juba/geneva: A mass grave containing some 75 bodies has been found in South Sudan’s Unity State and two other mass graves have been reported in the capital Juba after ethnic violence, the United Nations said yesterday.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called on both sides to protect civilians and warned that political and military leaders could be held to account for crimes.
“Mass extrajudicial killings, the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity and arbitrary detentions have been documented in recent days,” Pillay said in a statement. “We have discovered a mass grave in Bentiu, in Unity State, and there are reportedly at least two other mass graves in Juba.”
Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said that the bodies of 75 soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army were believed to be in the mass grave in Bentiu visited by UN rights officers. “They are reportedly all of Dinka ethnicity,” Shamdasani told Reuters in Geneva, adding that the UN team had been unable to verify the numbers or identities.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has warned warring factions that reports of crimes against humanity will be investigated, as well as asking the Security Council to nearly double the size of the UN mission in the country.
President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar, his former deputy, have both indicated they were ready to talk to try to end a deepening conflict that has killed hundreds of people since it erupted this month.
Western powers and east African states, anxious to prevent the fighting from destabilising a particularly fragile region, have tried to mediate between Machar, who hails from the Nuer tribe, and Kiir, a Dinka.
However, Machar said for the first time yesterday that he was ready to accept Kiir’s offer of talks, suggesting neighbouring Ethiopia as a neutral location.
“We are ready for talks,” he told Radio France Internationale (RFI), adding that he had spoken earlier in the day to US Secretary of State John Kerry and Ethiopia’s Foreign Minster Tedros Adhanom.
“We want democratic free and fair elections. We want Salva Kiir to call it a day,” Machar said, listing his demands, which follow days of shuttle diplomacy by African nations and calls from Western powers for fighting to stop. Machar’s promise of talks came shortly before the army stormed Bor town, which Information Minister Michael Makwei called a “gift of the government of South Sudan to the people”.
Bor’s capture, apparently without major resistance by the rebels, relieves some 17,000 besieged civilians who fled into the overstretched UN peacekeeping compound for protection, severely stretching limited food and supplies.
UN peacekeepers had spent days bolstering fortifications ahead of the army assault, after militia gunmen last week stormed a UN compound in the Jonglei outpost of Akobo, killing two Indian soldiers and some 20 ethnic Dinka civilians sheltering there. Fighting has spread to half of the young nation’s 10 states, the United Nations said Tuesday, with hundreds of thousands fleeing to the countryside, prompting warnings of an imminent humanitarian disaster.Agencies
