JUBA – South Sudan’s protest group and civil rights movement, the People’s Coalition for Civil Action (PCCA), has accused main signatories of the revitalized peace agreement of weaponizing the 2018 peace deal as a tool of ethnic division, resulting in the ongoing sub-national violence in most parts of South Sudan.
Fighting has seen increase in most parts of the country since the signing of the revitalized peace agreement in 2018. Violence between Jonglei state cattle herders and Eastern Equatoria state farmers is one of the most recent of the escalating violence across the country.
In a statement extended to Sudans Post on Wednesday, the PCCA said the revitalized peace agreement has been weaponized by the leaders to perpetuate ethnic strife and that it has become an obstacle to achieving permanent peace in the world’s youngest country.
“The Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R ARCSS) has been instrumentalized and weaponized as a tool of ethnic divisions, a looting scheme, and consolidation of a violent tyranny,” the PCCA statement reads in part.
“It has become an obstacle to the pursuit of peace and an impediment to democratic transition in South Sudan,” the statement added.
The statement pointed to ongoing violence between different ethnic groups and communities in South Sudan which the statement said is a sponsored and sanctioned by the state and armed groups.
“A complex web of devastating violence continues unabated in South Sudan, claiming thousands of lives, displacing, and impoverishing citizens across the country. Much of the violence happening in the communities is sponsored and sanctioned by the state and armed opposition groups,” the statement said.
“It is indisputable that forces affiliated with both President Salva Kiir Mayardit and the First Vice President, Dr. Riek Machar Teny, perpetuate much of the violence on civilians, contrary to their commitments to permanent ceasefire,” the statement added.
It also says that “Other armed groups, which are not signatories to the R-ARCSS, have also been responsible for incidents of violence against civilians.
“The country is devastatingly at war through proxy ethnic militias and the people of South Sudan are lied to that there is peace being guarded and implemented.”
