United Nations must ensure that South Sudan will not become a new Srebrenica

The more than 170,000 people who have found refuge in camps of the United Nations in South Sudan are in urgent need of better protection. On Wednesday, the Africa expert of the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) in Göttingen, Ulrich Delius, warned: “The recent attacks on UN camps clearly show that the peacekeepers are unable to protect civilians who try to find protection in the camps. The situation is dramatic. The United Nations must live up to their obligations and take action to ensure that South Sudan will not become a new Srebrenica.

The human rights activists recalled the failure of the UNMISS peacekeeping force in the town of Malakal in February 2016, when at least 25 people got killed in internal outbreaks of violence and in a grenade attack on the camp. Hundreds were injured. Mass panic arose when the peacekeepers failed to open the gates between different camp areas. Apparently, many of the peacekeepers had primarily tried to save their own lives, thus failing to protect the refugees in the camps – and some of them had waited for orders from their Ministry of Defence. “The problems are home-made. The safety regulations are keeping the peacekeepers from taking direct action. This is a known fact in South Sudan – and it encourages the unrestrained violence. 

The current situation in the camps is extremely dangerous: crimes, violence among the inhabitants, as well as xenophobic attacks from outside the camps. In the course of the fighting in Juba on July 11, 2016, a hospital in the area was severely damaged in an artillery attack on the UN base. Two Chinese peacekeepers were killed. Soldiers of the South Sudanese army had kept civilians from seeking shelter in the UN base. According to information by the UN, a total number of 13,000 civilians from Juba had sought refuge in one of the four different UN camps. There are also increasing numbers of refugees in other areas of South Sudan. UNMISS has established six refugee camps in the country. At the end of June, the total number of civilians who sought protection in one of these camps had reached 169,000.

Many of these refugees belong to the ethnic minorities. They are particularly vulnerable, and they often become victims of ethnically motivated attacks. Last week, even leading army officers and politicians who belong to the ethnic group of the Nuer, a minority group in Juba, had fled to the local UN base.

Header Photo: EU/ECHO/ Ludovico Gammarelli via Flickr