South Sudan records highest deliberate rape, killings UN report

South Sudan has actualized the most heinous form of government operated “scorched earth policy” of deliberate rape, pillage and killing of civilians during the civil war in 2015. This is cited in a report issued by the UN human rights office.

It also emphasized that minors and disabled people have been burned alive as the pro-government militia has been offered a leeway to a strategic or per-conceptualized war instrument of rape, mass killing and public vandalism, used as a form of lieu of cash dividend.

“The report contains harrowing accounts of civilians suspected of supporting the opposition, including children and the disabled, killed by being burned alive, suffocated in containers, shot, hanged from trees or cut to pieces,” explained the UN.

“This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war, yet it has been more or less off the international radar,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement.

The government and army-affiliated militias (SPLA soldiers), predominantly comprised of youths, in accordance to their contractual agreement have absolute rights over any material goods or figure that attracts their attention. The militias stole private property including cattle and other property under the said umbrella.

According to statistics, the period between April and September 2015, the UN investigation recorded more than 1,300 reports of rapes in South Sudan’s Unity State only. This is supported by an instance where witnesses confirmed of seeing soldiers at loggerheads because one of them wanted to “take” a 6-year-old girl he deemed as “beautiful.” The quarrel then resorted to some soldiers shooting the girl.

“Crimes against humanity and war crimes have continued into 2015, and they have been predominantly perpetrated by the government,” David Marshall, the coordinator of a United Nations Assessment Team, said in an interview that was videotaped in South Sudan.

The South Sudan state house spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, starkly denied any governmental affiliation to such inhumane acts. All he managed to confirm is that the officers are ordered to lessen the civilian casualty or stir any unnecessary tension.

South Sudan has succumbed to violence since December 2013 when a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and his political rival Riek Machar tumbled into a full-blown conflict. The civil war has then resulted to thousands been killed and approximately 2.3 million persons displaced.

The report also says that the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had already, in May 2014, pointed to “reasonable grounds” to consider that crimes against humanity committed in South Sudan. In a sign that little has been done since then, the report said “the killings, sexual violence, displacement, destruction and looting that were the hallmarks of the conflict through 2014 continued unabated through 2015.”

The UN report is the work of an assessment team deployed to South Sudan between October and January. It said “state actors” bore the most responsibility for the crimes, and that attacks on civilians, forced disappearances, rape and other violations could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.