Ambassador Samantha Power spoke Saturday as the U.N. Security Council visited the country on the brink of renewed civil war.
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It’s hoped the 4,000 troops of the Security Council-mandated Regional Protection Force will provide the stability to allow some people displaced by the 3 year conflict to return home.
While a fragile peace deal was signed in August past year, effectively ending the 2013-2015 civil war which killed tens of thousands and displaced 2.2 million, renewed fighting broke out on 7 July between forces loyal to Kiir, and those loyal to Vice-president Riek Machar – killing more than 300. The vote to send troops followed a week of tough negotiations, with China, Russia, and Egypt voicing concerns over deploying United Nations peacekeepers without the government’s full consent.
The force composed of African troops who will have more mandate than the United Nations mission in the country was rejected by President Salva Kiir who argued that it violates South Sudan’s national sovereignty.
That history has led proponents of the regional deployment to avoid calling it an intervention force, the Senegal envoy noted.
The government of South Sudan will also work with the African Union to establish a court to try crimes committed since December when violence broke out in the nation, Cabinet Affairs Minister Martin Elia Lomoro told reporters on Sunday in the capital, Juba.
Machar has since fled the country, raising the spectre of another war.
She also stressed that the UN Security Council needs to see progress on deployment of a regional protection force, lifting hurdles to humanitarian actors such as the UN mission, and progress in political consensus, which is the foundation of stability in South Sudan.
South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, left, takes members of the UN Security Council, including U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, right, on a tour outside the presidential compound in the capital Juba, South Sudan, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2016.
Dak said it was a shame for President Kiir and his government that a foreign force has to be deployed to the country, including in the national capital, Juba, in order to intervene by protecting the citizens from their own government.
Church leaders – both Catholic and Protestant – carry strong moral authority in Christian-majority South Sudan and bishops have played an important role in brokering past peace deals.
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“We have a lot of questions about how those attacks can have occurred and why there has been no visible accountability for the perpetrators of those attacks”, Power said. But the shaky accord broke apart in July, when Kiir loyalists and fighters backing Machar fought a four-day battle in Juba that killed at least 300 people and wounded hundreds more – a lot of them civilians.
