Blitz Bureau
JUBA: The arrest of an Army General from South Sudan’s main Opposition is a “grave violation” of the peace deal that ended a five-year civil war, an Opposition spokesperson told BBC. Gen Gabriel Duop Lam, said a BBC report, was arrested along with other senior officials of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM-IO).
The detainees are all allies of Vice-President Riek Machar, whose rift with President Salva Kiir sparked a devastating war in 2013, it said further.
Machar’s spokesperson said that the SPLM-IO did not know how their officials were or where they were being held.
“We are doing our best to avoid any escalation to the situation, however we need our partners in peace to demonstrate the political will to assure that this country will not go back to war again,” Puok Both Baluang told the BBC’s Newsday programme.
President Kiir has insisted that South Sudan will not return to war, Government spokesperson Michael Makuei told reporters in the capital Juba. He added that the Opposition figures were arrested because they were “in conflict with the law”.
South Sudan is the world’s newest nation, after seceding from Sudan in 2011. But just two years later, a civil war erupted when Kiir sacked his entire Cabinet and accused Machar of instigating a failed coup. After five years, with 400,000 lives lost, and 2.5 million people forced from their homes, a peace deal was agreed in 2018. But it has been fraught ever since.
