UN to ‘act immediately’ if South Sudan doesn’t sign deal

South Sudan’s rebel leader, Riek Machar, a former vice president, signed the deal last week.

In a letter obtained by VOA’s South Sudan In Focus program, the East African bloc IGAD says the agreement will be signed Wednesday in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has agreed to sign a peace deal to end a brutal 20-month civil war, his spokesman said Tuesday. The Security Council must act quickly.

The Kiir government objects to power-sharing provisions, calls to demilitarize Juba, and seeing foreigners in charge of a commission that would monitor implementation of the deal.

Current council president and Nigerian Ambassador Joy Ogwu adds in her national capacity that “we all believe that an arms embargo would go a long way in eliminating the situation” on the ground.

The 15-member Security Council is discussing a US-drafted resolution that would implement an arms embargo on South Sudan from September 6 if Kiir doesn’t sign the peace deal or if it is not implemented by both parties.

South Sudan’s civil war erupted in December 2013, when Kiir accused Machar of planning a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that has split the country along ethnic lines.

But Kiir only initialed part of the text, and his government slammed the accord as a sellout – saying it needed more time for consultations.

Under a so-called “scorched earth policy” government-allied forces razed entire villages, sometimes with people inside their homes, raped women and abducted children, the experts said. Doctors Without Borders said two of its staff members, Gawar Top Puoy and James Gatluak Gatpieny, were killed in Leer county of Unity state last week.

Meanwhile, a UN panel of experts said that a major Chinese state-owned arms supplier sold more than $20m of weapons to South Sudan’s government past year, several months into the country’s deadly internal conflict.

An estimated 1.9 million people have been displaced, thousands of refugees have fled to neighbouring countries, and massive looting and burning by both government and opposition forces has left towns and rural areas destroyed and abandoned. It had none before then. It also said “the intensity and brutality of the violence” since April has been the worst in an “exceedingly violent conflict”.