South Sudanese soldiers raped children, burnt people alive in their homes and hunted others for days in swamps in an increasingly brutal war the government had hoped to win with an emergency $850 million military budget, United Nations experts said.
A panel of experts who monitored the UN sanctions on South Sudan obtained a copy of the emergency budget for January to July 2014, but warned in a report made public on Tuesday that it did not mean South Sudan had acquired everything it wanted.
South Sudan was plunged into a civil war in December 2013 when a political crisis sparked fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebels allied with his former deputy, Riek Machar, the BBC reports.
The conflict has reopened ethnic fault lines that pit Kiir’s Dinka people against Machar’s ethnic Nuer people.
Kiir is expected to sign a peace deal on Wednesday to end the conflict. Machar signed the deal last week.
The UN experts found that a government offensive in oil-producing Unity State between April and July this year had been “intent on rendering communal life unviable and prohibiting any return to normalcy following the violence.”
“The intensity and brutality of violence aimed at civilians is hitherto unseen, in what has been so far — without a doubt — an incredibly violent conflict, where civilians have been targeted by all parties to the conflict,” the experts wrote in the interim report submitted to UN Security Council members.
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