“Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head”, she remembers him saying.
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The victim said she had no choice but to agree, but by the end of the evening she had been raped by 15 soldiers.
In a Tuesday morning press release, the US State Department said it was outraged by the 11 July attack, including reports of assaults and rapes of civilians, carried out by the South Sudanese soldiers on civilians, humanitarian aid workers and journalists at the Terrain Compound, a complex popular with foreigners and locals alike. The Associated Press further reported that a local journalist accused of being loyal to Machar’s forces was shot and killed in front of a group of foreigners who were forced to watch.
“We are deeply concerned that United Nations peacekeepers were apparently either incapable of or unwilling to respond to calls for help”.
According to the news agency, the United Nations and the U.S. Embassy did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Civilians hiding from the soldiers attempted to contact the United Nations and foreign embassies, including the U.S. embassy, for assistance, but to no avail.
“With refugees fleeing South Sudan in their thousands, surrounding countries are straining under the weight of large numbers of displaced people and critically underfunded operations”, UNHCR said in a statement.
The UNSC, which is to meet on Friday August 12 to vote on issues related to Southern Sudan, is slated to decide whether to create a unique force comprised of peacekeepers from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan itself with a special mandate to protect civilians, according to Simon Deng, a New York-based Sudanese-American human rights activist who co-organized Thursday’s rally.
The US ambassador to the United Nations is fighting back against claims that the US Embassy in Juba failed to respond as South Sudanese forces allegedly raped and attacked both foreign aid workers living in a residential complex as well as locals. Both sides have been accused of abuses.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, has been mired in violence and poverty since its independence from Sudan in 2011.
South Sudanese army spokesman Lul Ruai said it was too soon to determine whether the army was responsible for the attack.
He said “you will not achieve what the people of South Sudan expect of you if you do not work together and support its new leadership”.
An unknown number of South Sudanese women were also assaulted. Nobody in South Sudan has been publicly tried for any war crime or atrocity since the start of the civil war two and a half years ago. The violence quickly spread. Though she says she wasn’t raped during her ordeal, “Rape is part of the military arsenal that the South Sudanese government employs on a daily basis”.
By Monday, the government had almost defeated the forces under Machar, who fled the city.
“Monday was relatively chill”, one survivor said. Security guards at the hotel armed only with handguns didn’t stand a chance. They outnumbered the security staff and went door-to-door looting rooms, taking with them money, phones, laptops, and auto keys. Once inside, they then pulled people out one by one.
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One man wore a blue police uniform, but the rest wore camouflage, the American said.
