South Sudan’s former first vice president and prominent opposition leader Riek Machar says his replacement by President Salva Kiir with Taban Deng Gai is “illegal”.
In an interview with Al Jazeera on Wednesday, Machar said: “I’m still the first vice president of the republic of South Sudan. The appointment made by President Salva Kiir is illegal”.
“It has no basis because the peace agreement does not give him the powers to appoint a first vice president under the current circumstances”he explained.
Machar confirmed that he is currently “around Juba”, adding, however, that he will only return to the capital when an outside force intervenes.
But Machar said that if the international community failed to intervene he might order his troops to make a move to march towards Juba in the future.
“As long as the international community and the regional third party force are being waited to deploy, we will not disrupt that,” he said.
On Tuesday, the UN warned President Kiir that any political appointments must be consistent with last August’s peace deal that ended nearly two years of civil war – under the agreement, the vice president must be chosen by the armed opposition faction.