Troops loyal to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir went on a rampage last month in the national capital, Juba, in which they killed, raped, and looted both locals and foreigners while United Nations peacekeepers failed to intervene, according to new reports by the Associated Press and Human Rights Watch.
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The United Nations secretary-general is launching an independent investigation into allegations that U.N. peacekeepers did not respond to prevent multiple cases of abuse and sexual violence against foreigners and civilians in South Sudan’s capital. 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.
A report on the July assault put together by the owner of the Terrain hotel complex charged that at least five women were raped while others suffered mock executions, beatings, and looting.
Power said she also called for an investigation into why United Nations peacekeeping forces failed to respond to the pleas for help.
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.
“We are deeply concerned that United Nations peacekeepers were apparently either incapable of or unwilling to respond to calls for help”. And then the soldiers arrived.
“We are asking for a real peacekeeping force”, said Angelo Kassiano, 36, a Sudanese-American civil engineering student at the University of Nebraska, who traveled from Lincoln, NE to Manhattan this week.
For about an hour, soldiers beat the American and fired bullets at his feet and close to his head. Eventually, one soldier who appeared to be in charge told him to leave the compound. The U.S. Embassy was also asked for help, and reportedly never answered the American citizens trapped inside the hotel.
“They broke down the door, they came in, they began to threaten women, they separated us into groups, they took us outside”, he told NPR.
If sending more useless people doesn’t solve this, nothing will.
[W] idespread sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, of women and young girls, by soldiers and unidentified armed men…
The U.N. resolution threatens South Sudan with an arms embargo if it does not cooperate.
For the next hour and a half the timeline is blank. “If you are not protecting civilians, you are not a soldier, and it’s not a country”. “The U.N., the US embassy, contacting the specific battalions in the U.N., contacting specific departments”, said one woman who was raped by as many as 15 men. Another Western woman said soldiers beat her with fists and threatened her with their guns when she tried to resist.
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The troops reportedly singled out Americans during their assault, with a survivor telling the Associated Press that one attacker “definitely had pronounced hatred against America”.
