S. Sudanese meet for peace talks

U.N. official urges sides to pull ‘back from the brink’

Sudanese children displaced by fighting in Sudan play and bathe in the Nile River near Awerial, South Sudan, on Wednesday.
Sudanese children displaced by fighting in Sudan play and bathe in the Nile River near Awerial, South Sudan, on Wednesday.

JUBA, South Sudan - Negotiators from South Sudan’s two warring sides arrived Wednesday in Ethiopia for peace talks, and a United Nations official urged both forces to pull the world’s newest country “back from the brink.”

Fighting continued in Bor, a gateway city to the capital of Juba, a government official said. Bor is just 75 miles from Juba.

Rebel forces Wednesday were said to seize major sections of the city, giving them a strategic foothold for a possible march toward Juba.

Bor, the capital of Jonglei state, is the center of ethnically based violence stemming from the political rivalry between President Salva Kiir and ousted Vice President Riek Machar, the rebel leader accused of mounting a failed coup attempt.

Miyong Kuon, news coordinator for Machar, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that forces loyal to Machar were “fully in control of Bor.”

Kuon said that government forces were massing to carry out a counter assault but that the rebels had the strength to hold the strategic city. There was no sign of a cease-fire, he said: “As I’m talking to you right now there is sporadic fighting” in a separate oil-producing state as well.

Kiir declared a state of emergency Wednesday in Jonglei and Unity.

Machar said Tuesday he would send his forces from Bor to Juba, but that threat was played down by Hilde Johnson, the U.N. representative in South Sudan.

“I think we need to take quotations with pinches of salt at this point of time,” Johnson said.

“On Jan. 1, the country is at a fork in the road, but it can still be saved from further major escalation of violence,” she said.

Johnson urged Kiir and Machar to use the new talks to move toward peace, adding: “They can still pull the country back from the brink.”

The fighting has killed more than 1,000 people, theU.N. says.

The fighting in Bor has displaced about 60,000 people, making it the latest humanitarian crisis in South Sudan. The international Red Cross said the road from Bor to the nearby Awerial area was lined with people waiting for boats so they could cross the Nile River.

Two teams of five negotiators each arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Ethiopian foreign minister said talks were expected to start this morning between delegations of the opposing sides.

The U.N. is “gravely concerned” about mounting evidence of gross violations of international human-rights law, including the extra-judicial killings of civilians and captured soldiers, it said Tuesday.The U.N.’s estimate of 1,000 dead was given days ago, and the number of fatalities is believed to be higher as a result of the new fighting around the country, including in Bor.

Government troops earlier pulled out of parts of Bor because they were concerned about having to kill the “young boys” who fill the rebel ranks, one analyst said.

South Sudan’s military “was told to withdraw,” said Edmund Yakani, the executive director of the Juba-based group Community Empowerment for Progress, citing the accounts of contacts in Bor. “They communicated that these are young boys and we are killing them like nothing.”

Government troops in Bor face renegade forces allied with a pro-Machar tribal militia known as the White Army, because its young members of the Nuer tribe smear their faces with ash to keep insects away.

Johnson said that 240 U.N. police were to arrive later Wednesday in South Sudan to help police refugee camps. The U.N. said up to 180,000 people have been displaced internally by the violence, including about 68,000 at U.N. camps.

Information for this article was contributed by Ben Curtis and Rodney Muhumuza of The Associated Press and by Nicholas Kulish, Isma’il Kushkush and Benno Muchler of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 5 on 01/02/2014

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