25 December 2013
JUBA, South Sudan — The security forces went house to house, rounding up civilians by the dozens and binding the wrists of some with wire, survivors said. Some were summarily shot in the street, they said, while others were hauled off to crowded cells. Bodies of the executed were tossed into shallow graves, one recalled. Another jail where civilians had been taken reeked of death, a witness said.
“We thought that the war was fought between the soldiers,” said Peter Nhial, 30, one of many in a crowd of desperate people to describe attacks on civilians.
Little more than a week after political tensions between South Sudan’s leaders erupted into clashes in the streets of the capital, the crisis has broadened into a societal conflict in which longstanding ethnic divisions are fueling the violence and civilians are often the targets, not accidental victims, of the fighting.
On Tuesday, the top United Nations human rights official, Navi Pillay, expressed deep concern about “the serious and growing human rights violations” taking place in the country, reporting the discovery of at least one mass grave and the arrests of hundreds of civilians in searches of homes and hotels in the capital of Juba and elsewhere.
“Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days,” she said in a statement. “We have discovered a mass grave” in one state, she added, “and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba.”
Hours later, the United Nations Security Council voted to nearly double its peacekeeping force in South Sudan, hoping that a rapid influx of international forces would help quell the violence threatening to tear the young nation apart.
But even as it moved to add nearly 6,000 international troops and police officers to the more than 7,600 peacekeeping forces already in South Sudan, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, soberly warned that they might not be enough.
“Even with additional capabilities, we will not be able to protect every civilian in need in South Sudan,” Mr. Ban said.
“We have reports of horrific attacks,” he said, asserting that the attacks on civilians could constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. “Innocent civilians are being targeted because of their ethnicity. This is a grave violation of human rights, which could fuel a spiral of civil unrest across the country.”
South Sudan was born in 2011 after years of international diplomacy as a way of ending decades of conflict with Sudan. Donor nations like the United States have spent billions of dollars trying to turn one of the poorest nations in the world into a viable state, but the country has long been strained by deep internal divisions.
The latest conflict began last week after President Salva Kiir accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, of trying to stage a coup. Skirmishes rooted in politics then spiraled with shocking speed into attacks based on ethnicity, victims said. Mr. Kiir is a member of the Dinka ethnic group, the country’s largest. Mr. Machar is a Nuer.
The mistrust between the two groups has laid bare how much of the fledging nation’s cohesion was defined by opposition to the Sudanese government in Khartoum, rather than a broad sense of unity and national identity.
Survivors at a displaced-persons camp in a United Nations compound in Juba spoke of mass arrests and impromptu language tests being given by security forces to determine which ethnic group people came from — an exchange they said could determine life or death.
Stephen Bol, part of an organizing committee at the camp, said that boys who had left the compound looking for food had disappeared, and that at least 2,000 people, including relatives of the people huddled here, were unaccounted for.
“We don’t know whether they are alive or they have been killed,” he said.
Majang Riek, 49, showing the deep gashes slashed into his wrists and forearms where, he said, he was bound with wire, described being hauled off to jail with more than 70 others. There, he said, he was beaten with rifle butts.
