offensive on Leer and Mayendit counties in the northern state of Unity. The watchdog said the offensive began in April and continued until early July, “a week after the latest ceasefire was brokered on 27 June”, which paved the way for last week’s peace agreement.

“Civilians (were) deliberately shot dead, burnt alive, hanged in trees and run over with armoured vehicles,” it said. Amnesty said its report drew on testimony from around 100 civilians survivors. The group also documented “systematic sexual violence”, rape and gang-rape as well as abductions of women and girls, and the deliberate killing of young boys and male infants.

The killings echo the type of brutality that is a characteristic of South Sudan’s five-year-old civil war.

Published in Daily Times, September 20^th 2018.