A young boy looks through a monocle in the teaching hospital in Malakal, Upper Nile State, South Sudan. Fighting continues here despite a ceasefire agreement. Credit: Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/IPS

By Andrew Green
JUBA, Feb 3 2014 (IPS)

South Sudan is taking the first steps in what promises to be a long process of healing the fractures that prompted more than five weeks of fighting, potentially leaving thousands of people dead and wounded and displacing 863,000 others.

But tensions remain high, following reports of continued fighting in some areas of the country and the government’s decision to move forward with treason charges against four remaining political detainees. And the longer the process stretches on, the worse the situation will become for the hundreds of thousands of displaced across the country.As the numbers of internally displaced continue to grow, the U.N. and humanitarian partners are struggling to provide enough food, clean drinking water and shelter for all of them.

Upper Nile State Information Minister Philip Jiben Ogal told IPS there was gunfire last week outside of Malakal, the state capital. The fighting is in contravention of an almost two-week-old ceasefire agreement between the government and rebels.

Martin Ojok Karial lives in Malakal, working in the Ministry of Finance’s taxation office. Malakal suffered two waves of fighting and was temporarily held by government forces. The town’s central market is destroyed and at least 27,000 people have sought refuge at the United Nations base on the outskirts of town. Karial is one of them.

The humanitarian medical group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also announced Jan. 31 that ongoing insecurity had forced thousands of people to flee into the bush in Unity State.

Karial sees the fighting as a political feud that was allowed to get out of control.

“A lot of people were dying without any reason,” Karial told IPS. “Because the clashes are between two people. The president of South Sudan and the vice president. This is no reason for people to fight and kill themselves.”

The fighting here first broke out in a Juba military barracks on Dec.15 and spread quickly – first throughout the capital and then across central and eastern South Sudan. President Salva Kiir accused his political rival and former deputy Riek Machar of launching a coup against the government. Machar has repeatedly denied the charges, though he acknowledges he is now in open rebellion against the government.

Following weeks of negotiations in Addis Ababa, the two sides inked a cessation of hostilities agreement Jan. 23. Just hours after signing the document, they began accusing each other of violations.

Karial said people have now lost faith in their political leaders. Even if the two sides strike a peace deal, he said, they would be hard-pressed to convince people like him that it will last.

The government released seven of the 11 political prisoners it had held since mid-December, flying them to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, late last week. And on Saturday Feb. 2, an advance wave of regional observers arrived to begin monitoring a ceasefire agreement signed between rebels and the government.

While acknowledging there was not enough evidence to charge seven of the detainees, Justice Minister Paulino Wanawilla announced treason charges against the remaining four.

Wanawilla accused them of helping Machar and two others – all of whom are still at large – orchestrate a coup against the government, prompting the outbreak of fighting.

“I think there is enough [of a] case to take them before the court,” Wanawilla said.

Despite the government’s latest refusal to accede to the rebel demand, neither side has backed out of peace talks, which are scheduled to resume this week in Ethiopia.

“The parties are committed and they are ready to resolve the conflict in a peaceful way,” Ethiopian major general Gebreegzabher Mebrahtu said after arriving in Juba. Mebrahtu heads the monitoring efforts organised by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, a regional bloc.

It is unclear whether the two sides can strike a bargain that will bring the divided country back together again.

In a pastoral exhortation released late last week, Cardinal Zubeir Wako called for “better governance across the nation and an end to the personalised political power.”

Until people feel safe and they have some control over their political leaders and the events in the country, they will not leave the U.N. bases, the churches and the mosques where they sought shelter from the fighting.

Valerie Amos, U.N. Humanitarian Affairs chief, visited Malakal last week and talked to a handful of the more than 64,000 people displaced in the county.

“Even when I said, ‘We need to work on reconciliation, we need all the communities to come together, the leadership to come together. We need to make sure that people’s safety and security is guaranteed.’ Even then, people were not convinced,” she said. Instead, they asked to be moved to other parts of the country or to leave entirely.

It is a tenuous situation. As the numbers of internally displaced continue to grow, the U.N. and humanitarian partners are struggling to provide enough food, clean drinking water and shelter for all of them. They are also contending with the risk of disease outbreaks.

Aid workers are also starting to draw attention to the long-term implications of the situation.

“We’re coming up to the hunger gap and it is very likely because people have been forced to move as a result of the insecurity, that they won’t have the same food reserves that they had before,” MSF general director Arjan Hehenkamp told IPS.

The U.N. has announced that while 3.2 million people are at risk of immediate food insecurity, more than seven million people may become food insecure this year.

And as the two sides continue discussions, the situation is only going to get worse.

Two mothers and their children look to shore after arriving by boat to Mingkaman, Awerial County, Lakes State, South Sudan. In less than a month close to 84,000 fleeing the fighting in Bor have crossed the river Nile. Credit: Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/IPS

By Jacey Fortin
ADDIS ABABA, Jan 26 2014 (IPS)

When representatives of the warring factions of South Sudan signed an agreement to end hostilities at a luxury hotel in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Thursday, Jan, 23, fervent applause and some high-pitched ululations erupted from the audience.

The cessation of hostilities called for both sides to lay down arms within 24 hours. But on Friday evening, at around the time the truce was supposed to take effect, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang, a spokesman for the opposition army, told IPS that the situation was far from calm.

“We are fighting almost everywhere,” he said, pointing to clashes that erupted in the Unity State towns of Dangdok and Duar, in Dolieb Hill of Upper Nile State, and Mathiang in Jonglei State. “The government violated the cessation of hostilities before it began. We have the right to defend ourselves with all the means at our disposal,” Koang added.A disconnect between the delegates and their compatriots on the ground could render the cessation of hostilities agreement ineffectual.

Political rivalries and ethnic tensions have long threatened stability in South Sudan, but the current conflict kicked off on Dec. 15 when animosity between President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar, who was sacked by the president in July, sparked a clash inside of a military barracks in Juba.

The ripple effect was devastating. Divisions between the country’s two largest ethnic groups – the Dinka, of which Kiir is a member; and the Nuer, largely loyal to Machar – spurred a worsening cycle of retaliatory attacks, murders, rapes, and looting.

The three-week negotiating phase that just wrapped up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, has been subject to cynicism. The talks were slow, held up first by matters of protocol – agreeing on terms of reference and setting the agenda – and then by mediators’ trips to South Sudan.

The talks were mediated by members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), a bloc of eight East African countries. IGAD Envoy Seyoum Mesfin, Ethiopia’s former foreign minister, said during the ceremony that the signing was an “auspicious occasion,” but cautioned that “some settlements may only provide a temporary reprieve before violence escalates again.”

The final agreement is far from conclusive. The opposition was unable to secure a key concession from their counterparts: the release of 11 people who were detained by the government on allegations of attempting a coup. The prisoners include several high-ranking former officials who were instrumental in facilitating South Sudan’s independence from Sudan in 2011, including former Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) secretary-general Pagan Amum.

“We claim that on our side that the politicians have been framed, and they are political prisoners. If they were out, it would nullify the government argument that this is a Nuer-Dinka thing,” opposition delegate Mabior Garang, son of the late independence hero John Garang, told IPS. “This is an uprising of the people of South Sudan. Once these people are released it will show the true national character of the uprising.”

Representatives of the United Nations, the European Union and the United States have urged Kiir to release the prisoners as goodwill gesture. But government delegates deferred the issue to South Sudan’s Ministry of Justice, saying that the detainees will be released in accordance with due process.

The agreement notes that “IGAD and the Partners of IGAD are firmly committed to undertake every effort to expedite the release of the detainees,” but does not include any similar commitment from the South Sudanese administration.

The negotiations will now go on hiatus for two weeks, after which point both sides will come together once again to haggle over the thorniest issues: the detainees, long-term mechanisms for monitoring a ceasefire, and sustainable political reconciliation.

As the process drags on, hundreds of thousands of people in South Sudan are struggling to cope with a grave humanitarian crisis. But they looked to the talks with a some optimism, Edmund Yakani, a South Sudanese activist who runs a Juba civil society group called the Community Empowerment for Progress Organisation, told IPS.

“There are hopes that the agreement will stop the military confrontation, and that a ceasefire will bring about dialogue. But the citizens have some critical questions. They are concerned about the issue of representation – whether these negotiations are only representative of people in power, who don’t understand the real challenges facing the people of the nation,” he said.

A disconnect between the delegates and their compatriots on the ground could render the cessation of hostilities agreement ineffectual. During the signing ceremony, Nhial Deng Nhial, who led the government delegation on behalf of Kiir, expressed doubts about the opposition’s ability to control the fighting.

“What really worries us in terms of the agreement on the cessation of hostilities is the capacity of the rebel group, given that the bulk of the rebel army is made up of civilians who are not subject to military discipline,” he said. “An order to stop fighting may not be obeyed, and this will certainly make a mockery of the agreement.”

Koang argues that the government is largely to blame for the clashes that took place on Friday, though the conflicts he cited occurred before the cessation was scheduled to begin.

“The government is on the offensive, trying to force us back,” he said. Asked whether the opposition would stick to a defensive role only, he said it depended on the situation. “Sometimes when you are attacked, you resist and you get the momentum, and to keep the momentum sometimes there is a need for us to push back.”

Currently the government is in control of three major towns in conflict zones: the Jonglei capital Bor, Unity capital Bentiu and Upper Nile capital Malakal. But the opposition says it controls most of the surrounding rural areas and maintains positions not far from the government-controlled cities. If the cessation of hostilities is adhered to, both sides will hang on to their territories while delegations work through the major issues.

But some argue that lasting peace will require the factions of South Sudan to dig deeper than the causes of the current crisis.

“I think it will work if they address the question of state-building,” said Yakani, adding that South Sudan has suffered under a one-party system that put ethnicity before democracy.

“Political institutions are based on ethnic backgrounds, and that compromises accountability and transparency. These conflicts are symptoms of a system where ethnicity has been politicised.”

A boat of women and children arrives in Mingkaman, Awerial County, Lakes State, South Sudan. In less than a month close to 84,000 fleeing the fighting in Bor have crossed the river Nile to Awerial. Credit: Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin/IPS

By Andrew Green
JUBA, Jan 24 2014 (IPS)

The overwhelming job of providing relief to the more than half a million displaced and wounded in South Sudan may have gotten a little easier with the signing of a ceasefire agreement last night in Addis Ababa, which is set to go into effect today.

The government and rebel groups, who have been locked in more than five weeks of fighting, agreed to freeze their positions and open corridors to humanitarian groups desperately trying to deliver food and medicine to those in need. Relief workers are warning that the scale of the crisis will prove to be even larger as they gain greater access. Meanwhile, doubts linger about whether the agreement will hold.

The fighting in South Sudan started late on Dec. 15 in military barracks in Juba and then spread quickly around the capital city. President Salva Kiir has accused his political rival and former deputy Riek Machar of launching a coup against the government – a charge Machar has denied. But the former vice president has acknowledged that he is now openly in rebellion against the government.Jonglei’s capital, Bor, which government forces reclaimed late last week, is decimated and bodies are still scattered in the streets.

In the weeks after the initial violence, clashes between the army and anti-government forces have been reported in at least seven states. Rebels seized three state capitals, though the government has since regained control of the towns.

Aid organisations report thousands of people are suspected to have been killed and wounded, though it is impossible to gather an accurate estimate at the moment, because access to many areas of the country is still limited. What is clear is that the five weeks of fighting have created a severe humanitarian crisis.

The United Nations reports that at least 494,000 people were internally displaced – nearly one-tenth of the population. Less than 220,000 of them have received any assistance so far. Another 86,000 people fled to neighbouring countries.

Jacob Kurtzer, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said the known needs are massive.

“We’ve seen people displaced without any personal effects,” he told IPS. “Leaving their homes without basic shelter, very little food. We’re always concerned about sanitation. And the last would be the medical care, in particular, for the people who have been weapon wounded, to be able to respond to their medical needs. We’re trying to meet all of those needs simultaneously.”

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) flew in 70 tonnes of emergency supplies and medicines this week to distribute to women and children across the country.

At least 70,000 people have crowded into U.N. bases around the country to escape the fighting. But the cramped conditions and a shortage of toilets have created a high risk of disease transmission. UNICEF has warned of an outbreak of measles at some of the camps, which has prompted two emergency vaccination campaigns.

And that is only for those people the aid groups have been able to reach.

Dermot Carty, UNICEF’s deputy director for emergency operations, told IPS that the fluid nature of the fighting made it nearly impossible to predict where they could even maintain a sustained response.

UNICEF’s plans to reach 70,000 displaced people this week in Awerial County in northeastern Jonglei state had to be postponed at the last minute, he said, when unexpected fighting broke out.

“We were all ready to go and the security situation suddenly changed and we had to stand down.”

With a ceasefire now in place, the government, the U.N. and humanitarian groups are hopeful those interruptions will stop and they will be able to start reaching the hundreds of thousands of people who have gone without assistance so far. But better access is also likely to reveal an even bigger demand for assistance.

Paul Akol – a national lawmaker from Jonglei and a member of Kiir’s Crisis Management Committee – travelled with a team to Jonglei’s capital, Bor, which government forces reclaimed late last week. He said the town is decimated and bodies are still scattered in the streets.

“These towns are towns in name, but nothing exists on the ground,” he told IPS. “The houses are on the ground. The shops are on the ground. The little infrastructure that we built during the interim period has been completely destroyed.” He said it would take months, if not years, of assistance to help people start rebuilding their lives.

He suspects emergency response teams will encounter the same situation as they enter other areas that have been subject to intense fighting – when they are able to get there.

In a country that was already difficult to navigate – there are few paved roads and much of South Sudan is prone to floods during the months-long rainy season – the wide-scale destruction from the fighting has only made it more difficult and more expensive to get around.

The ICRC’s Kurtzer said his organisation already anticipates South Sudan “will be one of our most expensive responses in the next year. To a certain extent, that reflects the challenge of operating in this particular environment. But I think it also reflects the scale of the needs.”

The U.N. has already put out an emergency appeal for 209 dollars million just to respond to the immediate crisis and has said the country will require 1.14 billion dollars in assistance over the next year.

And that is only if the situation stays where it currently is. Oxfam Country Director Jose Barahona told IPS that this is not a guarantee.

“We don’t expect that the ceasefire means there’s no more shooting the following day. There are a lot of people with guns out there. All sorts of different groups armed. I think we cannot be naïve.”

It is also unclear whether the loose coalition of anti-government forces are all allied with Machar and feel bound by the agreement.

That could mean continued danger for hundreds of thousands of people across the country and ongoing difficulties for the aid agencies that are trying to help them.

UNMISS officers provide water to civilians seeking refuge from fighting in Juba on Dec. 17, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/UNMISS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 11 2014 (IPS)

As the death toll rises from South Sudan’s spiraling political and ethnic conflict, the ability of the U.N. to enforce its peacekeeping mandate in the country is coming under increased scrutiny.

On Thursday, U.N. under-secretary general for peacekeeping Hervé Ladsous told reporters the toll well exceeded 1,000 and reiterated that “the situation in terms of violations of human rights remains terribly critical.” The next day, the International Crisis Group released its own estimates that put the figure at up to 10,000."It's 11 million people across a country the size of France. How could we promise that we could protect everyone all of the time against everybody?” -- Kieran Dwyer of DPKO

Yet since the deaths of two Indian peacekeepers during a Dec. 19 attack by Nuer militia on an UNMISS base in Jonglei State, the U.N. has engaged militarily neither the loose coalition of rebel forces led by former vice-president Riek Machar nor government SPLA troops fighting for President Salva Kiir.

Vastly outnumbered by combatants, peacekeepers have been directed to protect UNMISS compounds where NGOs and the U.N.’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, have struggled to provide for upwards of 60,000 displaced South Sudanese who have sought shelter.

“We cannot protect those people from being overrun while at the same time doing patrolling in an area the size of France,” said Kieran Dwyer, chief of public affairs at the U.N.’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO).

As fighting raged and the government appeared to retake the northern city of Bentiu Friday, Mongolian peacekeepers there remained near the city’s compound, where 9,000 residents had taken refuge.

“It’s not our job to stand in the way of the anti-government forces fighting the pro-government forces,” Dwyer told IPS.

Dwyer says UNMISS utilises local channels to inform combatants of the location of civilians and threatens them with accountability should they attack, but he admits peacekeepers themselves are fearful of being overwhelmed and killed and even of reprisal attacks within UNMISS camps if they were to engage one side or the other in a firefight.

That state of affairs means little stands in the way of potential human rights violators, says Cameron Hudson, director of policy at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and former director for African Affairs at the National Security Council.

“You can’t do peacekeeping with the mentality that you accept zero casualties,” Hudson told IPS. “If that’s how you enter into these missions, they will never be fully successful and carry out their mission mandates.”

Fighting began on Dec. 15 when Nuer and Dinka factions of the SPLA skirmished in the capital. President Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, immediately ordered the arrest of 11 high-profile opposition leaders and accused Machar, a Nuer, of plotting a coup, a charge Macher has denied. Despite international scepticism of Kiir’s account, Machar fled Juba and took command of rebels.

The rebellion has displaced 400,000 people and pushed unknown numbers into the bush where they remain unreachable by humanitarian agencies and peacekeepers. The fate of those who fled their homes but didn’t make it to U.N. compounds lingers as a glaring question that neither the U.N. nor its critics appear capable of answering.

Human rights

The violence comes as the U.N. unveils “Rights Up Front,” its new genocide prevention initiative – an attempt to address failures to avoid civilian deaths in past conflicts in places like Bosnia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka.

Though it remains unclear how many civilians have perished in South Sudan, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in December reported mass graves had been found in Juba and Bentiu and cited “extrajudicial killings” and “the targeting of individuals on the basis of their ethnicity.” Observers believe more will be uncovered.

“It is irrefutable, and needs repeating, that serious human rights violations are the best early warning of impending atrocities,” said Deputy Secrety-General Jan Eliasson, speaking before the General Assembly on “Rights Up Front.”

But in South Sudan, UNMISS has been tentative.

“They don’t have that many forces on the ground,” said EJ Hogendoorn, deputy programme director for Africa at the Crisis Group. “They also obviously have significant logistic challenges in terms of moving around safely.”

Still, in a Christmas Eve letter to the U.N. secretary general, Crisis Group President and CEO Louise Arbour wrote that the U.N. needed to do more to ensure the safety of civilians.

“We feel that UNMISS, using its existing forces until additional troops arrive, should take a number of immediate, specific steps to prioritise protection of civilians, above all other mandated tasks,” said Arbour.

“Clearly not enough is known about what’s going on,” Hogendoorn told IPS. “This is part and parcel of the fact that peacekeepers are not patrolling as much as they normally would.”

From its beginning in 2011, UNMISS was mandated to protect with force “civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.” But despite signs of political instability in the SPLM governing coalition and an uprising earlier in 2013 in Jonglei state, the mission remained unequipped to prevent or intervene in violence on the scale seen in the past month.

On Dec. 26, Hilde Johnson, the U.N. special representative to South Sudan, told reporters, “I don’t think any South Sudanese nor any of us observers in country or outside expected the unraveling of the stability so quickly.”

But others have said those investments meant the U.N., Johnson, and NGOs on the ground were more hesitant to criticise the government and highlight warning signs.

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, says UNMISS was unprepared from the start. After South Sudan declared independence in 2011, peacekeepers that had already been in the country to enforce the 2006 comprehensive peace agreement between the north and south were shifted into the new mission.

“It was the power of inertia,” de Waal told IPS. “There were contracts, jobs, infrastructure and the U.N. said, let’s maintain it.”

“There was no deep analysis – what will these troops actually be doing? So they are really there by default.”

But Dwyer says part of the problem is some observers’ inaccurate expectations of the mission.

UNMISS “was never set for a situation where you have almost a civil war,” said Dwyer. “The primary responsibility to protect civilians is the government’s and our job is to support the government.”

“The U.N. will intervene militarily against any armed group who threatens civilians if we are there and have the capacity to do so.”

The rationing of intervention isn’t a new strategy for U.N. missions. Though DPKO oversees the second-largest deployed army in the world, peacekeepers are spread thin among 15 missions and further divided among bases within countries.

“It’s [South Sudan] 11 million people across a country the size of France,” said Dwyer. “How could we promise that we could protect everyone all of the time against everybody?”

Last month, the Security Council voted to increase troop levels in South Sudan from 7,000 to 12,500, but a lengthy approval process has slowed their deployment. Ladsous, who previously told reporters the 5,500 new troops would arrive by the middle of January, now says they may not all be in the country until March.

Meanwhile, as the conflict threatens to morph into a wider civil or regional war, information on deaths and human rights violations has become increasingly obscured by the fog of war.

Adding to the dilemma facing peacekeepers is the presence of Ugandan troops fighting for the government. Ugandan President Yuweri Museveni is a strong ally of Kiir, but Uganda is also one of the countries mediating at U.N.-endorsed negotiations taking place in Addis Ababa.

Observers say the talks in Ethiopia are unlikely to achieve a ceasefire until one side has gained a significant military advantage.

All of this only makes a show of force more important, says Hudson.

“There’s no question they could be doing more,” he said. “The humanitarian part of the mission appears willing to accept a much higher risk than the actual armed peacekeepers. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, that’s a fundamental flaw in the system.”

But Dwyer says that at a certain point, little can be done “if two people are really intent on their destruction.”

“The leaders of South Sudan, on both sides, bear responsibility for this conflict and for ending the fighting,” he said.

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir has declared a state of emergency in two states, according to the government’s official Twitter account.

The decree issued on Wednesday covers Unity and Jonglei, where government troops and rebel forces loyal to former vice president Riek Machar have been engaged in fighting.

The declaration came as the rival factions were set to open talks in Ethiopia on Thursday, aimed at bringing an end to the nearly three-week-old conflict, despite reports of an imminent military showdown in Jonglei.

Sources said government and rebel negotiators arrived in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Wednesday.

Ethiopian government spokesman Getachew Reda said the talks would focus on “monitoring mechanisms for the ceasefire”.

Following the fall of Bor, Jonglei’s state capital, into the hands of the rebels on Tuesday, the government and rebels loyal to Machar agreed to meet for talks.

The South Sudan government, however, refused to call it a ceasefire, saying negotiators must first agree on “mechanisms” for talks to move forward.

Fierce battle imminent

For his part, Kiir named eight negotiators to represent his government in the proposed talks in Ethiopia, Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Adow reported from the South Sudanese capital Juba on Wednesday.

Despite the preparations for the talks, thousands of government troops were making their way to Bor in an effort to wrest back control of the Jonglei state capital, setting up another possible fierce battle with rebels.

Our correspondent quoted government sources as saying that “it is just a matter of time” before they retake Bor, which was captured by rebels on Tuesday.

Fighting is also going on in other fronts like Mayom and Malakal, he said.

Violence first erupted in South Sudan on Dec. 15, when Kiir accused Machar of attempting a coup.

Machar has denied this, in turn accusing Kiir of conducting a violent purge of his opponents.

The fighting has since spread across the country, with the rebels seizing several areas in the oil-rich north.

Thousands of people are feared dead, U.N. officials said, while close to 200,000 civilians have been forced to flee their homes – many seeking refuge with badly overstretched U.N. peacekeepers.

Jacob Kurtzer, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Al Jazeera that refugees need immediate help.

The U.N. has said it will do everything it can to prevent further “terrible acts of violence” in South Sudan.

“We have seen terrible acts of violence in the past two weeks, there has been killings and brutality, grave human rights violations and atrocities committed,” Hilde Johnson, U.N. special representative to South Sudan, told Al Jazeera.

The conflict has been marked by an apparent surge in ethnic violence pitting members of Kiir’s Dinka tribe against Machar’s Nuer community.

Continuing ‘atrocities’

The U.N. Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said “atrocities are continuing to occur” across the country despite efforts to negotiate a ceasefire.

“UNMISS is gravely concerned about mounting evidence of gross violations of international human rights law that have occurred in South Sudan during the past 15 days,” it said in a statement, reporting “extra-judicial killings of civilians and captured soldiers” and the “discovery of large numbers of bodies” in Juba, Bor and Malakal, the main town in oil-producing Upper Nile state.

UNMISS has said it is “actively collecting information” on the atrocities to be used for future official investigations.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already given warning that senior South Sudanese figures “will be held personally accountable” for any crimes against humanity.

Johnson, the U.N. special representative, has said there is evidence that South Sudanese citizens are being targeted “on ethnic grounds”.

“This can lead to a perpetual cycle of violence that can destroy the fabric of the new nation,” she said.

“We need to do everything possible to prevent such a cycle of violence between communities of South Sudan.”

However South Sudan political analyst Matthew LeRiche told Al Jazeera the fighting is “very much a political struggle” rather than an ethnic conflict.

He noted that Kiir and Machar belonged to the same government and the same party, until they split due to political differences.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.