South Sudan at risk of ‘return to full-scale war’, UN warns 

A United Nations investigative body has warned that South Sudan risks “a return to full-scale war” unless it can urgently put an end to entrenched impunity and widespread abuses amid escalating violence in the world’s youngest country.

The report by the UN’s 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 “systematic” sexual violence, arbitrary detention, forced displacement and deprivation amid a deepening humanitarian crisis in one of the world’s most impoverished countries.

It said “escalating atrocity risks” and the collapse of political safeguards in the country made “urgent preventive action imperative”, 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.

“Preventing further mass atrocity crimes, institutional collapse, and the destruction of South Sudan’s fragile transition requires urgent coordinated national, regional and international re-engagement,” the report said.

The report, drawing on a year of investigations and testimony, blamed the actions of political and military elites – in detaining opposition leaders, eroding power sharing and attempting to change the terms of a 2018 peace agreement – for placing a peace framework in the country under major strain and increasing instability.

It noted that the arrest and removal from office of First Vice President Riek Machar last year, and his prosecution for murder, treason and crimes against humanity, had undermined “the core power-sharing guarantees” of the peace agreement, and triggered “political uncertainty and armed clashes on a scale not witnessed” for a decade.

Machar, an ethnic Nuer, was suspended last year as South Sudan’s number two after opposition Nuer White Army fighters overran a military garrison in the town of Nasir.

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’s largest, first dismissed Machar as vice president, accusing him of plotting a coup.

The report also noted that intensifying military operations had been marked by a “dangerous shift in tactics”, including air strikes on civilian-populated areas.

It said that the deployment of forces from neighbouring Uganda, a guarantor of the 2018 peace agreement, had “materially strengthened” government forces militarily and “raised credible concerns” of violations of a UN arms embargo.

The CHRSS report noted that joint aerial bombardments by the Ugandan and South Sudan armies had targeted civilian areas, “predominantly affecting [ethnic] Nuer communities in opposition-affiliated areas”.

Conflict-related sexual violence remained a “defining and persistent feature” of the crisis, the report found, with survivor testimonies over the past decade showing “widespread and systematic patterns of rape and other forms of sexual violence perpetrated by all armed forces and groups”.

Most women and girls lived “at constant risk of sexual violence,” it said, adding that last year, the threat of such abuse had again “functioned as a strategic instrument of conflict deployed to terrorise civilian populations, drive displacement, and fracture social cohesion”.

The report said that impunity was entrenched, with senior commanders and political actors rarely held accountable for serious abuses perpetrated on their behalf.

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.

The commission urged the government to immediately halt violations by its forces, release those arbitrarily detained and guarantee freedoms of expression, assembly and association.

It also called for the urgent establishment of long-delayed transitional justice mechanisms to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed since 2013.

Renewed conflict

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.

But escalating fighting in recent months has brought renewed fears of a return to civil war.

Beginning in December, a coalition of opposition forces – some loyal to Machar, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM/IO) – 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.

Following the territorial losses, South Sudan’s army announced a major military operation against opposition forces in late January, ordering civilians and aid groups to leave areas of Jonglei state, a move that the International Crisis Group said showed the country had “returned to war”.

Millions affected

The United Nations said earlier this month that an estimated 280,000 people have been displaced by the fighting and air attacks since late December, including more than 235,000 across Jonglei alone, while UNICEF warned last week that more than 450,000 children are at risk of acute malnutrition due to mass displacement and the halting of critical medical services in Jonglei.

Nearly 10 million people need life-saving humanitarian assistance across South Sudan, while humanitarian operations have been crippled by attacks and looting, with observers saying both sides in the conflict have prevented assistance from reaching areas where they believe civilians support their opponents.

The CHRSS report said that civilians had borne the “overwhelming human brunt” of the crisis as conflict, violence, displacement and sexual violence had intensified “an already-dire humanitarian situation”.

Last year, it said, displacement had risen by nearly 40 percent to 3.2 million people, while declining international assistance was disproportionately affecting women and children.