Mother had eyes gouged out, says UN report into South Sudan human rights abuses

THE latest report on human rights abuses during South Sudan’s civil war contains harrowing accounts of beheadings, mutilations, and gang rapes.

In the document, released by a United Nations commission, one South Sudanese man is said to have returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears.

The woman had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers. Seventeen soldiers then sexually assaulted the teenager, while the family’s father was beheaded.

The UN team has collected evidence of human rights abuses during the five-year conflict, including those in Pagak town, in the hopes of one day achieving justice.

Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, said: “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 imagined.”

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 said.

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.

Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, 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 stay at home face hunger.

An attempt at a ceasefire in December was violated within hours.

The United States then announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the UN Security Council to do the same.

South Sudan’s government said it has asked the UN commission for the names of the accused and will investigate. Opposition spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel said blame should be put “directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides”.

The names of the alleged perpetrators are being withheld for now to protect witnesses, the UN said.