Top military man resigns, accuses Salva Kiir of ordering killings

JUBA

A third top South Sudanese military official has resigned, accusing President Salva Kiir’s regime of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, according to a letter seen by AFP.

Brig Henry Oyay Nyago, advocate-general and director of military justice, was the latest military official to pen a damning quit letter accusing the government of atrocities in the three-year civil war.

“Your regime committed sundry war crimes...genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing,” he wrote, accusing Kiir of ordering killing of civilians not belonging to his ethnic Dinka group, and overlooking crimes committed by the Dinka in various investigations.

“I cannot continue to be silent or taciturn when you are slaughtering innocent people of South Sudan,” Nyago wrote in the letter to Kiir, which detailed events in which civilians were ordered killed, or atrocities were overlooked.

In another letter, the head of the military court, Col Khalid Ono Loki resigned, accusing the army chief of extra-judicial arrests of citizens based on ethnicity.

Addressed to army chief Paul Malong Awan, the letter decried “unspecified and unstipulated arrests and detentions fluctuating from months to years without investigation and scrutiny...on fabricated cases against individuals of non-Dinka ethnicity.”

DISMISSED RULINGS

Loki also accused Awan of dismissing rulings against members of his own tribe accused of murder, rape and theft.

“You have avoided the courts, tried officers on your own, whilst crafting and forming alien ones paradoxical to the established courts which are in conformity with the law,” Loki wrote.

“Your unqualified clique of friends and relatives who dangerously arrest and sentence as you so wish and command have never attended any law school.”

Lt Gen Thomas Cirillo Swaka, deputy chief of general staff, resigned last week accusing Kiir and the Dinka of ethnic cleansing.

While the army could not be reached for comment on the latest resignations, a statement last week said Swaka had quit because he was corrupt and had fled to evade arrest.
The labour minister resigned on Friday and declared allegiance to rebel leader Riek Machar. The exodus comes amid mounting alarm over a civil war which has devastated the world’s youngest nation over the past three years.

War broke out in in 2013, just two years after independence, when Kiir accused his former deputy Machar of plotting a coup.

An August 2015 peace deal was left in tatters when fighting broke out in Juba in July.

Violence — initially between Dinka supporters of Kiir and Nuer backers of Machar — has spread to other parts of the country, engulfing other ethnic groups.
The UN has warned of potential genocide and ethnic cleansing.

A confidential UN report cites UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as saying the war had reached catastrophic proportions for civilians.