JUBA: South Sudan troops will attack the main stronghold of rebel forces loyal to former vice president Riek Machar if the government’s offer of a ceasefire is rejected, a senior minister said yesterday.
More than 1,000 people have been killed in two weeks of ethnic clashes that threaten to turn into a full-blown civil war in the world’s youngest country. Refugees sheltering in UN camps spoke of atrocities committed by both main ethnic groups.
President Salva Kiir’s government offered an olive branch to the rebels on Friday, proposing a ceasefire and saying it would release eight of 11 senior politicians, widely seen to be Machar allies, arrested over an alleged coup plot against Kiir.
But Kiir’s former deputy Machar reacted coolly to the truce offer, telling the BBC that any ceasefire needed to be credible and properly enforced for him to take it seriously.
“Until mechanisms for monitoring are established, when one says there is a unilateral ceasefire, there is no way the other person would be confident this is a commitment,”
Machar said.
Information Minister Michael Makuei said government troops yesterday morning pushed rebels out of the town of Mayom in Unity State and were ready to advance the 90 km to Bentiu, the last state capital held by Machar’s forces.
“We will flush (Machar) out of Bentiu if he doesn’t accept the cessation of hostilities,” Makuei told Reuters by phone from the capital Juba.
Fighting between rival groups of soldiers erupted in Juba on December 15, then triggered clashes in half of South Sudan’s 10 states — often along ethnic lines, between Machar’s group, the Nuer, and Kiir’s Dinka.
Inside sprawling United Nations camps acting as a safe haven for more than 63,000 civilians, many traumatised Dinka and Nuer say ethnic bloodletting has left them paralysed with fear.
“They came with their guns and spoke to us in the Dinka language,” said Gattuor Gatkek, a Nuer man seeking refuge at the UN camp in Juba’s Tonping area where other civilians also have told Reuters about summary executions, rapes and mutilations.
“I didn’t speak the language, so they pulled me aside and forced me to eat the flesh of a corpse that lay next to me.”
Dinkas say they have also been victims of ethnic-based atrocities. In Jonglei state capital Bor they talk of mass killings by marauding Nuer militias, while a UN human rights group said earlier this week it had found a mass grave believed to contain bodies of Dinka soldiers in rebel-held Bentiu.
The United States, other Western powers and regional governments, fearful of a civil war in a fragile region with notoriously porous borders, have tried to mediate.
REUTERS
