A militia hunting down members of a specific ethnic group targeted and killed at least six South Sudanese aid workers over two days during a new bout of violence close to the South Sudan-Sudan border, the UN said today.
Two of the victims were murdered in the town of Bunj today while another three died in an ambush, the UN said. A sixth aid worker was killed yesterday and a seventh is missing and presumed dead, the UN said.
It condemned "in the strongest terms" the Upper Nile state killings by the Mabanese Defense Forces.
Ethnically targeted attacks have been a hallmark of the violence coursing through South Sudan since December. All of the murdered aid workers belong to the Nuer ethnic group, the same group that former vice president and current rebel leader Riek Machar belongs to.
The violence comes in a region where more than 100,000 refugees fleeing another conflict in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan have sought shelter and safety. The violence threatens to bring Sudan into South Sudan's internal conflict, an advocacy organisation warned today.
The UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, said the outbreak of violence the past 48 hours is compromising the security of the more than 100,000 Sudanese refugees who fled clashes in Sudan's Blue Nile state.
"These ethnically targeted attacks on unarmed aid workers will have a very drastic and adverse impact on the operations of humanitarian partners who have been providing food, shelter and other relief items to over 127,000 refugees from Sudan for over three years," the UN said.
The UN has no military or police presence in Bunj, the epicenter of the violence, but the UN said it dispatched a unit of peacekeepers in four armored personnel carriers to Bunj to protect UN, humanitarian personnel and civilians inside United Nations facilities Peace talks between South Sudan's government and rebel fighters restarted yesterday in Ethiopia, but no breakthroughs have been announced.
South Sudan saw ethnically motivated violence spiral out of from the capital last December after President Salva Kiir accused Machar of initiating a coup, a charge he denies.
The new border clashes threaten to draw Sudan and its rebel groups into South Sudan's own civil war, said Nuba Reports, a media outlet that advocates for residents in Sudan's Nuba Mountains who are caught in a conflict with Sudanese troops.
