South Sudan May Be Allowing Fighters to Commit Rape As Form of Payment

A harrowing UN report, released March 11, reveals horrific government-operated attacks against civilians in South Sudan, the youngest country in the world. The report stated that suspected opposition groups, including children and the disabled, are "being burned alive, suffocated in containers, shot, hanged from trees, or cut to pieces" by government or government allied forces.

Sources also indicate that government allied groups are allowing rape as a form of payment in leiu of wages. In a press release published on Friday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra`ad Al Hussein said,

“The scale and types of sexual violence - primarily by Government SPLA forces and affiliated militia – are described in searing, devastating detail, as is the almost casual, yet calculated, attitude of those slaughtering civilians and destroying property and livelihoods ... However, the quantity of rapes and gang-rapes described in the report must only be a snapshot of the real total. This is one of the most horrendous human rights situations in the world, with massive use of rape as an instrument of terror and weapon of war -- yet it has been more or less off the international radar.”

As the case in many civil wars, children have borne the worst of the violence, being raped, maimed, killed, or recruited for combat. South Sudan’s civil war began in 2013 and has only digressed into acts of genocide. 

#SouthSudan: killing, rape, destruction continued unabated in 2015. Full @UNHumanRights report is here: https://t.co/DDuqDq32XX

— United Nations (@UN) March 11, 2016

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