United Nations Security Council Authorizes More Foreign Troop Deployment to South Sudan

South Sudan tank during attempted coup on December 17, 2013. Reports indicate that more than 500 have been killed., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

UN agrees to increase peacekeepers in South Sudan to 12,500

December 24, 2013 20:28

The UN Security Council has unanimously voted to nearly double the number of peacekeepers in South Sudan to protect civilians, as thousands are feared dead in the deteriorating conflict in the world’s youngest state.

The top UN body voted Tuesday to authorize a request by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to boost the strength of the UN's mission in South Sudan to 12,500 troops and 1,323 police - up from its previous mandate of 7,000 troops and 900 police.

The request from Ban Ki-moon came after the discovery of mass graves, as the country slides into a bloody ethnic conflict.

Thousands of people may have been killed in South Sudan in one week, UN officials fear.

While the official nationwide death toll from the South Sudanese violence has stood at 500 for days, top UN humanitarian chief Toby Lanzer said on Tuesday that there is “absolutely no doubt in my mind that we’re into the thousands” of dead, AFP reported.

Reports from the young country, which is suffering from political and military division, indicate that the standoff between South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and his rival, ex-Vice President Riek Machar, who was sacked in July, is threatening to turn into an all-out civil war.

A mass grave containing 75 bodies was found in an area controlled by rebelling troops who support Machar, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on Tuesday.

“We have discovered a mass grave in Bentiu, in Unity State, and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba,” Pillay said in a statement in Geneva.

Preliminary conclusions indicate that all the victims were Dinka soldiers, an ethnic group to which President Kiir belongs. Machar and many of his supporters belong to the country’s Nuer tribe.

The suspected ethnic killing comes amid the escalated battle between troops supporting the two rival factions. President Kiir has blamed Machar for attempting a military coup, while Machar has accused Kiir of being “dictatorial” and attempting to carry out purges.

Kiir said on Tuesday that government troops have retaken control of the key town of Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, which was seized by rebels last week. The takeover was followed by the storming of a UN compound by militia gunmen in the Jonglei outpost of Akobo, in which two Indian peacekeepers and some 20 of the 17,000 ethnic Dinka civilians sheltering there were killed.

Meanwhile, troops supporting Machar are reportedly still in control of some of the country’s oil-producing regions bordering Sudan.

The fighting has already hit South Sudan’s oil production, which, according to Reuters, provides the government with 98 percent of its revenue. The country’s petroleum minister, Stephen Dhieu Dau, told Reuters on Tuesday that output has fallen from 245,000 to 200,000 barrels per day since oilfields in Unity state shut down due to clashes.

December 24, 2013

Security Council Authorizes More Peacekeeping Troops for South Sudan

By NICHOLAS KULISH and RICK GLADSTONE
New York Times

JUBA, South Sudan — The United Nations Security Council on Tuesday voted to nearly double its peacekeeping contingent force in South Sudan, hoping that a rapid influx of additional international soldiers would help quell the violence threatening to tear the young nation apart.

With tens of thousands of civilians in the country seeking refuge at United Nations compounds, some of which have come under direct threat or attack by armed forces as well, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the move. It will add about 6,000 international troops and police officers to the more than 7,600 peacekeeping forces already on the ground in the nation.

“We have reports of horrific attacks,” Mr. Ban said after the Security Council vote. “Tens of thousands have fled their homes,” he said, adding that “innocent civilians are being targeted because of their ethnicity.”

Mr. Ban raised the prospect that targeted attacks against civilians or United Nations personnel could constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity. But he warned that “this is a political crisis which requires a peaceful, political solution” involving the nation’s clashing leaders.

The vote came hours after the top human rights official at the United Nations, Navi Pillay, expressed deep concern about the escalating conflict in South Sudan, reporting the discovery of at least one mass grave in recent days and the arrests of hundreds of civilians in searches of homes and hotels in the capital of Juba and elsewhere.

The statement by Ms. Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, added a new level of urgency to the crisis in South Sudan, a fledgling nation that has moved closer to civil war in the past week, fueled by political rivalries that have stoked longstanding ethnic divisions.

Hundreds of people, and possibly many more, have been killed in more than a week of clashes and confusion around the country.

In a statement, Ms. Pillay said, “Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days.”

The statement said officials had “discovered a mass grave in Bentiu, in Unity State, and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba.” It was the first time that the United Nations had reported the existence of mass graves.

Ms. Pillay expressed “serious concern about the safety of those who have been arrested and are being held in unknown locations, including several hundred civilians who were reportedly arrested during house-to-house searches and from various hotels in Juba.”

It took decades of fighting, negotiation and diplomacy to forge the nation of South Sudan, but little more than a week of violent clashes and political brinkmanship to push it to the precipice.

South Sudan was born in the summer of 2011 with great hope and optimism, cheered on by global powers like the United States that helped shepherd it into existence. The new nation was carved out of Sudan to end one of Africa’s longest and costliest civil wars.

But the rivalry between two of South Sudan’s political leaders, President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar, along with the divisions between their ethnic groups, threatens what little cohesion holds the state together.

As diplomats scrambled to get South Sudan’s colliding leaders to sit down for talks, Mr. Kiir’s government warned on Monday that it would march on a pair of strategic cities it had lost to opposing forces. One, Bentiu, lies in a state that is central to South Sudan’s oil production, a linchpin of the economy and the country’s hopes for future development. The other city, Bor, is home to a United Nations base where an estimated 17,000 people have taken shelter from thousands of encroaching militiamen.

On Tuesday, the South Sudanese government said that it had retaken Bor. Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the South Sudanese military, said that government forces were now “in full control” of the city, adding that there were casualties but that he did not yet know the full extent of them. His assertions could not be immediately confirmed independently.

The fighting in South Sudan erupted last week in the capital after what Mr. Kiir described as an attempted coup by forces loyal to Mr. Machar, but it quickly spread to other parts of the country. Last week, United Nations officials said that 2,000 armed youths had overrun a United Nations base in the town of Akobo, killing at least 11 civilians sheltering there and two peacekeepers trying to protect them. An additional 20,000 civilians have crammed into the two United Nations compounds in Juba, frightened of arrest or attacks by state security forces if they left.

As the situation deteriorated, three American aircraft flying into South Sudan to evacuate American citizens in Bor were attacked on Saturday morning and forced to turn back. Four Navy Seals were wounded, one seriously.

On Monday, the Pentagon said it was stepping up its planning to evacuate Americans and protect those who remain in South Sudan. About 150 Marines and six transport aircraft are being sent from Spain to Djibouti, where an emergency force was created in the wake of the deadly attack on the American Mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.

The move was hinted at in a letter President Obama sent to congressional leaders on Sunday in which he said that he might take “further action” to support American citizens and interests in the strife-ridden region.

The United States also put forward a Security Council resolution on Monday to approve Mr. Ban’s plea for more international peacekeepers. There are currently more than 7,600 United Nations military personnel and police officers in the country, and the measure would increase that number to more than 13,000, drawn from other peacekeeping missions already deployed on the continent in places like Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo. French and American diplomats said there was widespread support for Mr. Ban’s recommendations and that the resolution would come up for a vote on Tuesday afternoon.

“The leaders of South Sudan face a stark choice,” said Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations. “They can return to the political dialogue and spirit of cooperation that helped establish South Sudan, or they can destroy those hard-fought gains and tear apart their newborn nation.”

Diplomats from Africa, the United States and elsewhere have tried to bring the warring parties to the table, hoping to cobble together a cease-fire before the cycle of violence gathers momentum and leads to a protracted civil war.

Even before its birth as an independent nation, South Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, had long been strained by political and ethnic tensions that have threatened to undermine it.

The latest political conflict surfaced when the president, Mr. Kiir, summarily fired his entire cabinet in July, including Mr. Machar. Some opponents have dismissed his allegations of a coup attempt last week as a mere pretext to crack down on the political opposition. Critics of Mr. Machar, by contrast, see him as an opportunist who switched sides during the civil war against Sudan to gain advantage for himself, before becoming vice president when South Sudan seceded in 2011.

Both sides have expressed a willingness to negotiate, but Mr. Machar has insisted that he will go to the negotiating table only when his political allies who have been detained are released. Mr. Kiir has insisted that he enter negotiations without preconditions.

Nick Kulish reported from Juba, South Sudan, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt in Washington and Somini Sengupta in Los Angeles.