Cut our supply lines? We will still get what we want, says official
In July 2014, as the death toll from civil war in the world’s newest nation mounted, the European Union announced a tough new line against those it accused of failing to halt the fighting.
With a ceasefire in tatters and thousands dead, the EU said it would impose sanctions on military leaders it accused of atrocities and obstructing South Sudan’s peace process. The move was designed to strengthen a long-standing EU arms embargo.
Yet four days later, a Boeing 747 took off from Burgas on Bulgaria’s Black Sea Coast with 4,000 assault rifles and about three million rounds of ammunition on board, bound for Entebbe in Uganda. The consignment was one of several to make its way from EU member states to a conflict so deadly that it may have claimed as many lives as Syria’s civil war.
A four-year investigation into weapons used in the war has found that, despite the EU embargo, armaments from Bulgaria, Slovakia and Romania have found their way to government forces in South Sudan.
Conflict Armament Research’s investigation drew on analysis of captured weapons, official paperwork and flight plans to provide the most forensic insight yet into how arms were funnelled into the war.
While the British body’s 105-page report found no evidence that European suppliers or their governments knew the arms were intended for South Sudan, the research highlights the apparent weakness of international arms embargoes. It also gives a glimpse into the murky networks of arms suppliers and logistics firms whose actions recall popular television dramas such as
Mcmafia and The Night Manager. James Bevan, CAR’S executive director, said: “The result is a forensic picture of how prohibitions on arms transfers to the warring parties have failed.”
South Sudan was once viewed as a rare African story of hope after it emerged battered but triumphant from a decades-long rebellion fought to win the right to secede from Sudan.
But the jubilation that accompanied independence in 2011 lasted two brief years. In 2013, the movement that fought for South Sudan’s freedom violently disintegrated after Salva Kiir, the country’s once widely respected president, sacked his deputy, Riek Machar, who had once fought in battle alongside him.
Mr Kiir’s government had been the beneficiary of US tutelage and largesse, receiving $11billion (£8.6billion) in aid, but Washington was unable to stop the country it had nurtured to statehood descending into
ethnically tinged fratricide. As the conflict fragmented, turning from one war into a series of them, a third of the country’s 12 million people fled their homes. Nearly 400,000 people have been killed in five years of fighting.
The EU has long tried to slow the flow of arms into the country. Its embargo on arms sales to Sudan dates back to 1994. Yet CAR researchers found that, in reality, the restrictions have meant little.
Small arms and ammunition from EU states that were supposed to be exported to Uganda, South Sudan’s neighbour, instead ended up in the hands of President Kiir’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army and its allies. The route was not only used by small arms. Investigators also found that a network of Ugandan and US companies procured a US military jet and an Austrian-made spy plane, both of which entered service with the SPLA.
President Kiir’s forces, like the rebels they are fighting, stand accused of grave atrocities. UN experts found the SPLA and its allies killed 232 civilians, hanging many from trees and burning others alive.
South Sudan is trying to make peace, but few are optimistic it will succeed. As an arms embargo imposed on the country in July at the UN was being debated, some South Sudanese government officials seemed unfazed about having their supply lines cut.
“We will still get whatever we want,” one was quoted as saying.
Armaments from Bulgaria, Slovakia and Romania have found their way to forces in South Sudan