Political Fight in South Sudan Targets Civilians
James Akena/Reuters
About 12,000 members of the Nuer ethnic group in South Sudan have fled to a United Nations camp near the Juba airport.
By NICHOLAS KULISH Published: December 24, 2013
Link to web article here. Document: United States Draft Resolution on Sudan
JUBA, South Sudan — The security forces went house to house, rounding up civilians by the dozens and binding the wrists of some with wire, survivors said. Some were summarily shot in the street, they said, while others were hauled off to crowded cells. Bodies of the executed were tossed into shallow graves, one recalled. Another jail where civilians had been taken reeked of death, a witness said.
“We thought that the war was fought between the soldiers,” said Peter Nhial, 30, one of many in a crowd of desperate people to describe attacks on civilians.
Little more than a week after political tensions between South Sudan’s leaders erupted into clashes in the streets of the capital, the crisis has broadened into a societal conflict in which longstanding ethnic divisions are fueling the violence and civilians are often the targets, not accidental victims, of the fighting.
On Tuesday, the top United Nations human rights official, Navi Pillay, expressed deep concern about “the serious and growing human rights violations” taking place in the country, reporting the discovery of at least one mass grave and the arrests of hundreds of civilians in searches of homes and hotels in the capital of Juba and elsewhere.
“Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days,” she said in a statement. “We have discovered a mass grave” in one state, she added, “and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba.”
Hours later, the United Nations Security Council voted to nearly double its peacekeeping force in South Sudan, hoping that a rapid influx of international forces would help quell the violence threatening to tear the young nation apart.
But even as it moved to add nearly 6,000 international troops and police officers to the more than 7,600 peacekeeping forces already in South Sudan, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, soberly warned that they might not be enough.
“Even with additional capabilities, we will not be able to protect every civilian in need in South Sudan,” Mr. Ban said.
“We have reports of horrific attacks,” he said, asserting that the attacks on civilians could constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. “Innocent civilians are being targeted because of their ethnicity. This is a grave violation of human rights, which could fuel a spiral of civil unrest across the country.”
South Sudan was born in 2011 after years of international diplomacy as a way of ending decades of conflict with Sudan. Donor nations like the United States have spent billions of dollars trying to turn one of the poorest nations in the world into a viable state, but the country has long been strained by deep internal divisions.
The latest conflict began last week after President Salva Kiir accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of trying to stage a coup. Skirmishes rooted in politics then spiraled with shocking speed into attacks based on ethnicity, victims said. Mr. Kiir is a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the country’s largest. Mr. Machar is a Nuer.
The mistrust between the two groups has laid bare how much of the fledging nation’s cohesion was defined by opposition to the Sudanese government in Khartoum, rather than a broad sense of unity and national identity.
Survivors at a displaced-persons camp in a United Nations compound in Juba spoke of mass arrests and impromptu language tests being given by security forces to determine which ethnic group people came from — an exchange they said could determine life or death.
Stephen Bol, part of an organizing committee at the camp, said that boys who had left the compound looking for food had disappeared, and that at least 2,000 people, including relatives of the people huddled here, were unaccounted for.
“We don’t know whether they are alive or they have been killed,” he said.
Majang Riek, 49, showing the deep gashes slashed into his wrists and forearms where, he said, he was bound with wire, described being hauled off to jail with more than 70 others. There, he said, he was beaten with rifle butts.
Deng Wang, 34, had a white bandage on top of his head where, he said, he was struck with a machete, and a deep gouge in his forehead that he said had come from the tip of a rifle. Soldiers came to his home last week and arrested him, tying his hands and taking him with about 200 other members of his ethnic group, the Nuer. His house was set on fire, he said, killing one of his small children.
“I don’t know if they’re still alive,” he said.
Deng Wang, 34, had a white bandage on top of his head where, he said, he was struck with a machete, and a deep gouge in his forehead that he said had come from the tip of a rifle. Soldiers came to his home last week and arrested him, tying his hands and taking him with about 200 other members of his ethnic group, the Nuer. His house was set on fire, he said, killing one of his small children.
The British ambassador to the United Nations, Mark Lyall Grant, left, and Samantha Power, the American envoy to the global body, after a vote to increase peacekeeping forces in South Sudan.
Of the 200 people he was held with, fewer than 10 survived, he said. Small groups were led away, followed by gunshots. Mr. Wang said he had seen several graves with “dead bodies, yes, so many.” He credited his survival to the fact that he speaks Dinka and did not have any of the markings on his face associated with the Nuer ethnic group.
Outside the capital, members of Mr. Kiir’s Dinka ethnic group have sought United Nations protection from attacks. In the town of Akobo, armed Nuer youths overran a United Nations base, killing Dinka civilians who were taking shelter there along with two of the peacekeepers trying to protect them.
United Nations officials have said Dinka workers have been killed at oil facilities. And a mass grave in the city of Bentiu, which Ms. Pillay cited, is believed to contain the bodies of Dinka soldiers.
On Tuesday, the South Sudanese government said it had retaken Bor, a city where an estimated 17,000 people have sought refuge at a United Nations compound. Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the South Sudanese military, said government forces were now “in full control” of the city, adding that there were casualties, but that he did not yet know the full extent of them. His assertions could not be confirmed.
Hilde Johnson, the head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, told reporters in Juba on Tuesday that the situation remained a struggle for political power, with ethnic violence an outgrowth rather than the root cause. But that did not lessen the danger that it could degenerate further.
“We have seen the signs of this already and we do not want to see any development of this nature taking hold in this country, and we have the historical analogies fresh in our minds,” Ms. Johnson said, in a seeming reference to conflicts in Bosnia or Rwanda.
In the displaced-persons camp in Juba, where hungry people crowded under the meager shade offered by tiny shrubs, small tents and slapdash shelters, Mr. Wang said he had searched in vain among thousands for his wife and four other children.