South Sudan soldiers guilty of abuses - report

Members of South Sudan's army have carried out killings, torture and arbitrary arrests, activists said on Thursday, in a rare critique of government forces in the region.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said southern soldiers had been allowed to operate in an "environment of impunity" and called on the authorities do more to protect civilians. Southern Sudan emerged from more than 20 years of civil war with the north in 2005 with a peace deal that created a semi-autonomous government in the south, allowing the south to keep an army, and promised national elections in 2009.

The southern authority has struggled to find new roles for the tens of thousands of soldiers that fought on its side as members of the then rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army. The Human Rights Watch report accused the southern government of failing to control its troops and security forces or enforce the law when they committed crimes. "All too often, soldiers who are untrained and ill-disciplined abuse civilians instead of protecting them," the group's Africa Director Georgette Gagnon said in a statement.

The Humans Rights Watch report said soldiers shot at least eight civilians during a disarmament operation in the town of Rumbek in September and killed another 10 in the state of Eastern Equatoria in June. International organisations that fund development projects in the south have tended to shy away from criticising the nascent government. "They are completely over-stretched and lack governing experience after two decades of war," one Western diplomat told Reuters on Thursday. The southern army's spokesman Peter Parnyang said there were indeed problems with discipline in the former rebel force. "We are working hard to establish ourselves after all those years of destruction," he told Reuters. "It is too much to ask us to be able to do everything in one go." Other senior members of the southern army said armed civilians, sometimes still in uniforms from the war years, and criminals were often the real culprits. The report said South Sudan's government and donors should boost funding for training soldiers and police.

Source: Reuters