South Sudan’s opposition leader flees country

The U.N. mission there, known as MONUSCO, was alerted to his presence and contacted the Congolese government.

Machar’s flight from South Sudan could give him more visibility and increase pressure on the worldwide community to send in the regional peacekeepers.

However, renewed fighting erupted in July, killing hundreds of people and forcing Machar’s troops out of Juba.

On Thursday last week, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in DRC confirmed they evacuated Dr Machar from eastern Congo and placed him under the care of the Congolese authorities.

In his absence, Machar last month was replaced as first vice president after a disputed change of leadership in his party. But the government has not accepted the force, saying that such a deployment would be a violation of South Sudan’s sovereignty without President Kiir’s approval.

Machar is now under the protection of the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to SPLM-IO sources.

Earlier in August, the USA requested that the United Nations send 4,000 additional troops to the country after a United Nations report revealed that its peacekeepers has contributed to a february massacre of internally displaced persons in the south of the country. Machar says he will return to Juba only after a regional peacekeeping force secures the capital.

South Sudan, the youngest country in the world is witnessing horrific abuses of its youngest citizens. The Associated Press this week reported that South Sudanese troops went on a almost four-hour rampage through the compound in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in the country’s three-year civil war.

Since the July fighting, Kiir has sacked Machar from his post and appointed Taban Deng Gai, a former opposition negotiator who broke ranks with Machar, as vice president. “The systematic use of rape, sexual exploitation and abduction as a weapon of war in South Sudan must cease, together with the impunity of all perpetrators”, he added.

August 2016: The opposition figure flees the country. The region had little violence during the country’s civil war, which began in December 2013.

Both sides in South Sudan’s conflict have repeatedly promised to address allegations of child recruitment, but they continue such recruitment efforts.

The ethnically charged war has forced more than one in five of South Sudan’s 11 million people to flee their homes and around half of the country’s children do not attend school.