Human Rights Watch today released a new report, ‘South Sudan’s New War: Abuses by Government and Opposition Forces,’ documenting war crimes committed in South Sudan since last December.

The 92-page report is based largely on interviews with more than 400 survivors and witnesses. Below is the first of several excerpts of the report to be published by Radio Tamazuj. For readability, the extensive footnoting of the original report is removed, but otherwise the text of the report is reproduced verbatim.

The section of the report recounts the events of the Gudele Massacre in Juba, which has earlier been reported by Human Rights Watch and by the human rights report of the UN Mission in South Sudan, but here is recounted in more detail.

The December 16, 2013, Gudele “Police Building” Massacre

One of the worst incidents documented in the conflict was a massacre at a police compound of the South Sudan’s police service and used as a base for a mixed “joint unit” force of police, army and other security forces. The joint units were formed in Juba in 2012 to respond to growing crime in the town.

Human Rights Watch interviewed seven survivors of the massacre. They consistently described how during the night of December 15 and the day of December 16 soldiers and policemen patrolling the Gudele and nearby neighborhoods rounded up and arrested hundreds of Nuer men and detained between 200-400 in the police compound. Soldiers arrested the men and boys based solely on their perceived ethnicity. One survivor, a Nuer construction worker, said he was arrested with six other builders by a group of soldiers and police stationed at the Gudele crossroads after midnight on December 15, while they were walking home from a worksite. The security forces walked them at gunpoint to the building. They were questioned about their ethnicities the following morning. “They asked us what tribe we were, asking: ‘are you Nuer’?” he said. “There were two people who were not Nuer ... two Nuba; they were released.” The men were beaten with a gun during the interrogation but were not asked any questions besides their ethnicity.

Another young man, a student, said he was with two other Nuer men in a car that was stopped by soldiers at around 3 p.m. on December 16, 2013, at a checkpoint at the Gudele crossroads. The men were arrested, apparently because one of them had traditional Nuer scarification on his forehead, and were then marched at gunpoint to the building.

A Nuer civil servant and three other Nuer men were stopped at the Gudele checkpoint and asked their ethnicity on the afternoon of December 15, soon after President Salva Kiir’s televised press statement. When they told the security forces – a mix of Dinka in NSS and army uniforms –that they were Nuer they were told to get out of the car and lie on the ground on their bellies. “(One of the Nuer men) asked ‘what have we done wrong?’ and the soldiers said: ‘do you not hear the guns? Are you not Nuer?’” the witness said. The witness was then allowed to proceed with one of the other men. The other two, Tut Banypiny and Koang Toang, were detained and are believed to have been killed, most probably in the massacre.

More detainees were brought into the building during the day of December 16. One survivor told Human Rights Watch that he was among 17 Nuer males arrested in a house in the Manga neighborhood at around midday on December 16 and taken to the building on foot, at gunpoint. He said the Dinka forces, which arrested them shot one man dead in the house during the arrest.

Many survivors described how after the single room had been filled with Nuer men in the afternoon of December 16, the door was locked. Several survivors reported seeing or hearing men being shot on the veranda outside the room. All the men said several individuals collapsed because of the intense heat and lack of air in the room that afternoon.

At around 8 p.m. on December 16, witnesses said that at least two men opened fire into the room through windows on one side of the building, killing almost all of the 200 - 400 people in the room. One survivor recounted:

When it got dark, at around 8 p.m. they fired at everyone (in the room) through the open windows. The room was very bright with bullets, sounds of PKM, and the different sounds from an AK 47.

Several of the survivors said they survived only because they were shot early on, fell to the ground and then were protected by the bodies of others falling on top of them. The survivors consistently reported that after the shooting, security forces entered the room with torches. “They came and checked who was still alive. Those still breathing they shot again,” one survivor remembered. Three of the survivors fled the building during the night but other survivors stayed in the room. “I spent a whole day with the corpses,” one man described.

In the late afternoon of December 17, officers from the NSS came to the building, removed around 13 survivors from the room and took them to the Juba Teaching Hospital. Two of the survivors said an NSS officer came in the morning before this larger group came in the evening.

These survivors also said that they saw bodies being removed from the building and placed in trucks before they were removed from the site. On the afternoon of December 17, Human Rights Watch received a phone call from a witness, a Dinka resident of the neighborhood who was close to the Gudele crossroads at the time of the massacre. The witness said that he was watching as security forces moved “huge” numbers of bodies out of a building near the crossroads into trucks.

A security official who visited the site on the morning of December 17, after receiving a report of the mass killing reported seeing “an extremely large number of bodies” but said he was too scared to investigate further. He said there was “no command and control at all” and that it appeared that a number of the Dinka police and soldiers present on the scene were drunk. Another senior police official, talking to Human Rights Watch two months after the incident said that police officials had visited the site on December 17 and had been shocked by the scale of the killing that had taken place.

Human Rights Watch spoke to several families who believe they lost relatives in the massacre. A Nuer policeman told Human Rights Watch that 12 young men were taken from his house in the Gudele area, close to the massacre site, on the afternoon of December 16. He said he has still been unable to find out what happened to the men, but said he had been told by a Gudele massacre survivor that at least some of them had been in the building.

A 46-year-old man who was shot and injured by soldiers in Mangaten said he saw soldiers line up a group of 19 Nuer men from the neighborhood tie them with rope in two groups, then march them away on foot. As of late December the men were still missing and believed to have been killed in the massacre.

Other Attacks in Gudele

Human Rights Watch received reports of other cases of extrajudicial killings in the Gudele area, especially around the Gudele crossroads, near the Gudele police building on December 16 and 17. For example, according to an in-law, a civil servant named John Bamum was stopped in his car and killed near the Gudele crossroads when he went to check on relatives in Gudele during the night of December 15.

A Nuer civil servant working in immigration said he ran from his house in Khor William on the morning of December 16 to the Gudele area to escape the fighting. On the morning of December 17 soldiers stopped him with others in his group at the Gudele checkpoint and demanded to see their identification documents. While he and another man who could show student IDs were told to sit on one side, the other four, traders without IDs, were shot and killed. The civil servant also said that he saw several bodies in ditches at the crossroads.

An east African woman said she saw the bodies of 15 of her Nuer neighbors killed in their house in her neighborhood in Gudele, early in the morning on December 16, following shooting in the neighborhood between Nuer and Dinka soldiers. She told a Human Rights Watch researcher on December 17 that Dinka security forces in the neighborhood were still not allowing the bodies to be moved. In a follow up interview later that week she said that the bodies had since been removed by soldiers.

Three different eye witnesses, interviewed separately, told Human Rights Watch how seven men were killed in the house of David Kojela, a soldier with the presidential guard, in the Gudele neighborhood on the afternoon of December 16, by presidential guard soldiers, all clearly identified by their tiger shoulder badges, who arrived in four military pickups, surrounded the house and fired into the compound. They told women to leave the building before they fired into the compound. The soldiers then collected bodies of Maker Thay Jany, Machuot Luth Puoc, Dak Biel Toang, Wuor Wang Machar, Reath Kulang Juoy, Ruot Meat Riak and Ter Gatjang Nhial and took them away.

A Nuer civil society activist described seeing soldiers shoot three men, Charles Mawar, Duop Danhier and Maker Mathon, as they fled outside a house at around 3 p.m. on December 16 in the Gudele neighborhood near the Christian university. Another man, Gai Matong, was killed when soldiers shot inside the house where the civil society activist was also hiding. Another man in the group of fleeing men said he also saw Duop Danhier and Charles Mawar being shot.

According to two witnesses interviewed separately, three men were killed on December 21, in Gudele neighborhood, close to the Lou Clinic area. The men were Benjamin Dhieu Tungwar, 42 years, James Luny Tingwar, 28 years, and Marub Dhieu, 27 years.

Related:

UN rights chief zeroes in on Gudele massacre (24 Jan.)