A spokesperson for South Sudan’s opposition and rebel group says that their leader Riek Machar has fled the country.
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A statement issued by the leadership of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement In Opposition said Machar had left on Wednesday to a “safe country within the region”.
After clashes with President Salva Kiir’s army in the capital of Juba on July 8th, Machar and rebel forces left the city, putting the country’s peace deal in limbo.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has announced a special investigation into allegations that the UN mission peacekeepers in South Sudan (UNMISS) failed to respond properly to last month’s attack on a hotel in Juba.
While the Obama administration spent the initial years of South Sudan’s independence backing the Kiir government, the relationship began to sour when the South Sudanese president sacked his entire Cabinet – including Mr. Machar in 2013.
Earlier, a senior member of Machar’s party, SPLM-IO, had told AFP that the former rebel leader was “in Kinshasa and wanted to move quickly to Ethiopia where he would give a press conference”.
The UN and aid organizations have contributed nearly 11 billion USA dollars since 2003, including more than 600 million dollars last year and 250 million dollars to date this year to meet humanitarian need in Sudan, Ruedas noted.
Peacekeepers retrieved Machar and his group from the town of Dungu, near to the border of South Sudan, sources told VOA’s South Sudan In Focus. Power described Machar’s arrival as “the best hope that South Sudan has had in a very long time”. They signed a peace deal in August 2015, but implementation was slow and sporadic fighting continued.
Mr. Kiir, whose forces now fully control the capital, has sought to consolidate his power, replacing Mr. Machar with Taban Deng Gai and calling for early elections, despite pleas from the global community. And last month Juba was rocked by several days of heavy fighting between Kiir’s forces and those loyal to Machar.
The UN peacekeeping mission in the DRC became aware of Machar’s presence in the country on Wednesday and contacted the Congolese government, who then asked the mission to extract Machar from his location, a UN spokesman said. The renewed fighting in the 5-year-old nation has raised fears of a slide back into civil war.
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South Sudan’s military and opposition forces have made repeated promises to address allegations of child recruitment, but both sides have continued recruiting since July’s outbreak of violence, according to Justin Forsyth, UNICEF’s deputy executive director.
