UN report: South Sudan allowed soldiers to rape civilians in civil war
Scale of atrocities committed by both sides laid bare in report, including allegations of torture, murder and deliberate mass displacement
A displaced woman, Akki Adduok, sits in the spot where her shelter used to be in the protection of civilians site in Malakal, South Sudan. Photograph: Albert Gonzalez Farran/AFP/Getty Images
Women search for their belongings after the protection of civilians site in Malakal was burnt and looted. Photograph: Albert Gonzalez Farran/AFP/Getty Images
The South Sudanese government has conducted a “scorched earth policy” against civilians caught up in the country’s civil war, allowing its soldiers and allied militias to rape women in lieu of wages, torture and murder suspected opponents and deliberately displace as many people as possible, according to a UN report.
The blunt and harrowing document, published on Friday by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), comes six months after accounts emerged revealing the systematic abduction and abuse of thousands of women and girls during the conflict.
The report laid bare the scale of the atrocities committed by both sides since the war broke out in December 2013 and warned that many of those may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity. Most of the civilian casualties, it added, had been the result of deliberately targeted attacks rather than combat operations.
While the report found that all sides had committed “serious violations and abuses”, it was unequivocal in asserting that “the government appears to be responsible for the gross and systematic human rights violations”.
From April to September last year, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in Unity state alone, an oil-rich area in the north of the country that has seen some of the worst violence of the conflict. In 2014, opposition forces harried towns in the area, turning churches, mosques and hospitals into “veritable traps for civilians”, the UN report said.
Although those forces scattered in 2015 in the face of an offensive waged by government troops in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), civilians were once again deliberately targeted.
The report chronicled how those suspected of supporting the opposition – including children and disabled people – were murdered by being burned alive,suffocated in shipping containers, shot, cut to pieces or hanged from trees.
