UN peacekeepers failed to protect civilians before South Sudan massacre, Amnesty says

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United Nations peacekeepers and South Sudanese authorities failed to take adequate action despite warnings weeks before insurgents raided a village and killed more than 200 people…

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — United Nations peacekeepers and South Sudanese authorities failed to take adequate action despite warnings weeks before insurgents raided a village and killed more than 200 people earlier this year, Amnesty International said in a report released Thursday.

The rights group said that the peacekeeping mission, known by the acronym UNMISS, knew that an attack on Abiemnom, a remote area near the border with Sudan, was likely but failed to reinforce the roughly three dozen peacekeepers based there until after it occurred.

Between 1,000 and 1,500 armed men from neighboring Mayom County carried out the March 1 attack, shooting residents, burning homes and looting part of the hospital, Amnesty said.

The death toll was at least 213, according to authorities, including 130 town residents, 76 security personnel and seven foreign nationals.

“Both the government and UNMISS had sufficient information and time to take more effective preventive action. Their failure to take stronger action cost lives,” said Tigere Chagutah, an Amnesty regional director.

UNMISS spokesperson Priyanka Chowdhury said in a statement that the mission did its best with limited resources to provide protection and medical care to the roughly 2,500 people who sheltered at a protected area established in anticipation of the attack.

Facing budget cuts and reduced personnel, she said that the mission “concentrated its available capacity on immediate protection of civilians seeking refuge within our base rather than dispersing limited forces across tasks they could not safely sustain simultaneously.”

The March assault came amid renewed fighting between government forces and an array of opposition groups, undermining a 2018 agreement that ended five years of civil war. The area has experienced cycles of retaliatory violence linked to land access and cattle raiding.

Amnesty said that the March attack may have been triggered by unresolved killings of several young men from neighboring Mayom County in…

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