The South Sudanese government has conducted a “scorched earth policy” against civilians caught up in the country’s civil war, allowing its soldiers and allied militias to rape women in lieu of wages, torture and murder suspected opponents and deliberately displace as many people as possible, according to a United Nations report.
The blunt and harrowing document, published on Friday by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), comes six months after accounts emerged revealing the systematic abduction and abuse of thousands of women and girls during the conflict.
The report laid bare the scale of the atrocities committed by both sides since the war broke out in December 2013 and warned that many of those may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity. Most of the civilian casualties, it added, had been the result of deliberately targeted attacks rather than combat operations.
While the report found that all sides had committed “serious violations and abuses”, it was unequivocal in asserting that “the government appears to be responsible for the gross and systematic human rights violations”.
From April to September last year, the UN recorded more than 1,300 reports of rape in Unity state alone, an oil-rich area in the north of the country that has seen some of the worst violence of the conflict. In 2014, opposition forces harried towns in the area, turning churches, mosques and hospitals into “veritable traps for civilians”, the UN report said.
Although those forces scattered in 2015 in the face of an offensive waged by government troops in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), civilians were once again deliberately targeted.
The report chronicled how those suspected of supporting the opposition – including children and disabled people – were murdered by being burned alive, suffocated in shipping containers, shot, cut to pieces or hanged from trees.
One woman recounted being raped by five soldiers in front of her children; another was tied to a tree and forced to watch 10 soldiers rape her 15-year-old daughter.
“If you looked young or good-looking, about 10 men would rape the woman; the older women were raped by about seven to nine men,” one witness explained.
The report noted that the prevalence of rape suggested that its use had become “an acceptable practice by SPLA soldiers and affiliated armed militias”. Its assessment team was told that youth militias who carry out attacks with the SPLA had an agreement – “do what you can and take what you can”.
The report added: “Most of the youth therefore also raided cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a form of payment.”
The UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said that while South Sudan was “one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world”, the situation was struggling to attract international attention.
“The scale and types of sexual violence – primarily by government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods,” said Zeid. “However, the quantity of rapes and gang-rapes described in the report must only be a snapshot of the real total.”
