Dec. 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –
At least 60 people have been killed, many of them women and children, in a series of new clashes in recent days between communities in the Pibor Administrative Area and Jonglei state in northern South Sudan, a area affected by an increase in this type of incident in recent months.
According to a spokesman for the regional Parliament, a spokesman for the regional Parliament has told the DPA agency, another twenty people have been injured since Sunday, when hundreds of fighters from a Jonglei youth militia attacked the area.
Pibor’s Information Minister, Abraham Kelang Jiji, has indicated that the clashes, which he has called “barbaric”, broke out in the village of Lanam and later spread to other towns in Lekuangole county, according to the South Sudanese station Eye. Radio.
The aforementioned spokesman for the regional Parliament has detailed that several villages near Pibor, some 350 kilometers northeast of the capital, Juba, have been looted and burned by armed men in the context of attacks that are still active.
Last week the United Nations expressed its “deep concern” over calls for the mobilization of members of the Nuer community in Greater Jonglei and warned that it could lead to “massive attacks” against the population in this area of South Sudan.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) said in a statement that “these mobilizations have the potential to unleash violent attacks that seriously impact civil society” and stated that “any upsurge in the conflict would undermine progress towards peace achieved by contacts between leaders of Jonglei State and Greater Pibor Administrative Area (GPAA)”.
South Sudan has a unity government that began after the materialization of the 2018 peace agreement between the president, Salva Kiir, and the rebel leader Riek Machar, which led to the latter returning to the position of first vice president from the African country.
Despite the decrease in violence due to the political conflict, the country has registered an increase in inter-community confrontations, mainly motivated by the theft of cattle and disputes between herders and farmers in the most fertile areas of the country, especially due to the increase in desertification and displacement of populations.