With a peace deal still elusive in war-racked South Sudan, small volunteer groups have combed the city of Bor for uncollected remains to be buried in mass graves, the U.N.’s humanitarian news agency, IRIN, reported Monday.
Determining the exact number of those killed across South Sudan since fighting began is difficult, but in January, the International Crisis Group “suggested 10,000,” whereas “some diplomats put the toll at ten times that figure.”
Bor, the capital of the state of Jonglei, is nearly deserted, IRIN reported, and finding and removing dead bodies from homes is a long and arduous task. Teams of gravediggers are still in Bor clearing the massacre sites found when government troops retook the town on Jan. 18. Civilians had been killed in churches, homes and a hospital by opposition forces who withdrew from Bor on Jan. 17. Burials carried out by state authorities and volunteers have been ongoing since then.
Mayor Nhial Majak Nhial described the collection of dead bodies as “a continuous exercise,” according to Sudanese radio station Radio Tamazuj.
“Even this morning we have collected over 107 bodies,” Nhial said. “We took them to the graveyard, and we’re digging the grave for about 100 people, and we’ll be digging a second grave for the others.”
On Tuesday, actor George Clooney, co-founder of Not On Our Watch, and John Prendergast, director of the anti-genocide Enough Project, published an op-ed in USA Today.
“The mass killing in the Bor hospital could symbolize another escalation in an expanding atrocity-fueled war, or provide a wake-up call that feuding politicians cannot be allowed to use hope-starved boys so cynically in pursuit of their ambitions,” the two wrote. “The answer will determine the fate of millions of South Sudanese children.”
Human Rights Watch said the burials should be catalogued properly and the dead photographed before the burials in Bor. Bullet casings and other munitions evidence should also be collected by professionals for examination at a later date.
Prendergast said he visited three other mass graves the week before IRIN’s documented visit, where “hundreds of people have been buried,” he said. “Every day, dozens of new corpses are discovered in abandoned homes. The body bags prepared by medical workers appear along the roads with relentless regularity.”
Body bags are still lying along the main routes, IRIN reported.
“Because most of the town has been abandoned, there is no way to know how many dead are still to be counted,” Prendergast told IRIN.
Opposition rebel forces, which rely heavily on child soldiers, are said to be operating in the multi-county area surrounding Bor, making it difficult for volunteers to search for bodies there.
Hundreds more bodies are awaiting burial at a site where diggers from the U.N. Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) are making “more space in a field that used to serve as a cemetery for a few dozen people who died of diseases,” IRIN reported.