When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it gained not only sovereignty, but control of about three-fourths of Sudan’s oil production, a devastating blow to Sudan’s economy.
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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”.
South Sudan’s rebel leader has fled the country, a spokesman for his party said Thursday. The U.N. mission there, known as MONUSCO, was alerted to his presence and contacted the Congolese government.
“Machar has successfully relocated to a neighbouring country”, Gatdet said, without naming the country.
The government of South Sudan is determined to ramp up crude oil production by November, so it can start exporting fuels to neighboring Ethiopia, Petroleum Minister Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth said in Kenya.
Haq said the United Nations findings will be fed into the work of the independent investigation whose report will be made public.
It learned Wednesday that Machar was in Congo, near the South Sudan border, and arranged on humanitarian grounds for the United Nations peacekeeping force there to airlift him, his wife and 10 others, deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said. “Right now he’s in the hands of the authorities of the DRC”.
“We have undergone an extraction operation and so he is now in the care of the authorities in the DRC”. “He needed to be moved safely from one spot to another”, he added.
President Kiir said on Monday that his government was also investigating the attack on the compound. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, called his return “the best hope that South Sudan has had in a very long time”. Machar and fighters supporting him left the city, putting the country’s peace deal in limbo. The renewed fighting in the 5-year-old nation has raised fears of a slide back into civil war.
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.
According to the dpa report, Machar representative who did not want to be identified said he was in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
But South Sudan’s government said it opposed the deployment and it is not clear how the mission can go ahead without its co-operation.
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Tens of thousands of people were killed in the fighting and more than two million people were displaced. The peace deal has been violated repeatedly by fighting.
