Forces loyal to South Sudan President Salva Kiir have been locked in a civil war with supporters of Vice President Riek Machar, a former rebel leader.
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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.
We aren’t convinced that more peacekeepers will be very effective – considering that the existing 12,000-strong United Nations force has failed to protect civilians thus far.
Several women were raped, men were beaten and a South Sudanese journalist was shot dead in cold blood.
A soldier “kept hitting me with an AK-47 over and over again, and he kept screaming at me to open my legs, open my legs”, she says. Numerous women were raped; one Western woman reported that she was raped by five soldiers.
South Sudan’s army has executed two soldiers by firing squad for murder in the northwest and detained 19 others for offences ranging from murder to looting in Juba after fighting in July between government and opposition troops, officials said.
Another woman who does not want to be identified tells NPR she and other Western aid workers thought they’d be safe in the compound.
During the fighting throughout the city, the USA embassy in South Sudan responded to distress calls from the compound and urgently contacted South Sudanese government officials, who sent a response force to the site to stop the attack.
But why didn’t the United Nations or the U.S. Embassy do anything to stop the attack?
She says it is time for the US government to rethink its approach to South Sudan – and at least push harder for an global arms embargo on a country.
“He definitely had pronounced hatred against America”, Gian Libot, a Philippine witness, said, referring to one of the troops.
He said “already there are people who are accusing the TGONU (Transitional Government of National Unity) of refusing and fighting the UN”.
“We are asking for a real peacekeeping force”, said Angelo Kassiano, 36, a Sudanese-American civil engineering student at the University of Nebraska, who traveled from Lincoln, NE to Manhattan this week.
Following the fighting in July, the UN Security Council authorized the deployment of a 4,000-strong protection force to support the existing 12,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission. When asked why no one responded, the United Nations said that it is investigating the matter.
State Department Press Director Elizabeth Trudeau would not say whether the attackers specifically assaulted Americans due to their nationality, telling reporters during the department’s press briefing Monday that she “is not in a position to say any particular nationality was singled out”. “We have requested and are awaiting the outcome of an investigation by the United Nations and demand swift corrective action in the event that these allegations are substantiated”, stressed Power.
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“They didn’t venture out of the compound to help women being assaulted right outside, nor did they respond to rescue the people at Terrain just one kilometer away”, said Jehanne Henry, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
