SPLM-IO demands Machar’s ‘unconditional’ release from Juba detention  

JUBA – South Sudan’s main armed opposition group, SPLM-IO, is asking the regional bloc, IGAD, which mediated the revitalized peace agreement, to release its chairman Dr. Riek Machar Teny who has been under forced regional confinement since a collapse of a 2015 peace agreement in 2016.

Following the renewal of conflict in 2016, Machar fled to Congo, then to Sudan and eventually ended up under regional detention in South Africa. He was briefly released to participate in a revitalization forum for the dead 2015 peace agreement which at the end brought about the revitalized peace agreement.

After that, Machar was returned to detention, but this time, Juba and first in Khartoum.

The SPLM-IO, along with some regional countries including Sudan and Ethiopia, as well as the US, UK and Norway, has at several occasions called for his release, which has not yet been answered by the region.

In a communiqué issued on December over the weekend following the 5-day SPLM-IO National Conference in Juba, the main armed opposition group demanded “that IGAD officially releases Dr. Riek Machar, the first vice president.”

Despite assertion by the IGAD special envoy to South Sudan, Ismail Wais, that Machar was a ‘free man,” at some point in August, the call by the SPLM-IO clears the air that the SPLM-IO leader has indeed confined to Juba since he returned in early 2020.

South Sudan information minister, Michael Makuei Lueth, recently denied that Machar has been under detention saying: “As to where these people got their information is up to them. He has not been restricted.”

“If he was under arrest or restricted, why should he be performing the official duties? These are stories concocted by sycophants that do not want peace for South Sudan.”