Gang rapes and beheadings: UN reveals new South Sudan abuses
JUBA, South Sudan — The witness accounts remain appalling. One South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears.
She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didn’t succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The family’s father was beheaded.
The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudan’s five-year civil war, released on Friday by a United Nations commission, for the first time identifies more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, “who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes” and crimes against humanity.
“I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined,” Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, told The Associated Press.