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A United Nations investigative body has warned that South Sudan risks \u201ca return to full-scale war\u201d unless it can urgently put an end to entrenched impunity and widespread abuses amid escalating violence in the world\u2019s youngest country.<\/p>\n
The report by the UN\u2019s Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan (CHRSS), released on Friday at the Human Rights Council session in Geneva, found that civilians were enduring severe abuses including killings and \u201csystematic\u201d sexual violence, arbitrary detention, forced displacement and deprivation amid a deepening humanitarian crisis in one of the world\u2019s most impoverished countries<\/a>.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n It said \u201cescalating atrocity risks\u201d and the collapse of political safeguards in the country made \u201curgent preventive action imperative\u201d, calling on regional and international actors to engage with diplomatic pressure, sanctions and enforcing the UN arms embargo until concrete improvements in human rights and accountability are achieved.<\/p>\n \u201cPreventing further mass atrocity crimes, institutional collapse, and the destruction of South Sudan\u2019s fragile transition requires urgent coordinated national, regional and international re-engagement,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n The report, drawing on a year of investigations and testimony, blamed the actions of political and military elites \u2013 in detaining opposition leaders, eroding power sharing and attempting to change the terms of a 2018 peace agreement<\/a> \u2013 for placing a peace framework in the country under major strain and increasing instability.<\/p>\n It noted that the arrest and removal from office of First Vice President Riek Machar<\/a> last year, and his prosecution for murder, treason and crimes against humanity, had undermined \u201cthe core power-sharing guarantees\u201d of the peace agreement, and triggered<\/a> \u201cpolitical uncertainty and armed clashes on a scale not witnessed\u201d for a decade.<\/p>\n Machar, an ethnic Nuer, was suspended last year as South Sudan\u2019s number two after opposition Nuer White Army fighters overran a military garrison in the town of Nasir.<\/p>\n Civil war broke out in South Sudan in 2013, two years after gaining independence from Sudan, when President Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the country\u2019s largest, first dismissed Machar as vice president, accusing him of plotting a coup.<\/p>\n The report also noted that intensifying military operations had been marked by a \u201cdangerous shift in tactics\u201d, including air strikes on civilian-populated areas.<\/p>\n It said that the deployment of forces from neighbouring Uganda, a guarantor of the 2018 peace agreement, had \u201cmaterially strengthened\u201d government forces militarily and \u201craised credible concerns\u201d of violations of a UN arms embargo.<\/p>\n The CHRSS report noted that joint aerial bombardments by the Ugandan and South Sudan armies had targeted civilian areas, \u201cpredominantly affecting [ethnic] Nuer communities in opposition-affiliated areas\u201d.<\/p>\n Conflict-related sexual violence remained a \u201cdefining and persistent feature\u201d of the crisis, the report found, with survivor testimonies over the past decade showing \u201cwidespread and systematic patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence perpetrated by all armed forces and groups\u201d.<\/p>\n Most women and girls lived \u201cat constant risk of sexual violence,\u201d it said, adding that last year, the threat of such abuse had again \u201cfunctioned as a strategic instrument of conflict deployed to terrorise civilian populations, drive displacement, and fracture social cohesion\u201d.<\/p>\n The report said that impunity was entrenched, with senior commanders and political actors rarely held accountable for serious abuses perpetrated on their behalf.<\/p>\n The report also noted a sharp deterioration in civic space, with journalists, activists and opposition figures facing harassment, surveillance and arbitrary detention, undermining prospects for inclusive political participation and long-term stability.<\/p>\n The commission urged the government to immediately halt violations by its forces, release those arbitrarily detained and guarantee freedoms of expression, assembly and association.<\/p>\n It also called for the urgent establishment of long-delayed transitional justice mechanisms to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed since 2013.<\/p>\n An estimated 400,000 people were killed in the five years of a war waged largely along ethnic lines, before calm was restored with a peace deal in 2018.<\/p>\n But escalating fighting in recent months has brought renewed fears of a return to civil war.<\/p>\n Beginning in December, a coalition of opposition forces \u2013 some loyal to Machar, leader of the Sudan People\u2019s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM\/IO) \u2013 seized a string of government outposts in Jonglei state, an opposition stronghold northeast of the capital, Juba that is the homeland of the Nuer ethnic group.<\/p>\nRecommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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