Thousands still missing in South Sudan: Rights group

JUBA, South Sudan/ANKARA, Turkey

The US-based Human Rights Watch on Friday called on South Sudan to investigate the fate and whereabouts of thousands of victims of enforced disappearances and those still missing from years of civil war in the country.

“Since the conflict broke out in December 2013, the United Nations and other organizations including Human Rights Watch have documented major human rights violations including attacks on civilians and targeted killings, abductions, and detentions by the parties to the conflict,” the rights group said in a report that came ahead of the Aug. 30 International Day of the Disappeared.

“People have vanished in South Sudan, and are presumed detained or dead,” said Jehanne Henry, East Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

“The government needs to acknowledge that people are still missing and take concrete steps to investigate and hold those responsible to account,” Henry added.

The report referred to The Ones We Lost, a local initiative launched in 2014 which documented some “280 names of missing people since December 2013, some of whom were abducted or detained by security forces and meet the definition of enforced disappearance.”

“The International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 2014 that over 4,000 people were still missing since the war started and their fate or whereabouts remained unknown,” the report noted.

The authorities have not started to “address Sudanese government abuses during the South’s long war for independence, which ended in 2005,” it said.

The rights group urged the South Sudanese government to take immediate, concrete steps by ratifying the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and end the practices of unlawful and secret detentions by its security forces.

“They should also set up the transitional justice bodies provided for in the 2015 and 2018 peace agreements,” it added.

Meanwhile, the South Sudan’s Information Minister Michael Makuei Lueth dismissed the report.

“These are mere stories that are being concocted by people who need to secure or to grantee their own livelihood, this is not correct,” Lueth told Anadolu Agency over the phone.

He called on the rights group to come up with areas where it said the people got disappear.

“They should differentiate between the transitional government and the current revitalized government,” he said.