A UN Security Council delegation arrived in South Sudan on September 2, three weeks after the body approved 4,000 extra regional peace keepers for the world’s youngest country.
Advertisement
South Sudan has agreed to the deployment of a 4,000-strong regional protection force approved by the U.N. Security Council after first rejecting the peacekeepers as a violation of its sovereignty.
“If we don’t accept it, if we don’t agree with that, nobody will enter South Sudan”. The UN said it would consider an arms embargo if the South Sudanese government objected to deployment of the force.
People in the PoC “said that they want this prison sentence to end, and the only way it’s going to end is if the United Nations force gets up to full strength, the Regional Protection Force deploys and the peace agreement is implemented”, Power said.
Kiir publicly consented to the protection force, authorized by the U.N. Security Council last month, after meeting with council envoys, led by U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, on Sunday in Juba.
East African regional bloc IGAD pushed for a regional protection force and has pledged to provide the troops.South Sudan Minister of Cabinet Affairs, Martin Elia Lomoro, said the government had no objection to who contributes soldiers.
For weeks now South Sudan’s government has been facing intense pressure and the threat of sanctions from the worldwide community for refusing to accept the regional force.
“What we need to do now is move from those very important high-level commitments into working up the modalities in an operational way”, Ms Power said.
“UNMISS has an impartial mandate to protect civilians, no matter who they are, no matter where they are”.
She said that the number one obstacle to the peacekeeping and humanitarian officials fulfilling their mandate up has been the severe restrictions on their movement. But analysts say his civilian supporters continue to be targeted, along with what Ambassador Power described Saturday as “a huge surge in sexual violence against women” who leave the crowded Juba refugee camp to gather firewood or other family necessities.
South Sudan descended into war in December 2013 after President Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup. Tens of thousands of people have died. When fighting erupted in the capital, Juba, in July, hundreds were killed and residents feared a return to civil war in the already devastated country.
Advertisement
An estimated 16,000 children have been recruited by armed groups and the national army in the conflict, and 2.5 million people have been driven from their homes.
