In 2015, as a civil warfare was raging in South Sudan, the United Nations Safety Council imposed the primary set of sanctions on the nation, together with asset freezes and journey bans on varied senior officers. Three years later, after a ceasefire settlement was repeatedly violated, the UNSC mustered the votes to impose a full arms embargo. Fragile peace ultimately settled in, however the embargo was saved in place and was prolonged yearly.
The evaluation of the embargo is now developing on Could 29 and there’s a push from African members of the UNSC – Sierra Leone, Somalia and Algeria – to raise it. On March 18, the African Union Peace and Safety Council (AUPSC) publicly known as for this measure to finish.
However lifting the embargo on South Sudan at this second can be a mistake. Violence has come again to plague the nation, killing a minimum of 180 individuals between March and mid-April, amid deepening divisions between President Salva Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar, who has been positioned underneath home arrest.
Permitting extra weapons to enter the nation would solely escalate the dire state of affairs. This might not be within the curiosity of neighbouring international locations and the African Union as a complete.
Underneath the AU’s growth plan, Agenda 2063, the continent set itself an formidable objective of “Silencing the Weapons” by 2020, later prolonged to 2030. With this, the AU desires to “finish all wars and violent conflicts and promote dialogue-based mechanisms for battle prevention and determination”.
But, the AUPSC’s name for lifting the embargo on South Sudan doesn’t fall in keeping with these targets. The justification for this stance is that free entry to extra weapons can allow the unification of presidency and opposition forces and reform the safety sector.
However this logic ignores the rising fractures in South Sudan amid the renewed tensions between Kiir and Machar. Putting extra weapons within the arms of fighters concerned in critical human rights violations and crimes underneath worldwide regulation would solely make the state of affairs worse.
South Sudan’s safety and defence forces have attacked the very individuals they’re tasked to guard: Civilians. The South Sudanese military, Nationwide Safety Service and armed opposition forces have been implicated in warfare crimes and human rights violations for effectively greater than a decade, together with by the AU’s Fee of Inquiry on South Sudan and the UN Fee on Human Rights in South Sudan.
Certainly, across the time the AUPSC known as for the lifting of the arms embargo, South Sudan’s authorities reportedly used improvised incendiary weapons in aerial assaults, killing a minimum of 58 individuals and injuring others, together with kids.
To make sure, the existence of the arms embargo is just not sufficient – its enforcement is essential. That’s already faltering after in early March, Uganda sent troops and navy gear to South Sudan with out offering notification or receiving particular exemption from the UNSC Sanctions Committee. This can be a clear violation of the embargo.
South Sudan’s Mi-24 helicopters additionally appear to be on the transfer, regardless of the federal government’s fleet reportedly being non-functional and grounded because the arms embargo was imposed in 2018. This means spare elements have been sourced in violation of the embargo.
On Could 4, Medical doctors With out Borders, recognized by its French initials MSF, reported that two helicopter gunships had bombed its medical facility in Outdated Fangak the day earlier than and fired on the city, killing seven and injuring 20 others. Deliberate assaults on a medical facility performing its humanitarian operate violate worldwide humanitarian regulation and would represent a warfare crime. That is one more indication of why the UNSC should renew the arms embargo and strengthen its enforcement.
If correctly carried out and enforced, a renewed UNSC arms embargo wouldn’t hinder safety sector reform. As a substitute, it could block the disorderly and destabilising accumulation of arms in South Sudan, which is spurring the present battle and contributing to violations towards civilians.
If the AU is critical about silencing the weapons, it ought to again the strict controls prohibiting arms transfers to South Sudan, and the African states within the UNSC ought to vote to resume the arms embargo.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.