In South Sudan, peace requires justice

South Sudan is a country torn apart by war after war, rape after rape, impunity after impunity. There are far too many sad and tragic places in the world, but none of them need justice and accountability more than South Sudan. Even before Sudan gained its ......

South Sudan is a country torn apart by war after war, rape after rape, impunity after impunity. There are far too many sad and tragic places in the world, but none of them need justice and accountability more than South Sudan^[1].

Even before Sudan gained its independence in 1956, the northern and southern parts of the country were engaged in a first civil war that continued from 1955 to 1972 and a second war from 1983 to 2005, leaving two and a half million people dead and four million displaced. The second war ended with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which granted the south a substantial measure of autonomy and provided for a referendum on the south’s independence after an interim period. In fact, the south voted overwhelmingly for independence, becoming the world’s newest country on July 9, 2011, amid much celebration, international good will and hope for a new, brighter future.

Unfortunately, only two and a half years later, in December 2013, these hopes were dashed, with the country falling into yet another civil war, which continues to this day. Beginning as a clash between two long-time political rivals, the conflict quickly took on ethnic dimensions, initially between the country’s two largest ethnic groups, the Dinka and Nuer, but ultimately spreading to and encompassing most of the country and its people.

Today, South Sudan, despite possessing large oil reserves and rich agricultural lands, is one of the world’s poorest, most fragile countries (second only to Somalia), with its economy in ruins and recent inflation at 900 percent. Villages are attacked, people murdered and houses burned, with civilians both deliberately and indiscriminately targeted, often on ethnic grounds. At least 3.5 million South Sudanese (somewhere between a fourth and one-third of the country’s population), most of them women and children, are displaced, across international borders or internally, comprising Africa’s worst refugee crisis and third largest in the world, after Syria and Afghanistan.

Five and a half million people face severe food shortages, more than half of them children. One hundred thousand face imminent starvation, with another million on the brink. For the first time in the world since 2011, famine has been officially declared in northern parts of the country. The country’s failing government, with its soldiers, secret police and allied militias committing most of the human rights violations and apparent war crimes, blocks and manipulates humanitarian aid.

In a country recently described by United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley as the most dangerous in the world for humanitarian workers, with eighty-three being killed since December 2013, humanitarians struggle every day, with tremendous dedication, to provide as much aid and assistance as possible. Sexual violence is rampant, with a UN study indicating that 70 percent of South Sudanese women in displacement camps have previously suffered some form of sexual assault or abuse, to which they are exposed every day when they go looking for food, water and firewood. Journalists and human rights defenders are arbitrarily detained without charges for indefinite periods of time, in horrible conditions. Babies sit in the road and cry.

What makes all of this especially tragic is that it is all man-made. As one national ambassador recently said in the Security Council: “The famine is not the result of drought; it is the result of leaders more interested in political power and personal gain than in stopping violence and allowing humanitarian access.”

To be clear, virtually all of the conflict’s principal parties have engaged in gross misconduct and rights violations, but most of the responsibility for the more serious abuses falls on the government. Ethnic violence and displacement are happening on an ever-larger scale. Senior government and military officials deny that rape is happening and, aside from military prosecutions of a few low-level soldiers (with a goat or two often being the penalty for rape), there is no accountability or real effort to stop any of this. And therein lies a great deal — even a fundamental core — of the problem.

South Sudan suffers from a long history and deep culture of impunity. Throughout and following the country’s long periods of violence, no one has ever been held accountable, including, as one example only, for the atrocities committed in Bor in 1991. In a highly militarized country, with no secure foundation of civil governance, where military power equals political power, all political change and “accountability,” possibly excluding the 2011 referendum (which, in the end, was more a rejection of Sudan than an affirmation of anything else), has been and is at the point of a gun.

After each period of mass violence, the political elites and victors tell the people “we just need to go forward, trying to sort out and hold people responsible would be too difficult (and inconvenient), just never mind.” Current perpetrators and those responsible at all levels cannot be blamed for thinking “no one has ever stopped this or been held accountable before, why will it be any different this time?” The South Sudanese people have simply never seen a government official or military officer held accountable. It is something which doesn’t happen, something which doesn’t exist.

In some recognition of this, parties to the conflict and the presidents and prime ministers of the surrounding countries, in an August 2015 peace agreement which is now in tatters and daily violated, promised and “guaranteed” that the African Union would establish an international hybrid court (comprised of both South Sudanese and African judges and other elements) to bring to account those responsible for the man-made tragedies and suffering in South Sudan. But efforts to establish the court have been slow to non-existent, with many having real doubts that it will ever happen at all. The South Sudan government delays, obfuscates and fails to cooperate with the African Union and others. Victims and witnesses die, evidence disappears.

There will be no sustained or durable peace in South Sudan unless justice is both done and seen to be done. John Lennon said “Give peace a chance.” In South Sudan, we need to give justice a chance — and really mean it.

Kenneth Scott is an international human rights lawyer, war crimes prosecutor and United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights in South Sudan. He lives in Denver.

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References

1. ^{^} none of them need justice and accountability more than South Sudan (www.denverpost.com)
2. ^{^} online (www.denverpost.com)
3. ^{^} guidelines (www.denverpost.com)