South Sudan lets fighters rape women as payment, the UN rights office
said Friday, describing the country as “one of the most horrendous
human rights situations in the world.”
“The assessment team
received information that the armed militias… who carry out attacks
together with the SPLA (South Sudanese army) commit violations under an
agreement of ‘do what you can and take what you can,'” the rights office
said in a new report.
“Most of the youth therefore also raided
cattle, stole personal property, raped and abducted women and girls as a
form of payment,” the report added.
In a report, the UN human rights office painted a harrowing picture
of civilians suspected of supporting the opposition, including children,
being burned alive, suffocated in shipping containers, hanged from
trees and cut to pieces.
UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al
Hussein meanwhile warned that brutal rapes had been used systematically
as “an instrument of terror and weapon of war.”
“This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world,” he said in a statement.
After
gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan erupted into civil
war in December 2013, setting off a cycle of retaliatory killings that
have split the poverty-stricken, landlocked country along ethnic lines.

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