Forced cannibalism, mutilation of bodies, conscription of child soldiers and other human rights abuses have marked the war in South Sudan and may amount to violations of worldwide law, an African Union (AU) report said on Wednesday.
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The investigators, led by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo was released Tuesday, stated that the conflict started in December 2013 as a skirmish between members of the presidential guard and followed by a cycle of government-sanctioned killings of ethnic Nuer civilians and soldiers, refuting reports that it began when President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, accused his former deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, of planning a coup.
The conflict in the oil-producing but severely impoverished country, which has often pitted Kiir’s ethnic Dinka community against Machar’s Nuer people, has killed over 10,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.
Ethnic Nuer were later rounded up in “an organized military operation that could not have been successful without concerted efforts from various actors in the military and government circles”, the report found. This group later helped carry out the killings, the report said. Tens of thousands were killed, although the AU report said it wasn’t possible to state accurately how many.
“House to house searches were undertaken by security forces”.
The long-awaited report was released this week after almost two years of brutal daily violence in South Sudan, sometimes described as a civil war but more accurately a relentless wave of massacres by all sides, usually targeted against ethnic foes.
The investigators found “evidence that a few of the people who had been gathered were compelled to eat human flesh, while others were forced to drink human blood belonging to a victim who had been slaughtered and his blood collected on a plate”, it said.
Tensions stay, having a peace deal agreed between rebels and the government in August.
The report says the violations included killings and murder, torture, cruel, inhumane and other degrading treatment, abductions, rape and other sexual and gender-based violations.
Meanwhile, the commission found that the Transitional Constitution of South Sudan gives the presidency too much power amidst a weak institutions and a gap between the judiciary, legislature and the executive. Its report was due for release earlier this year but was delayed as negotiations over the peace deal dragged on.
The Commission condemned killings by both the rebels (SPLA-in opposition) and the government (SPLA).
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The report called for an internationally backed, African-led court to try those responsible for the violence.
