JUBA: South Sudan’s army personnel raped then torched girls alive inside their homes during a recent campaign marked by “new brutality and intensity”, a UN rights report said on Tuesday.

Rights investigators from the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) warned of “widespread human rights abuses” including gang-rape and torture in a report based on 115 victims and eyewitnesses from the northern battleground state of Unity, scene of some of the heaviest recent fighting in the 18-month-long civil war.

The military, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), launched a major offensive against rebel forces in April, with fierce fighting in Unity state’s northern Mayom district, once a key oil producing area.

“Survivors of these attacks reported that SPLA and allied militias from Mayom county carried out a campaign against the local population that killed civilians, looted and destroyed villages and displaced over 100,000 people,” the UN said.

“Some of the most disturbing allegations compiled by UNMISS human rights officers focused on the abduction and sexual abuse of women and girls, some of whom were reportedly burnt alive in their dwellings. “Investigators said they had collected at least nine separate incidents where “women and girls were burnt in tukuls (huts) after being gang-raped” as well as scores of cases of sexual violence, which included numerous cases of mothers raped in front of their children.

Others were simply “shot and killed” after being gang-raped, it added.

Photographs in the report show the burnt circles left after huts were set on fire, with all buildings apparently razed to the ground.

Rebel forces have also been accused of carrying out atrocities, including rape, killings and, like the government, the recruitment of armies of child soldiers.

There was no immediate response from the army, which has previously dismissed allegations of rights abuses. The UN said the report had been handed to government officials, who were yet to comment on its findings.

The UN said they had tried to visit the sites of the atrocities described by witnesses, but were “routinely denied access” by the army, but that they had corroborated reports from several sources.

UNMISS chief Ellen Margrethe Loej called for “unfettered access” to investigate the reported crimes.

“Revealing the truth of what happened offers the best hope for ensuring accountability for such terrible violence and ending the cycle of impunity that allows these abuses to continue,” she said.

The civil war began in December 2013 when President Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar of planning a coup, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that have split the poverty-stricken, landlocked country along ethnic lines.

The upsurge in fighting “has not only been marked by allegations of killing, rape, abduction, looting, arson and displacement, but by a new brutality and intensity,” the UN statement added.

“The scope and level of cruelty that has characterised the reports suggests a depth of antipathy that exceeds political differences.”.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2015

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