By AFP
South Sudan’s government forces and other armed groups have “deliberately starved” civilians by denying aid access and displacing communities, a United Nations rights probe said Thursday.
In a report issued two days before a deadline to form a unity government, the three-member commission looked into abuses from the signing of a peace deal in September 2018 to December 2019.
The panel delivered a damning indictment of “predatory and unaccountable elites” and the suffering of civilians after six years of conflict.
“Today in South Sudan, civilians are deliberately starved, systematically surveilled and silenced, arbitrarily arrested and detained and denied meaningful access to justice,” it said.
As President Salva Kiir and his rival Riek Machar met in Juba to discuss outstanding obstacles to the power-sharing government, the report slammed the process as beset with delays and bickering, and “lack of political will”.
“Political elites remained oblivious to the intense suffering of millions of civilians for whom they were ostensibly fighting,” it said.
