Amnesty: UNMISS failed to act before South Sudan attack killed at least 213

Detailed summary

Amnesty International said UNMISS and South Sudanese authorities failed to act adequately on warnings before the Abiemnom attack. The alleged failure has intensified demands for public investigations into the killings and peacekeeping response.

United Nations peacekeepers and South Sudanese authorities failed to take adequate preventive action despite receiving warnings weeks before armed men attacked a village and killed more than 200 people earlier this year, Amnesty International said in a report released on Thursday.

The rights group said the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, known as UNMISS, knew an attack on Abiemnom, a remote area near the Sudan border, was likely. However, it did not reinforce the roughly three dozen peacekeepers stationed there until after the assault.

Between 1,000 and 1,500 armed men from neighbouring Mayom County attacked Abiemnom on March 1, shooting residents, setting homes on fire and looting part of the hospital, Amnesty said. Authorities put the death toll at at least 213, 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,” Amnesty regional director Tigere Chagutah said.

UNMISS spokesperson Priyanka Chowdhury said the mission did its best with limited resources to protect and provide medical care to about 2,500 people who took shelter in a protected area set up in anticipation of the attack.

Amid budget cuts and reduced personnel, 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”, she said.

The attack took place amid renewed fighting between government forces and several opposition groups, weakening a 2018 agreement that ended five years of civil war. The area has seen repeated retaliatory violence linked to access to land and cattle raiding. Amnesty said the March assault may have been triggered by unresolved killings of several young men from Mayom County in Abiemnom.

Amnesty's investigation was based on interviews with 82…

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