southsudan0814_ForUpload

contributed to the emergency-level food shortages which now face 1.1 million people,
many of them displaced civilians, with the prospect of famine looming on the horizon.
The political contest between two leaders, President Salva Kiir Mayardit, a Dinka, and the
former Vice President Riek Machar, a Nuer, and those who have supported them and
ongoing abuses perpetrated against civilians because of their ethnicity, has pitched the
country’s two largest ethnic groups against each other. Government rhetoric has attempted
to underplay the ethnic dimension, but with little success: many communities believe that
leaders, soldiers or armed civilians from the other ethnic group will continue to target and
physically attack and politically undermine them.
A political dispute triggered the war wracking this young nation, but the speed at which it
spread and the dominating pattern of ethnically motivated reprisal violence during attacks
and occupations is in large part due to South Sudan’s history of war, criminal violence and
abuse without any form of accountability or meaningful inter-communal reconciliation.
Serious crimes committed in violation of international law against Nuer and Dinka
communities by fighters from both Nuer and Dinka-led rebel factions in Sudan’s 1983-2005
civil war, ahead of Southern independence, were never addressed. Fear of repetition and
anger over those crimes created conditions for the current conflict and the abuses being
perpetrated in it. Without clear and meaningful efforts to end abuses and determination to
ensure justice and accountability, and over the longer term, serious efforts to promote
societal healing, South Sudan is likely to continue to witness more unlawful killings,
massacres, and attacks on places of refuge.
South Sudan’s new war began with gun battles in the capital Juba between Nuer soldiers
and other government soldiers on the night of December 15, 2013 as months of escalating
tensions between Riek Machar and Salva Kiir reached boiling point. A defining event in the
conflict – a gruesome massacre of Nuer men in Juba by Dinka government security forces –
took place within 24 hours of this first fighting. Many thousands of armed Nuer
subsequently joined the Riek-led opposition principally to revenge the massacre and other
killings in capital. Well-aware of this fury, the government has failed to admit the scale of
the crimes committed or demonstrate political will to provide accountability. Instead
President Salva Kiir and other authorities set up a confusing array of investigations, none
of which have yielded a public report, hearing or prosecutions.
SOUTH SUDAN’S NEW WAR 2