UN Fact-Finding Team to Visit Site of South Sudan Killings - New York Times

NAIROBI, Kenya — The United Nations is sending a fact-finding team to the site of a recent massacre in a remote region of South Sudan where more than 100 people may have been killed, United Nations officials said Monday.

South Sudan, Africa’s newest country, is struggling with a number of serious security issues, including bombing along the border of Sudan, violent protests in some areas and ethnically driven clashes in others.

On Friday, heavily armed militiamen from the Murle ethnic group ambushed a large gathering of Lou Nuer villagers making their way with their cattle to a river, the local authorities said. Preliminary estimates from local officials indicate that 103 people were killed — mostly women, children and elderly people unable to run away.

The raiders also took all the cattle and kidnapped dozens of children. Officials said that a platoon of government soldiers had tried to fight off the raiders, but that more than a dozen soldiers had been killed.

A deadly feud between the two groups has been raging for years, exacerbated by a simmering proxy war between South Sudan and Sudan. South Sudanese officials said Monday that there was evidence that the Sudanese government was arming Murle militias and that villagers had seen planes dropping crates of guns and ammunition to David Yau Yau, a fugitive Murle rebel leader who has been hiding out by the Ethiopian border, organizing attacks against civilians and government forces.

“He’s part of a destabilizing strategy of Khartoum,” said Col. Philip Aguer, the spokesman for South Sudan’s military.

Officials in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, have denied arming rebels in South Sudan and leveled the same type of allegations against the South Sudanese. They contend that South Sudan has been helping rebels in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, two restive regions of Sudan. Most independent analysts believe that both Sudan and South Sudan, which broke off from Sudan in 2011, have provided covert aid to militias on the opposite sides of the border.

In South Sudan, especially in Jonglei State, a vast, swampy hinterland where the Murle, Dinka and Lou Nuer have clashed over land and cattle for years, ethnic grievances can be set off easily. The Murle are a relatively small group and have long complained about being marginalized and discriminated against. The Lou Nuer, on the other hand, supply thousands of soldiers to South Sudan’s army and are considered more a part of the political establishment.

In late December 2011, thousands of Lou Nuer attacked Murle civilians, killing hundreds. Murle leaders complained that United Nations peacekeepers and the South Sudanese national forces had abandoned them in their hour of need and simply stood by. In one place, an entire family was executed together, the bodies discovered facedown in the swamp grass.

Kouider Zerrouk, a spokesman for the United Nations mission in South Sudan, said that since that attack, “in general, it was stable, until this incident.”

Mr. Zerrouk said that a team of United Nations officials was traveling Monday to the site of the massacre, several hours’ walk from the small town of Walgak in a thickly forested area of Jonglei State. The United Nations team, along with South Sudanese officials, will “assess the situation and ascertain the facts,” he said.

Kuol Manyang Juuk, the governor of Jonglei State, described the Murle as pastoralists with a history of raiding cattle from their neighbors, partly as a way to survive in a harsh environment.

“This has been their way of life all along,” he said Monday by telephone from Bor, the state capital.

The only long-term solution to this feud, the governor said, is roads.

“Roads will allow the security forces to move and will introduce trade,” he said. “This is about development. What we need is development.”