The president of South Sudan has arrested his vice president, according to a statement released by the vice president’s party on Thursday, threatening to plunge the oil-rich but deeply impoverished nation back into full-fledged civil war.
President Salva Kiir ordered the arrest of First Vice President Riek Machar on Wednesday night, the statement said. Machar’s bodyguards were disarmed and taken away, the statement added.
“Tonight, the country’s leaders stand on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict or taking the country forward toward peace, recovery and democracy,” said Nicholas Haysom, the special representative of the United Nations secretary general and head of the U.N. mission in South Sudan.
Several embassies, including those for the United States, Germany and Britain, have already begun closing or pulling out their employees, urging their citizens to leave while commercial flights are still operating. On Wednesday morning, before Machar’s arrest, gunfire was reported in several locations in the capital, Juba.
“We are concerned by reports South Sudan’s First Vice President Machar is under house arrest. We urge President Kiir to reverse this action & prevent further escalation,” the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs wrote on X.\
There was no immediate public comment from Kiir or other government or military officials.
Sudan’s previous civil war was characterized by extreme sexual violence, the widespread recruitment of child soldiers, famine and ethnic massacres. It ended with a 2018 peace deal that led to a unity government in which Kiir and Machar served together.
“It looks like President Kiir is continuing to escalate. … Some people in Juba worry that Kiir is trying to start an ethnic war,” said Alan Boswell, the International Crisis Group’s project director for the Horn of Africa. The two come from different pastoralist groups that have often clashed over land, politics and cattle: Kiir comes from the Dinka ethnic group, and Machar is a Nuer.
Earlier this month, more than two dozen members of the South Sudanese military, including an injured general, and a U.N. peacekeeper were killed when gunmen shot at a U.N. helicopter in Nasir, Upper Nile state, a stronghold of the opposition-aligned ethnic militant group known as the White Army. Last week, the South Sudanese army or its allies dropped incendiary bombs on Nasir, killing at least 21 people.
The latest developments suggested “a severe unraveling of the peace process — and a direct threat to millions of lives,” the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said in a statement Thursday.
Rivalry between Kiir and Machar plunged South Sudan into a five-year civil war in 2013. The violence triggered pockets of famine and was so widespread that around a third of the country’s residents were forced to flee their homes, many spilling into neighboring nations. On Thursday, the deputy chair of Machar’s party said that Machar’s arrest “effectively collapses” the 2018 peace deal, Reuters reported.
The war erupted two years after South Sudan won its independence from neighboring Sudan, following years of scorched-earth conflict. But the two nations remained inextricably linked: South Sudan kept most of the oil fields, but Sudan kept the pipeline infrastructure needed to export the crude. Last year, that pipeline burst.
“His government has faced a lot of challenges since the main export oil pipeline burst last year,” Boswell said. “After that happened, he did a full shake-up of his government.”
First, Boswell said, Kiir fired all his major security people. Then last month, he fired two of his vice presidents.
“Then he elevated his family money man into the most powerful position below Machar — a perceived indication of who he wanted to be his successor, which alienated the other elites in his government,” Boswell said. Benjamin Bol Mel Kuol, the man Kiir appointed, is under U.S. government sanctions for alleged corruption.
South Sudan was always one of the world’s most conflict-ridden countries, but money siphoned off from oil revenue helped lubricate the government. The civil war eventually ended in 2018, but not all of the armed groups signed the peace deal, and key parts of the agreement, such as the integration of Machar’s forces into the national army, were never implemented.
South Sudan was one of the world’s poorest nations when it was created, and after more than a decade of independence it has only 300 kilometers (186 miles) of paved roads in a nation the size of France. Over the past decade, it has been battered by two droughts, seven severe floods and covid-19, in addition to the civil war. It has also received an influx of about a million refugees and returnees from Sudan, which was plunged into civil war in 2023 after two of its rival generals turned on each other. Earlier this month, Kiir invited Ugandan soldiers armed with tanks and helicopters into South Sudan to support his forces.
Almost the entire Horn of Africa is either riven by civil war or on the brink of international conflict. Sudan’s civil war is two years old, and Sudanese generals are threatening retaliation against neighboring Chad for allowing a paramilitary force to operate from its territory.
Ethiopia, which borders South Sudan and Sudan, is battling two major insurgencies, and tensions are high with neighboring Eritrea — both countries are militarizing along their border. Somalia has been at war since 1991. Only the tiny nation of Djibouti — home to enormous military bases established by China and the U.S. — has an uneasy peace.
* Victoria Bisset contributed to this report
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