South Sudan’s main opposition party has said that a peace agreement that ended a five-year civil war has collapsed, following the arrest of its leader, Riek Machar, a day earlier.
The party's deputy chairperson, Oyet Nathaniel Pierino, said in a statement on Thursday that the agreement "has been abrogated” and that Machar's arrest shows a lack of political goodwill to achieve peace and stability.
The United Nations warned on Monday that the country was teetering on the edge of a renewed civil war following fighting in the north between an armed group allied to Machar and government forces.
South Sudan’s five-year civil war, in which 400,000 people were killed, ended in a 2018 peace agreement that brought President Salva Kiir and Machar together in a unity government. Machar is one of the five vice presidents in the country.
Machar was “in confinement by the government”, and his life was “at risk,” opposition spokesperson Pal Mai Deng said in a video address to the media Wednesday night.
The head of the UN mission in South Sudan, Nicholas Haysom, said following reports of the detention of Machar all parties should “exercise restraint and uphold the Revitalized Peace Agreement.”
Clashes between forces allied to President Salva Kiir and his long-time rival, First Vice President Riek Machar, have left their 2018 power-sharing agreement increasingly fragile and threaten to plunge the country back into civil war.
Fears of civil war
Tensions have been increasing between Kiir and Machar’s parties and escalated in March when the White Army, an armed group loyal to Machar, overran an army base in the Upper Nile state and attacked a UN helicopter.
The government responded with air strikes, warning any civilian in the area where the army group was based to vacate or “face consequences.”
More than a dozen people have died since the air strikes started in mid-March, and the UN warned of a renewed civil war if the leaders do not put the country’s interests first.
“Tonight, the country’s leaders stand on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict or taking the country forward towards peace, recovery and democracy in the spirit of the consensus that was reached in 2018 when they signed and committed to implementing a Revitalized Peace Agreement,” Haysom said in a statement on Wednesday night.
An opposition official described 20 heavily armed vehicles arriving at Machar's home, where he was arrested alongside his wife.
The arrest follows clashes in Upper Nile State and detentions of Machar-aligned officials.
