U.N. inaction in South Sudan is unacceptable

It is difficult to stomach details of a vicious attack on aid workers in South Sudan in which government troops, apparently drunk and wild from drugs, repeatedly raped women, singled out Americans, shot to death a local journalist, subjected others to moc

It’s equally difficult to consider that United Nations peacekeepers stationed less than a mile away ignored text messages and social media posts from victims begging for help. An American beaten in the attack and released early made it to a U.N. base and notified officials, and still the abuse continued unchecked.

The Associated Press brought to light the July 11 rampage earlier this week. The attack is one of the worst visited upon aid workers in South Sudan’s threeyear civil war.

Embassies in the world’s newest country, including the U.S. embassy, also were alerted. A State Department spokeswoman said the embassy wasn’t able to help, but notified South Sudanese officials, which would seem an odd choice, given that government troops were conducting the rampage.

One aid worker reported that a South Sudanese solider pointed his AK-47 at her and instructed: “Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head.”

By the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 of the marauding soldiers.

The United Nations has thousands of troops stationed in the war-torn country, a hostile place of tricky ethnic conflicts, and their mission is to protect civilians during this period of violent upheaval.

It would seem the peacekeepers need, at the very least, a refresher on their mission. According to the U.N., the peacekeeper force deployed in this difficult country is there “to protect civilians under threat of physical violence, irrespective of the source of such violence, within its capacity and areas of deployment, with specific protection for women and children, including through the continued use of the Mission’s child protection and women’s protection advisers.”

But since the start of the civil unrest three years ago, when U.N. peacekeepers opened compounds to tens of thousands of civilians, the mission has been a difficult one. On the same day of the attack at the Terrain hotel compound, two peacekeepers were killed in battles that made a mockery of the weekend’s observance of the country’s five-year anniversary.

And violence within the U.N. compounds themselves has led some experts to warn of the potential for widespread massacres. Part of the problem appears to be the U.N. reliance on troops from neighboring countries that also deal with similar ethnic tensions.

The U.N. told The Associated Press it would conduct an investigation of the nightmarish assaults at the Terrain compound.

Perhaps a more serious review of the peacekeeping mission itself should also be in the works.

Part of the problem appears to be the U.N. reliance on troops from neighboring countries that also deal with similar ethnic tensions.