South Sudan leaders must account for atrocities

NAIROBI: It is time to stop romanticising about the world’s newest state and deal firmly with its leaders before their careless actions push it over the precipice and condemn it to another cycle of bloody civil war.

Currently, Riek Machar, one signatory of a Collective Peace Agreement, is in hiding, holding out with a band of men trying to gain passage to a country other than the one he represented barely months ago. The other signatory, Salva Kiir, continues his presidency in Juba as if oblivious to threats facing his country. The unrest in South Sudan is everyone’s problem. If the now broke, starving and war-ravaged nation goes completely belly up, the impact will reverberate across its borders.

Currently, Kenya and South Sudan are joined at the hip. For some of our biggest infrastructure projects to survive, South Sudan must survive. For us to continue enjoying some level of success in stabilising our security situation, South Sudan must not only survive, but thrive as well. A week ago investigations by a United Nations agency placed most of the blame for the violence, which it said included mass rapes, on Kiir’s forces. Yet, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAAD) continues to equivocate rather than deal with decisively with the perpetrators.

Kenya and other stakeholder must not allow the country’s leaders to get away with it. It must force Juba to come to the negotiating table with a sustainable peace plan. We cannot sit back and wait for winners and losers to emerge from the unfolding crisis. Victory can only be obtained through compromise. Painful, deliberate compromise by all involved.