South Sudan: The Forever War

SOUTH SUDAN

The Forever War

Perpetual civil war has often seemed to be the fate of the people of South Sudan, where cease-fires and agreements come and go and the fighting grows ever more brutal.

Another such deal is on the anvil this month, with the warring factions representing President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar agreeing to a permanent cease-fire and claiming to be on the brink of signing a power-sharing deal to end the war altogether, the National reported.

But the peace talks have been marred by the release of a United Nations report accusing Kiir’s government troops of alleged war crimes, Al-Jazeera said.

The UN human rights office (OHCHR) and the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) documented at least 232 civilian deaths and many more injuries between April 16 and May 24 in attacks by government-backed troops and armed youth on 40 villages in the opposition-held areas of Mayendit and Leer counties. At least 120 women and girls were raped or gang-raped, and at least 132 other women and girls were also abducted.

The testimony of the survivors drove home how brutal the conflict has become.

“How can I forget the sight of an old man whose throat was slit with a knife before being set on fire?” the BBC quoted a 14-year-old survivor as saying. “How can I forget the smell of those decomposed bodies of old men and children pecked and eaten by birds? Those women that were hanged and died up in the tree?”

Another woman testified that soldiers raped her while she was still bleeding from childbirth, but she was too frightened to resist because she’d seen what happened to other women who did so.

“There must be consequences for the men who reportedly gang-raped a six-year-old child, who slit the throats of elderly villagers, who hanged women for resisting looting, and shot fleeing civilians in the swamps where they hid,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement.

But such accountability is likely to be elusive until a lasting peace is established. And past experience suggests that any optimism should include a healthy dose of caution.

The latest round of talks, brokered by Uganda and Sudan, have been underway since June. On July 7, the two sides appeared to have reached a power-sharing deal under which Machar would join the government as Kiir’s vice president. But the rebels swiftly rejected the deal, claiming it didn’t dilute Kiir’s stranglehold on the real power. Ten days later, mediators in Sudan again said the parties were ready to ink a “preliminary” agreement by July 19 and a “final power-sharing accord” July 26. On Wednesday, South Sudan’s information minister, Michael Makuei Lueth, said the two leaders had initialed such a deal in Khartoum and they’d sign the final one Aug. 5, the Associated Press reported.

However, at least nine cease-fire agreements have been signed since the war began, the Economist reported. Only one has lasted longer than a month. Moreover, the new power-sharing deal is all but identical to one that was supposed to end the fighting in 2015.

That one ended in a shootout at the presidential palace.