South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir on Sunday agreed to the deployment of a regional protection force to beef up the UN’s large UN peacekeeping mission in the war-scarred nation after initially opposing it as a breach of national sovereignty.
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South Sudan accepted the deployment of 4,000 troops to the United Nations mission in the country and agreed to lift all restrictions on the peace keepers as well as allow the free movement for humanitarian workers, a government official said. The U.N. already has 12,000 peacekeepers in the country, and South Sudan has been wary of giving it more authority.
According to the permanent representative of the United States to the United Nations Samantha Power, it’s been painfully hard for the United Nations to do its work in South Sudan.
Speaking after the meeting between President Kiir and the UN Security Council delegation, the cabinet affairs minister Martin Elia Lomoro said finer details of the deployment are still being worked on. Security Council after first rejecting the peacekeepers as a violation of its sovereignty.
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“We have heard some names of the countries which can substitute regional neighbouring countries – Zambia, Zimbabwe were mentioned”, said Deputy Russian U.N. Ambassador Petr Iliichev, after the council envoys met with the African Union Peace and Security Council in Addis Ababa on Monday.
A fresh wave of violence erupted in South Sudan in July, pitting Kiir’s troops against former rebel chief Riek Machar’s forces in Juba.
The 12,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force (UNMISS) has been on the ground since South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
South Sudan is wary of giving the United Nations more authority and has called the plan a new form of colonialism. “I think any mother would”.
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.
“If we don’t accept it, if we don’t agree with that, nobody will enter South Sudan”.
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Helmoed Heitman, South African correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly and an expert on conflict in Africa, told the African News Agency (ANA) what was desperately needed was the immediate deployment of a huge neutral force to separate the warring factions and enforce peace and that force would need to stay at least 10 years, said Heitman.
