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.
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The AP this week reported that on July 11, South Sudanese troops went on a almost four-hour rampage through a compound popular with foreigners in Juba in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in the country’s three-year civil war. The other five said they were beaten; one was shot.
“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.
Jehanne Henry, with Human Rights Watch, has spoken with several of those women, who did not want to be identified. Numerous women were raped; one Western woman reported that she was raped by five soldiers.
Citing witnesses and victims, the United Nations reported that besides being sexually assaulted, women and girls were also “robbed of their belongings, beaten up and verbally abused by SPLA soldiers and other security officers”.
In one incident government soldiers rampaged through a hotel compound, “where they killed a prominent journalist, raped or gang raped several global and national staff of (aid) organisations, and destroyed, and extensively looted property”, said HRW. When they did, one took her to another room.
She curled up on the floor and locked her legs.
One female aid worker interviewed by the Associated Press said a soldier pointed an AK-47 at her and demanded she have sex with him.
Another man walked in the room, screaming at her, too.
The soldiers then pulled people out one by one. “I think it is the duty of this house because all the members, it is now your turn to talk to these people to come out from the POCs and go back to their villages”.
Last month South Sudanese soldiers raided a residential complex in the capital of Juba, after a victory over opposition forces in the country’s failing bid to emerge from its civil war. She suspects he had been waiting outside the whole time.
Power said she also called for an investigation into why United Nations peacekeeping forces failed to respond to the pleas for help. The worse part is, the nearby United Nations compound and the U.S. Embassy knew, but did nothing. “The people in the United Nations, they’re helping the rebels”.
Due to the gravity of these incidents, related allegations and the preliminary findings by UNMISS, the Secretary-General has chose to launch an independent special investigation to determine the circumstances surrounding these incidents and to evaluate the Mission’s overall response. He’s launching an independent investigation.
The U.S.is also calling for accountability.
“Throughout this three-year conflict, the Government of South Sudan has routinely allowed impunity for murder and sexual violence”. She said the USA ambassador instead contacted local government officials.
“Attacks against courageous individuals attempting to help the people of South Sudan are attacks against humanity itself”, partly reads Power’s strongly-worded statement.
The trouble, says Henry, is this wasn’t an isolated incident. “So it wasn’t only this compound and the worldwide women”.
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Sudan’s modern history has been extremely violent: in the 1950’s and 1960’s, by some estimates as many as two million southern Sudanese Christians and animists, or practitioners of native religions, were killed and, in thousands of cases, enslaved in Sudan’s Islamist north. Each side blamed the other for starting the violence. As both sides prepared to call for a cease-fire, some residents of the Terrain started to relax. Then they beat up foreigners with their rifles-seemingly singling out Americans-and fired bullets close to people’s heads.
