Firing off a damning attack against South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said she was “appalled by the apparent lack of concern about the risk of famine displayed by both leaders.”
The comments came after Pillay, accompanied by a special genocide envoy, held talks with the rival leaders, and a day after the UN made a desperate appeal for a one-month truce to avert a famine and humanitarian disaster.
“To the survivors of the genocide, we owe a pledge to take all possible measures within our power to protect populations from another Rwanda, there is no excuse for inaction,” UN envoy for the prevention of genocide Adama Dieng told reporters.
“It is clear that the conflict has taken a dangerous trajectory, and civilians are being deliberately targeted based on their ethnicity and perceived political affiliation,” he said in a joint news conference with Pillay.
The four-month-old civil war in South Sudan, which only won independence from Sudan in 2011, has already left thousands of people dead – and possibly tens of thousands – with at least 1.2 million people forced to flee their homes.
A ceasefire signed in January is in tatters, with tens of thousands of people sheltering in UN bases following a wave of ethnic massacres and other war crimes including rapes, the forced recruitment of children and killings in hospitals, churches and mosques.
“The deadly mix of recrimination, hate speech, and revenge killings that has developed relentlessly over the past four and a half months seems to be reaching boiling point,” Pillay said.
She said there were now some 9,000 children fighting in the country on both sides.
“The country’s leaders, instead of seizing their chance to steer their impoverished and war-battered young nation to stability and greater prosperity, have instead embarked on a personal power struggle that has brought their people to the verge of catastrophe,” she said.
“The prospect of widespread hunger and malnutrition being inflicted on hundreds of thousands of their people, because of their personal failure to resolve their differences peacefully, did not appear to concern them very much.”