South Sudan minister accuses officer who lost governorship vote last year of orchestrating carnage in Jonglei region. A cabinet minister has accused a renegade militia in Southern Sudan’s Jonglei oil state of killing at least 211 people, doubling earlier estimates of the death count.
Making the announcement on Tuesday in Juba, the capital of south Sudan, James Kok Ruea, the humanitarian affairs and disaster management minister, called the killings a “massacre”.
Renewed violence has sparked concerns for the security of the underdeveloped south where voters last month overwhelmingly voted to declare independence from the north in a referendum.
Ruea said 201 southern civilians and security forces died during the attack in Jonglei state – where French oil group Total leads a consortium controlling a largely unexplored oil concession – and that 10 died later in the hospital.
He said nearly 160 of the dead were civilians, including children, the elderly and the internally displaced.
“They were chased into the river. I was the one who put them into a mass grave,” an emotional sounding Ruea told The Associated Press news agency.
Pagan Amum, secretary-general of the south’s ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), repeated accusations that the north was trying to destabilise the south by arming militias – but stopped short of directly implicating northern government figures.
“It was a massacre of our people and it is really very painful,” he said. “We are a society that is traumatised … Guns are in a lot of hands.”
South Sudan’s army said forces loyal to George Athor, a renegade army officer who launched a revolt after losing in last year’s elections, carried out attacks in Jonglei last week. More