South Sudan at risk of ‘large scale conflict’: UN report

Experts warn that the slow pace of reforms and political disputes threaten a 2018 peace deal that halted a civil war.

A United Nations report warns that the slow implementation of a revitalised peace accord in South Sudan risks pushing the country back into a “large-scale conflict”. Political, military and ethnic divisions in South Sudan are widening, leading to multiple violent incidents between the main signatories to last year’s ceasefire, the possibility of renewed war, and nearly 100,000 people facing “famine-like conditions”, it said. In the 81-page report sent to the UN Security Council on Monday, a panel of experts said slow-moving reforms by President Salva Kiir’s government and more than a year of political disputes and disagreements over how to implement the February 2020 ceasefire and a 2018 peace agreement has led to frayed relations between Kiir and First Vice President Riek Machar.