South Sudan: soldiers allowed to rape civilians in civil war, claims UN report

Children and the disabled in South Sudan have been burned alive and pro-government militia allowed to rape women as a form of payment, a new UN report has said. The investigation accused all sides in the country's civil war of targeting civilians for murder and rape but said the army and government-allied forces were most to blame for what it described as "one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world". 

 

"The report contains harrowing accounts of civilians suspected of supporting the opposition, including children and the disabled, killed by being burned alive, suffocated in containers, shot, hanged from trees or cut to pieces," the UN human rights office said in a statement on Friday.

More than 1,300 rape cases were recorded in just one of South Sudan's states - the oil-rich Unity state - over a five-month period last year, the report said.

One woman told the UN investigators she had been stripped naked, raped by five soldiers in front of her children on the roadside, then raped again by more men in the bushes only to return and find her children missing.

"Credible sources indicate groups allied to the government are being allowed to rape women in lieu of wages but opposition groups and criminal gangs have also been preying on women and girls," the UN said.

The prevalence of rape "suggests its use in the conflict has become an acceptable practice by (government) SPLA soldiers and affiliated armed militias," it added. 

South Sudan presidential spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, denied that government forces and allied groups had committed atrocities.

"As a responsible government we take every report seriously, when the report is about human rights violations. However, our forces are under strict command to observe human rights and to protect civilians," he told Al Jazeera.

"If there are individuals, soldiers, that comes to violate human rights, then they are doing it at their own peril because the government does not authorise anybody to kill civilians.

"We tell them .. to minimise civilian casualties when they are actually forced to fight." 

The UN report is the work of an assessment team deployed to South Sudan between October and January.