In Nairobi to meet with the foreign minister of Kenya, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke about the deployment of extra United Nations troops in South Sudan, and about American aid provided to the region.
By REUTERS on Publish Date August 22, 2016. Photo by Pool photo by Thomas Mukoya. Watch in Times Video »
NAIROBI, Kenya — A new protection force intended for South Sudan that was authorized by the United Nations this month needs to be deployed there as soon as possible to safeguard civilians, especially women and girls, Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday.
“We need to move forward,” Mr. Kerry said, calling South Sudan’s ethnically based conflict, which has killed tens of thousands in the past two and a half years, tragic and reprehensible.
Mr. Kerry made the remarks while visiting Nairobi for the beginning of a six-day trip to Africa and the Middle East.
Kenyan newspapers have described Mr. Kerry’s visit as a “peace mission” because the region’s conflicts are at the top of the agenda. Mr. Kerry is familiar with East Africa’s troubles, having flown in several times over the years to advocate peace proposals.
As a senator, he visited Sudan, venturing to the war-plagued region of Darfur. He has also visited Juba, the capital of South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, where people on the street joked that he was a “white Dinka” because of his 6-foot-4-inch height. (The Dinka are among the biggest ethnic groups in South Sudan and are one of Africa’s tallest.)
So far, the government of South Sudan has resisted the planned deployment in Juba of a 4,000-soldier protection force, which the Security Council approved on Aug. 12 to bolster the United Nations peacekeeping mission there.
That mission, which has about 12,000 soldiers, has been struggling to protect civilians from armed groups.
International pressure for the additional force, which would be supplied by neighboring nations, escalated after a burst of fighting in July claimed hundreds of lives and resulted in rapes, including of Western aid workers.
As Mr. Kerry emphasized several times on Monday: “This is not an intervention force, this is a protection force.”
His words appeared aimed at the leaders of South Sudan’s warring factions who have often seemed to want to fight it out among themselves without a neutral force in between.
President Salva Kiir of South Sudan, a Dinka, has resisted such a deployment, describing it as a United Nations takeover of the country. His main rival, the former vice president Riek Machar, a member of the Nuer ethnic group, fled the country last week, just a few months after he had returned under a peace deal that appears to have collapsed.
Mr. Kerry met with the foreign ministers of five African countries — Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda — in an effort to coax them to play a bigger role in stabilizing trouble spots, such as South Sudan and Somalia.
But he also said there was “a lot more going on in East Africa,” praising the region’s economic progress and “entrepreneurial energy.”
He shared some light comments about Kenya’s success at the Olympics in Brazil, where Kenyan runners won gold in the men and women’s marathons and other track and field events. He said he had congratulated President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and had asked him “to teach us how to run.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Kerry was scheduled to fly to Nigeria, where the topic of hundreds of missing schoolgirls, kidnapped in 2014 by the militant group Boko Haram, was bound to come up.
Then he heads to Saudi Arabia to discuss the war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been bombing areas of the country, trying to shore up a weak central government against Houthi insurgents. That action has provoked an outcry by international human rights groups who say the Saudi bombings have indiscriminately killed civilians.
