The United Nations warned that the detention of Vice President Riek Machar threatens to push the world’s youngest country back into civil war.
South Sudan’s vice president, Riek Machar, has been placed under house arrest, according to his party, escalating tensions that the United Nations has warned are pushing the world’s youngest country to the brink of civil war.
The country’s defense minister and the chief of national security “forcefully entered” Mr. Machar’s residence late on Wednesday, disarmed his bodyguards and “delivered an arrest warrant to him under unclear charges,” according to Mr. Machar’s political party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition.
Mr. Machar’s wife, Angelina Teny, who is the interior minister, was placed under house arrest, too, the party’s deputy leader said in a statement. All of Mr. Machar’s aides and protection officers “were arrested and moved to separate locations,” he added.
The arrests threaten the fragile peace agreement signed in 2018 between Mr. Machar and President Salva Kiir, which ended a five-year civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people. A return to war in South Sudan could draw neighboring nations into the conflict and exacerbate the already-dire conditions for the country’s more than 11 million people.
The peace deal established a power-sharing agreement between the country’s largest ethnic groups, Mr. Kiir’s Dinka and Mr. Machar’s Nuer, which fought a bloody civil war that erupted roughly two years after South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
But all that has appeared to be coming undone in recent weeks, as deep-seated political and ethnic tensions have flared up and forces allied with both sides have clashed in the northeastern Upper Nile State. The violence has displaced at least 50,000 people since February, the U.N. said, with 10,000 of those crossing the border into Ethiopia seeking safety.
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