Situation in South Sudan - Report of the Secretary-General (S/2021/172) - South Sudan reliefweb.int - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from reliefweb.int Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
<p>February 19, 2021 (JUBA)- The Jieng Council of Elders (JCE) on Friday penned a scathing letter, describing President Salva Kiir and his First Deputy, Riek Machar, as a symbol of failed leadership and demanding they step aside.</p>
What’s new? In February 2020, South Sudan’s two main belligerents began forming a unity government pursuant to a peace deal inked a year and a half earlier. But the pact is fragile, smaller conflicts are still ablaze and the threat of return to full-blown civil war remains.
Why does it matter? Forthcoming elections could test the peace deal severely. Looking further ahead, conflict will continue to plague South Sudan until its leaders forge a political system that distributes power more widely. The cost of cyclical fighting since 2013 has been steep: hundreds of thousands dead and millions uprooted from their homes.
INTERVIEW: ‘We do not support Kiir, we support the people’s demands’-JCE
File photo: Joshua Dau (centre), a leading member of the Jieng Council of Elders during a meeting with Equatoria and Nuer elders in Juba in November 2016
The Jieng Council of Elders (JCE), a grouping of prominent Dinka politicians and elders from across South Sudan, last week released a statement that drew mixed reactions by inter alia disparaging the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (R-ARCSS) as being worse than the botched 2015 agreement, and demanding that the period of the peace agreement and subsequent implementation be cut short and elections called early.