‘There is no humanity here,’ says UN officer about South Sudan
By: Ilya Gridneff Associated Press
A heavily armed UN convoy walks through the streets of Malakal, the capital of oil-producing Upper Nile state.
House
after house has been burned to the ground. Hospital patients have been
shot by armed rebels while lying in their beds. Dozens of corpses litter
the streets.
“This
is about revenge now. There is no humanity here,” said Col. Jan Hoff,
an officer in Norway’s army who has served in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria.
South Sudan, he said, is the worst he’s seen.
“It’s
absolutely horrific,” Hoff said this week as he led a heavily armed UN
convoy through the streets of Malakal, the capital of oil-producing
Upper Nile state. “This is tribe against tribe. In Syria it was foreign
fighters against the government. Here I don’t think it’s about the
government.”
A
corpse nearby is already a skeleton wrapped in a soldier’s uniform.
Hoff said he counted 30 bodies on a recent day. A colleague had counted
70. The dead include both civilians and soldiers.
Human
Rights Watch said Thursday that both government and rebel forces are
responsible for serious abuses that may amount to war crimes for
atrocities committed in Malakal and Bentiu, another capital of an
oil-producing state, despite a cease-fire signed in January. Reprisal
killings, based on ethnicity, are common place.
“Armed
forces from both sides have extensively looted and destroyed civilian
property, including desperately needed aid facilities, targeted
civilians, and carried out extrajudicial executions, often based on
ethnicity,” said Human Rights Watch, which called the destruction and
violence against civilians “shocking.”
A
week ago forces loyal to former vice-president Riek Machar retook
Malakal in a bloody assault that forced the government army to make what
it labeled a tactical withdrawal.
Government officials this week said they would retake the town, but on Wednesday,
as the UN convoy drove through, there was no sign of South Sudan’s
army. The only talk was how rebels were pushing north toward the oil
fields that provide the world’s newest nation its only income.
After
the UN personnel alighted from their vehicles to tour the Malakal
hospital, the smell of death and sight of destruction overwhelmed. The
hospital, now filled with heavily armed rebel soldiers, is ransacked and
empty of patients. Inside is a scattering of dead bodies, including
those clearly executed in their beds. Flies are everywhere.
The
UN has classified South Sudan as a level 3 emergency that puts it on
par with Syria’s crisis. As South Sudan’s rainy season approaches there
are fears that the hundreds of thousands displaced by fighting will not
be able to plant crops, an event that the UN aid chief here says could
precipitate a famine.
Church
leaders, analysts and government leaders have played down the ethnic
dimension to the conflict, but more often than not the violence is being
carried out by one ethnic group against another.
Human
Rights Watch said that despite the cease-fire both rebels and
government have launched attacks, and that credible reports indicate
government forces supported by Uganda’s military have attacked locations
in Unity state. The group said it has credible reports that rebel
fighters killed civilians at the Malakal hospital, where Doctors Without
Borders on Wednesday said it found 14 dead bodies.
“A
clear pattern of reprisal killings based on ethnicity, massive
destruction, and widespread looting has emerged in this conflict,” Human
Rights Watch said.
At
Christ is King Malakal Catholic Church, where three white UN tanks
guard people — mainly from a group called Shilluks — Ko Aduk Peter said
no one is safe regardless of tribe.
“Yesterday
some soldiers took our girls by power. Six women, about 20 years, from
the church,” he said. “Now we don’t know where they are.”
Toby Lanzer, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in South Sudan, who travelled to Malakal on Wednesday, said the town is in a “terrible state that was really quite shocking.”
The
UN camp in Malakal has hosted up to 20,000 people since fighting broke
out in December. Ethnic conflict broke out inside the camp at one point,
resulting in the deaths of 10 people.
While Lanzer was promoting peace talks, the UN has been preparing for more fighting in the north, near South Sudan’s oilfields.
“The
conflict in South Sudan is far from over, with civilians still at risk
of further abuse even inside UN compounds,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa
director at Human Rights Watch. “Military commanders from both sides
have an obligation to immediately and unequivocally order their forces
to stop attacking civilians and civilian property, and the commanders
need to hold abusive soldiers to account.”
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