According to a UN Report, the South Sudanese government has conducted a “scorched earth policy” against civilians caught up in the country’s civil war. The Government has allowed its soldiers and allied militias to rape women in lieu of wages, torture and murder suspected opponents and deliberately displace as many people as possible.
The report laid bare the scale of the atrocities committed by both sides since the war broke out in December 2013 and warned that many of those may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity. From April to September last year, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in Unity state alone, an oil-rich area in the north of the country that has seen some of the worst violence of the conflict.
The report chronicled how those suspected of supporting the opposition – including children and disabled people – were murdered by being burned alive,suffocated in shipping containers, shot, cut to pieces or hanged from trees.
One woman recounted being raped by five soldiers in front of her children; another was tied to a tree and forced to watch 10 soldiers rape her 15-year-old daughter.
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said that while South Sudan was “one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world”, the situation was struggling to attract international attention.
The government flatly rejected suggestions that SPLA soldiers have been involved in the human rights abuses detailed in the report.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, has been consumed by conflict since December 2013, when President Kiir accused his former vice-president, Riek Machar, of plotting a coup. The fighting quickly tore the country apart along sectarian lines, pitting supporters of Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, against those backing Machar, an ethnic Nuer. Two years of war are estimated to have killed at least 50,000 people and displaced a further 2.2 million, as well as pushing parts of South Sudan to the brink of famine and decimating an already weak economy.
