Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I have just returned from South Sudan a few days ago. I've had the chance to spend three weeks in the field interviewing people with disabilities and elderly people in IDP locations located in Unity state, but also in Malakal and in Juba. This was my sixth trip to South Sudan since I began my work with Human Rights Watch early in 2016. As you probably know, we have been documenting the conflict and the human rights violations that have been taking place in the country since the beginning of the war in December 2013.
As you know, this began as a political conflict between President Kiir, and then vice-president Riek Machar, and quickly escalated to an ethnic conflict with fighting moving north to the Greater Upper Nile region, which used to comprise the former states of Upper Nile, Jonglei, and Unity. What we saw in 2014 was extreme violence on the part of both perpetrators. You clearly had patterns of conventional warfare, with towns being taken over by soldiers and then by opposition fighters, and depending on who would be in control of those towns you would find various ethnicities being targeted as a result. That led to the displacement of tens of thousands of people to POC sites, protection of civilian sites, that are found in UN-protected bases.
In the case of Malakal, for instance, a town that has changed hands a good dozen times, you would see various influxes of people depending on who was in charge. If you had Dinka soldiers controlling the town, you would see mainly Shilluk and Nuer people fleeing to the POC sites, and the reverse was true when the town was taken over by the opposition.
In 2015, we documented horrific offences in the former state of Unity, which used to be controlled in large part by the opposition. Riek Machar, the IO leader, the opposition leader, comes from the town called Leer, which is in central Unity state, and that county is now one of the famine-afflicted counties in South Sudan. We have documented horrible cases of abuses against civilians by soldiers and government-allied militias in 2015, horrible scorched earth campaigns, with tanks and tribal militias being used to steal cattle from people, to destroy villages, destroy livelihoods in a very systematic manner, forcing the displacement of tens of thousands of people, who were then left without livelihoods. The famine that we see today is a direct result of those operations that took place in 2015, and which led to few consequences against commanders and the people responsible for these operations in the first place.
Following this horrific offensive, a peace agreement was signed, as you probably know, in August 2015. There was a power-sharing agreement, which was coupled with accountability measures, including the proposed establishment of a hybrid court that would be responsible for investigating and trying the crimes that have been committed in this conflict by the two parties. Unfortunately, as we have documented later on, the provisions of the peace agreement actually provided an incentive for new groups to appear in the Equatoria and in the western parts of the country, claiming an affiliation to the opposition, which then brought upon those regions counter-insurgencies by the government and an expansion of the human rights abuses throughout the country.
In 2016, I had the opportunity to travel to places like Yambio, and Wau and Yei, and see how the government has been waging extremely abusive counter-insurgencies in those areas, targeting youth, imprisoning them for long periods of time, torturing them in trying to obtain information about the whereabouts of the rebels, going on those road-cleaning operations around towns, destroying villages, forcing the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians who we now see crossing into Uganda at a horrendous daily rate of about 4,000 a day during a certain period.
There have been lots of cases of rapes, lots of cases of abductions, lots of cases of enforced disappearances by military and state actors. This expansion of the conflicts has been our focus since last year, and clearly this demonstrates not only that the peace agreement has failed to put human rights violations to an end, but that both parties, the opposition and the government, are still very much intent on abusing civilians as part of their strategy to win this war.
The international community has unfortunately failed at imposing an arms embargo and other punitive measures that would have sent the right signal to the government of South Sudan and to the opposition that those abuses are unacceptable. Unfortunately as a result of this failure, as you probably know, in December of last year, an attempt at passing a resolution imposing an arms embargo failed to gather enough votes, and that was seen as a clear victory by the Government of South Sudan and has emboldened perpetrators.
Now that the famine has been declared, you still have attacks on villages in Mayendit and Leer, which are the two counties that have been affected, or where the famine has been declared. I had the chance to meet with a number of civilians who fled in recent weeks from their villages. Those are people who have been fleeing their homes twice, or thrice, over the past couple of years, people who have had to walk through swamps to get to safety, people who are facing a horrendous food security situation, but on top of that are forced to do that under the bullets and with the constant threat of being either raped or killed, or seeing their children abducted by army groups.
The cynicism with which the government has responded to the famine declaration, by declaring that it would impose a $10,000 U.S. fee on humanitarians, the fact that it has continued to obstruct humanitarian access to those two famine-afflicted counties in central Unity, and the fact that its forces have continued to attack civilians and civilian goods, clearly demonstrate that in the case of South Sudan we are in the presence of a government that has repeatedly shown its lack of respect for fundamental human rights. The attitude with which the international community has been engaging and continuing to engage with the government of South Sudan—the first vice-president was recently in Germany at the Munich security forum discussing with statesmen as though he were a legitimate and democratically elected and human rights abiding—
I'm sorry. There's a light problem, apparently. Can you still see me?