UN panel accuses South Sudan officials of overseeing gang rapes

over 1 year ago

Greetings to my esteemed friends on the InformationWar platform and the entire hive blockchain. It's another day and time to share with you news from Africa and how the military in conflict prone areas are violating and abusing innocent citizens in Africa. Today, we'll be looking at organized gang rapes in South Sudan. It's your friend @faquan, saying hello from this part of the world.

Source

It's been 11 years since the civil violence broke out in South Sudan and it has been from one level of violations to the other. Many innocent citizens have been raped, tortured and killed by the military in their course to quell the conflict. These series of violations led to the setting up of a panel of inquiry in 2016 by the UN Commission for Human Rights.

The panel or committee is saddled with the responsibility to identify cases of human right violations in South Sudan. Several investigations have been carried out by the committee in collaboration with citizens who have been victims of violations, most especially those that have experienced rape and sexual violence.

From the investigations, the panel have discovered that most of the rape cases and abuses, which most led to death, were organized gang abuse and today have told the South Sudan government to investigate the government officials involved in organizing gang rapes in the country.

United Nations experts have called on authorities in South Sudan to investigate officials accused of overseeing systematic gang rapes, some of whose victims were girls as young as nine.

The Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said on Monday that it had reasonable grounds to believe a county commissioner in the northern oil-rich state of Unity orchestrated gang rapes at a military camp.

It should be noted that the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan have some evidences of the involvement of government officials in organized gang rapes in South Sudanese state of Unity.

The documented abuses also involved beheadings, rape victims forced to carry the severed heads, victims being burned alive and days of brutal sexual assaults, the UN experts said in a statement.

“Conflict-related rape and sexual violence in Unity State has become so systematic and is a direct result of impunity,” commission member Barney Afako said.

South Sudan Minister of information in response to the Commission for Human Rights report said, it's an effort to bring bad name to the Sudanese government and that all the informations documented are false.

According to him, the members of the commission come to South Sudan and seat in hotels, create reports in order to cash out from it and it's not a genuine report given to them.

I have one issue with the Minister of information and that's, the Commission for Human Rights have told the South Sudanese government to investigate the involvement of her officials in gang rapes and other abuses, which the government should do and not answer to undermine what the commission said.

I join the commission today to ask the South Sudanese government to investigate officials in the state of Unity who have been accused of sponsoring gang rapes to know if they're guilty or innocent.

Thanks!