Rampaging South Sudan troops raped foreigners, killed local

South Sudan has softened its rejection of a regional protection force a day after the U.N. Security Council voted to deploy the 4,000 additional peacekeepers to help restore calm.

The UN mission known as UNMISS has come under criticism for failing to protect civilians, with reports of women and girls being sexually assaulted near a UN compound in Juba.

“The government is seeking more engagement with the worldwide community in order to get the details of the plan”, the president’s spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, said in a text message.

UNHCR said its $609 million (546 million euros) response plan for South Sudan is only 20-percent funded.

While one side regards the additional troops as a guarantee of peace and security, the other side considers it a violation of the country’s sovereignty.

The failure of United Nations peacekeepers to act on their core mandate of guaranteeing non-combatants’ safety was corroborated in the HRW report, which said that the “peacekeepers did not venture out of the bases to protect civilians under imminent threat”.

“But South Sudanese people living outside the camps have take a very different view”.

“The transitional government has not met to declare its final position”.

The proposed resolution threatens to impose an arms embargo if the government blocks deployment of the regional force.

It was one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in South Sudan’s three-year civil war.

“We need to be engaged in a discourse and exchange ideas on what is the best way forward, rather than be presented with a fait accompli from outsiders”, Kiir said in the capital Juba.

Despite a peace agreement signed almost a year ago by the government and the rebels, fighting has continued and the country’s crisis has worsened.

The HRW report said numerous attacks targeted civilians belonging to Machar’s Nuer ethnic group.

President Salva Kiir formed a transitional government with ex-rebel leader Riek Machar in April after tens of thousands of people were killed in fighting and over 2 million people were displaced since late 2013.