Issue No. 82

UNMISS Renewed As Kiir's Offensive Continues

On 8 May, the UN Security Council voted to extend the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) for another year until 30 April 2026. The mission's extension comes amid a badly deteriorated political and security situation in South Sudan, with a fragile 'peace' barely holding and civilians under siege from the Salva Kiir government. UNMISS, which enjoys the most strongly worded mandate of any UN force to protect civilians, will maintain its personnel levels with a maximum number of 17,000 troops and a police contingent of 2,101. But the renewal of UNMISS should provide an opportunity for a genuine overhaul and recalibration rather than a business-as-usual approach.

Following another year of ratcheting tensions, Kiir's regime launched an offensive across parts of the Upper Nile, Western Equatoria, and Western Bahr el Ghazal states in late 2024. Wielding a mixture of ethnic militias and indiscriminate aerial bombardment, civilians and community forces have been targeted alike. Ostensibly meant to remove checkpoints that have bedevilled humanitarian aid delivery, the military offensive has been brutal-- and precipitated a severe crackdown within Juba against the remaining political opposition in recent weeks. But across the swathes of the country, many tens of thousands of people have been displaced amidst the government attacks, with entire villages having been razed. And with cholera ripping through the country already, the government's offensive, which essentially seeks to replace rival checkpoints with its own, has accentuated a rapidly escalating humanitarian emergency. Though the clashes in Nasir County in Upper Nile state have garnered particular attention due to Juba's dropping of incendiary barrel bombs, the government's offensive has triggered fresh bouts of fighting between communities elsewhere as well.

The offensive is further providing 'justification' for Kiir's government to abrogate any remaining elements of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS), which ended the 2013-2018 civil war. The agreement was essentially a surrender, and since then, the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) has steadily worked to undermine nearly all parts of the agreement, including security sector reform. For instance, rather than unifying forces under a single command, the South Sudan People's Defence Forces (SSPDF) remains a demoralised and unpaid coalition, while other rival armed movements have been bribed and cajoled into defecting to Kiir's government. Meanwhile, the prospects of repeatedly delayed genuine democratic elections in 2024– the first in South Sudan's tortured young history– were always remote, with Juba wielding the process for its own interests. The R-ARCSS 'peace deal' has instead principally served as a grim vehicle for the Kiir regime to consolidate its grip on power over several years. 

In March, amid targeted ethnic violence against the Nuer, the White Army, a coalition of community militias, overran a military base in Nasir town. Juba's response ratcheted up violence further, dropping incendiary barrel bombs indiscriminately on White Army fighters and civilians, inflicting horrific burns. The ruling SPLM further used the Nasir attack as a flimsy excuse to wrest power and positions away from the greatly diminished SPLM-In Opposition (SPLM-IO), as well as arrest swathes of opposition figures in Juba, whom it has wrongly accused of being answerable for the violence and Nuer militias. This included placing the First Vice President Riek Machar, leader of the SPLM-IO, under house arrest in March, though his position amongst many of these communities has been unpopular and distant for years. Instead, Machar's house arrest has been the culmination of years of gradual erosion of his position by the government, as well as his own blunders; his networks today are a shadow of their former selves. It is unlikely that Machar can pose a major threat to Juba unless the divided Nuer and others unify once again behind his position, which is an improbable prospect at this current juncture. 

Nevertheless, dozens of diplomats have travelled to Juba to plead with Salva Kiir and regime officials to release Machar and other senior SPLM-IO officials, but to no avail. Releasing the SPLM-IO leader, however, would do nothing to halt the government's campaign against its own civilians in Upper Nile and elsewhere. And hoping that R-ARCSS can somehow be resuscitated, or the fighting across the country calmed by Kiir's government releasing SPLM-IO leaders in custody, does not reflect the realities on the ground, nor the scale of the crisis. 

Further, the house arrest of Machar has distracted from the broader arrests of opposition figures in Juba as Kiir looks to further consolidate his grip amid succession planning. The speed and scale of Kiir's infamous late-night reshuffles have been turbocharged this year. Many of these appointments have also been in contravention of R-ARCSS, which assigns key ministries and posts to the SPLM-IO. Just this week, Kiir appointed a health minister from a splinter faction of the SPLM-IO to fill the docket, which has lain empty since February despite the cholera outbreak. Many of the changes appear related to 78-year-old Kiir's ailing health as he lays the groundwork for newly appointed Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel to succeed him. An unpopular, US-sanctioned figure with little experience or support base, there remains significant opposition within the SPLM to Bol Mel. But an economic crunch-- partially driven by the Sudan war's interruptions to Juba's oil-based patronage-- has further complicated these machinations.

No one doubts the absolute necessity for a mechanism to protect civilians in South Sudan, but the mission has strayed from its original purpose. A return to full-blown conflict between Kiir and Machar-aligned forces is far less likely than in 2013, with the SPLM-IO a greatly diminished coalition of forces today. Instead, the present danger to civilians, and particularly Nuer communities, comes from the government offensive itself. Here, UNMISS needs to step up and quickly. UNMISS's shuttering of its Protection of Civilian (PoC) sites in 2020 to transform them into government-run displacement camps was a short-sighted measure. Among other issues, it was argued that the UN was devoting too many resources to protect too few people and that these camps had become highly dependent on international aid. Yet since then, UNMISS has also failed to protect civilians from government troops in Upper Nile and Unity states, as it is continuing to do so in the recent offensives in Upper Nile, Western Bahr el Ghazal and Western Equatoria, among other areas. Its mandate is to protect civilians by any means necessary, including engaging forcefully with government forces, but it has repeatedly avoided this primary responsibility.

Instead, in March, several UN peacekeepers were killed attempting to evacuate government soldiers and a general when their helicopter came under fire in Nasir in Upper Nile. At the time, UNMISS head Nicholas Haysom referred to the attack as "utterly abhorrent and may constitute a war crime." But UNMISS peacekeepers have not been similarly deployed to defend civilians in Nasir County against the government's incendiary bombs. And Nasir is not the only area that is facing bombardment and renewed risk of ground invasions, including Longochuk, Akobo, and Tambura. All these areas require support and access to UNMISS operating bases to protect civilians from their own government, among other threats. 

Another extension should not be read as a simple vote of confidence in the mission to continue as it has, but to re-evaluate and recommit to its founding principles. Clearly, UNMISS cannot solve the vast array of problems in South Sudan, but it can begin by diagnosing the problem. UNMISS is aware that Kiir's regime is not a willing partner in peace but an impediment, and the blame for the current violence should be laid squarely at its door. But it is time for it to act as such, and for the international community to look beyond the confines of South Sudanese politics through the binary lens of Kiir vs. Machar. The coming months are certain to spell more conflict and more suffering for those in the peripheries of the South Sudanese state, and UNMISS, as it did in 2013 and beyond, will be badly needed to intervene to protect civilians. If it cannot prevent the fighting, with its mandate having been renewed, establishing safe zones for civilians to shelter is the least it can do-- no matter the risk of upsetting Salva Kiir's government. 

The Horn Edition Team