South Sudan: The Mass Graves of Bor, South Sudan

Bor — A handful of volunteers in almost deserted Bor, capital of South Sudan's Jonglei State, remove dead bodies from homes, put them in body bags donated by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and place them in mass graves.

Since the emergence of an armed rebellion in mid-December, government troops have lost and won control of the town several times. On 23 February, the army said it had repelled further attempts to take Bor.

"Maybe 60 percent of Bor has been cleared," said Jonglei's acting governor Aquilla Lam, returning from the burial of 134 people the same morning.

John Prendergast, director of the anti-genocide Enough Project, said he visited three other mass graves the week before IRIN's visit, where "hundreds of people have been buried...

"Every day, dozens of new corpses are discovered in abandoned homes. The body bags prepared by medical workers appear along the roads with relentless regularity."

Some white body bags still lie along the main routes.

"Because most of the town has been abandoned, there is no way to know how many dead are still to be counted," Prendergast added.

Hundreds are awaiting burial at a site where diggers from the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) are clearing more space in a field that used to serve as a cemetery for a few dozen people who died of diseases.

Crumpled sheets of metal and piles of litter are all that remain of the market in Bor; burnt huts - some said to contain the bodies of their owners - line pockmarked dirt roads.

Estimates for the numbers killed across South Sudan since mid-December vary widely: in January, the International Crisis Group suggested 10,000; some diplomats put the toll at ten times that figure.

Fleeing aid and church workers talk of devastation in towns such as Bentiu and Malakal in South Sudan's oil producing states of Unity and Upper Nile where rebels have massed and are still attacking.

Access to bodies difficult