S. Sudan: UN report links officials to supply of weapons to ethnic militias
Photo: South Sudan militia group
March 9th 2020 (SSNN) – A new report by United Nations human rights experts has linked senior South Sudan government officials and military commanders to the supply of arms to the country’s many ethnic militias.
This morning, Yasmin Soka, the Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights Yasmin Soka told the Human Rights Council in Geneva that “South Sudan has become an environment in which fundamental rights are trampled and eroded.”
Soka who said killing, torture, rape, intentional starvation of civilians, intimidation, displacement, enforced disappearances and corruption have become the norm, warned that “while the revitalized peace process had led to a fragile peace at the national level, the conflict had shifted to an intensification of violence at localized levels.”
“There is a great deal of hope that the peace we have at the moment will be sustainable, but six years of brutal conflict have left the country bitterly divided along ethnic lines,” she added.
“We have documented how senior government officials and opposition leaders have been involved through proxies in cattle raiding, which is being used to exploit local rivalries and manipulate historical divisions between communities.”
The Commission found – in the report – that “high-ranking government officials were implicated in the supply of heavy military grade weapons including AK-47 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and PK machine guns to local militia.”
“Cattle raiding could no longer be characterized as traditional clashes over cattle or criminality involving private citizens,” the Commission said in its report.
“Cattle raiding had become a deliberate strategy to strengthen local governors and politicians at state and country level, where local militias were aligned to the warring parties and benefitted from personnel and weaponry. Some of these are supplied by parties to the conflict with the ultimate goal of displacing civilians perceived to be aligned to ‘the enemy.’”
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