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South Sudan: Delayed Peace Means No Justice for War Crime Victims
South Sudan: Delayed Peace Means No Justice for War Crime Victims
By Andrew Green, IRIN / All Africa, 06 Mar 2015
Kampala — Regional negotiators had warned that yesterday was the "last chance" for South Sudan's warring parties to reach a resolution, but even a renewed threat of sanctions from the international community was not enough to bring the two sides to an agreement.
The talks are scheduled to resume today in Addis Ababa, though participants are cautioning that there is little common ground. This round of negotiations has taken on heightened significance and if it ends in failure it will be a significant blow - not just to hopes that an end to the fighting is near, but to efforts at seeking justice for victims of the horrific human rights abuses that have taken place over the past 15 months.
Peace, civil society activists said, is necessary to fully pursue accountability for these crimes, which include ethnically targeted killings, torture and rape. And accountability is critical if the country hopes to break what some activists describe as a cycle, not just of impunity, but of rewarding violence with political power. But faced with the reality of the faltering talks, local and international human rights groups are suggesting that justice need not be held hostage to the negotiations in the Ethiopian capital. Instead, they are pushing for the United Nations and the African Union to at least begin assembling a mechanism for accountability so that perpetrators know that when the fighting finally ends, there will be a reckoning.
A May United Nations report is the closest thing to a comprehensive investigation of the crimes against humanity that have occurred in South Sudan - and it is nearly a year out of date. Still, it offers a window into the scale of the abuses citizens have suffered.
It documents an incident at the outset of the fighting when government soldiers are accused of having rounded up and killed more than 300 civilians who shared the same ethnicity as former vice president Riek Machar, now the leader of the rebellion. In another instance in April, after overrunning Unity state capital, Bentiu, forces loyal to Machar allegedly massacred hundreds of civilians hiding in hospitals, mosques and churches.
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The Sudan People's Liberation Army's (SPLA) decades-long rebellion against the north was marred by internal conflicts. The most infamous episode came when Machar, a senior commander, defected from the SPLA in 1991. The troops who left with him went on to slaughter thousands of civilians in the Jonglei state capital in an episode known as the Bor massacre. It did not prevent Machar from rejoining the SPLA more than a decade later and rising to vice president in the country's first government.
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Machar's rise and the amnesty of the rebel leaders also contributed to a perception in South Sudan that "unless you're killing people, you don't matter, you don't get a seat at the table", said Niccolò A. Figà-Talamanca, the secretary-general of the Rome-based group No Peace Without Justice. "Breaking the cycle of impunity is about breaking that dynamic" and setting South Sudan on a different course.