Medical teams who flew to remote Manyabol on Sunday to pick up the most severely wounded were forced to leave before 60 more injured arrived, with gunshots heard in the distance, Bior added.
“There’s no way it will end until one side is annihilated,” he said.
Tit for tat cattle raids and reprisal killings are common in this severely under developed state, awash with guns left over from almost two decades of civil war.
But the latest upsurge in fighting that began almost two weeks ago is of a different scale and nature, with organised and well armed forces fighting.
Local government officials have reported columns of hundreds if not thousands of gunmen in tribal militia forces battling in remote and swampy bush.
South Sudan’s rebel turned official army has also been fighting in the region to crush a rebellion led by David Yau Yau, who comes from the Murle people, since 2010.
“When you go for fighting, killing must happen,” said Tut Mut, aged 42, who said he joined the raid to seize back children and cattle he claimed Murle fighters had stolen. “People have died on both sides.”
The clashes echo attacks in December 2011, when some 8,000 Lou Nuer marched south killing and looting in what they said were reprisals for earlier attacks and cattle raids by Murle fighters.
The UN later estimated more than 600 people were massacred, although local officials reported the figure to have been far higher.
But Murle youth leader Paul Kuakuak, speaking in the capital Juba, claims that the Lou Nuer militia is backed by the government, an accusation strongly denied by officials who say the army is supporting neither side.
“Those people who came and attacked Murle are not youth, they are militias that have mobilised by the state,” said Kuakuak, saying that only wounded Nuer have been taken to hospital.
Those wounded say they want the fighting to stop, yet at the same time few seem able to break a bitter cycle of revenge.
“If they don’t stop, neither will we,” said Puol, views echoed by his comrade Mut.
“If the Murle are protected and the authorities tell us to go back, we will still come back, until this is settled once and for all,” Mut said.
About The Author
