UN reveals new South Sudan abuses

The witness accounts remain appalling.

One South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears.

She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didn’t succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The family’s father was beheaded.

The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudan’s five-year civil war, released on Friday by a United Nations commission, includes that horrific day in Pagak town and many others as the team collects evidence in the hopes of one day finding justice.

“I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have im- agined,” Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, told The Associated Press.

One South Sudanese woman told the commission that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother to stay alive, the report says.

The findings, with “sufficient evidence” against both President Salva Kiir’s government forces and rebels, identify more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, “who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes.”

The report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva next month. They also will be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared.

Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago.

Millions who remain at home face hunger.

The new UN report is an account of the gang-rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished East African nation in despair, while international frustration with the warring sides grows.

An attempt at a cease-fire in late December was violated within hours.