South Sudan Massacres Follow Independence

Sven Torfinn for The New York Times

South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. A man carried his daughter as people who fled the small town of Pibor returned after fleeing the violence there. More Photos »

PIBOR, South Sudan — The trail of corpses begins about 300 yards from the corrugated metal gate of the United Nations compound and stretches for miles into the bush.

There’s an old man on his back, a young woman with her legs splayed, skirt bunched up around the hips, and a whole family — man, woman, two children — all face down in the swamp grass, executed together. How many hundreds are scattered across the savannah, nobody really knows.

South Sudan, born six months ago in great jubilation, is plunging into a vortex of violence. Bitter ethnic tensions that had largely been shelved for the sake of achieving independence have ruptured into a cycle of massacre and revenge that neither the American-backed government nor the United Nations has been able to stop.

The United States and other Western countries have invested billions of dollars in South Sudan, hoping it would overcome its deeply etched history of poverty, violence and ethnic fault lines to emerge as a stable, Western-friendly nation in a volatile region. Instead, heavily armed militias the size of small armies are now marching on villages and towns with impunity, sometimes with blatantly genocidal intent.

Eight thousand fighters just besieged this small town in the middle of a vast expanse, razing huts, torching granaries, stealing tens of thousands of cows and methodically killing hundreds, possibly thousands, of men, women and children hiding in the bush.

The raiders had even broadcast their massacre plans in advance.

“We have decided to invade Murleland and wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth,” the attackers, from a rival ethnic group, the Nuer, warned in a public statement.

The United Nations, which has 3,000 combat-ready peacekeepers in South Sudan, tracked the advancing fighters from helicopters for days before the massacre and rushed in about 400 hundred soldiers. But the peacekeepers did not fire a single shot, saying they were vastly outnumbered and could have easily been wiped out.

The attack was presaged by a fund-raising drive for the Nuer militia in the United States — a troubling sign that behind the raiders toting Kalashnikovs and singing war songs was an active back office half a world away. Gai Bol Thong, a Nuer refugee in Seattle who helped write the militia’s statement, said he had led an effort to cobble together about $45,000 from South Sudanese living abroad for the warriors’ food and medicine.

“We mean what we say,” he said in an interview. “We kill everybody. We are tired of them.” (He later scaled back and said he meant they would kill Murle warriors, not civilians).

Such ethnic clashes were unnervingly common here in 2009, before the final push for independence. More ominous than the small-scale cattle raids that have gone on for generations, the attacks often seemed like infantry maneuvers, fueling accusations that northern Sudanese leaders had shipped in arms to destabilize the south.

But southerners seemed to rally together as the historic referendum on independence from the north drew near. The exuberance brought reconciliation. Major ethnic clashes all but disappeared.

The respite was short lived. Fighting broke out almost immediately along the tense border between north and south. Then, only a month after South Sudan celebrated its independence last July with a new national anthem and a countdown clock that blared “Free At Last,” Murle fighters killed more than 600 Nuer villagers and abducted scores of children. That attack set this month’s massacre into motion.

The makeshift medical clinic here in Pibor now stinks of decaying flesh. It is full of children with bullet holes drilled through their limbs. Many have trudged for days to get here, through swamps and murky rivers, and their wounds are suppurating and gangrenous. The doctors take one look and whisper the word: amputation.

South Sudan’s government has been extremely reluctant to wade into these feuds, because the government itself is a loosely woven tapestry of rival ethnic groups that fought bitterly during Sudan’s long civil war. The Nuer are a key piece of the governing coalition, and the Lou Nuer, the subgroup that led the raid on Pibor, supply thousands of soldiers to South Sudan’s army.

“Nuer fighting Nuer?” said a Western diplomat in South Sudan, considering the complications of a military intervention to stop the massacre. “That would be explosive.”