Government soldiers used heavy weapons to fire on the undefended home of the Shilluk king in South Sudan’s capital Juba during violence last month, according to a new research report.
In a report released Monday, Human Rights Report said that on 10 July, tanks and a large group of soldiers attacked and shelled the king’s house in the Munuki neighborhood.
“The tank shot three times towards our house, where we hosted about 100 Shilluk civilians, but missed,” a relative of the king said, as quoted by HRW.
“Then they used their heavy machine guns and started to spray bullets on the house. One of the rooms caught on fire. From inside the compound, I could hear them shout: ‘We need to destroy this house!’”
The hitherto unreported attack did not result in any confirmed casualties but it does point to the indiscriminate nature of some of the violence in the city during a five day period in July.
The king of the Shilluk is a traditional leader who has not played an active role on either side of the conflict, though most of his tribe’s home territory is controlled by the opposition Aguelek militia, aligned with SPLM-IO.
SPLA soldiers also targeted the house of Joseph Monytuel, the Bul Nuer governor of Bentiu – another non-Dinka government ally living in Munuki. Hundreds of Nuer had sought refuge at his house. The governor’s bodyguards fended off the attackers, according to a relative cited in the report.
Human Rights Watch says that its researchers who visited Juba interviewed civilian Nuer citizens who said that uniformed Dinka security forces harassed them after fighting broke out on 8 July, sometimes using language test to determine whether to rob or kill the men.
One man said, “When the incident happened at J-1, I was near Juba University with colleagues of mine… I tried to run, but soldiers stopped me on the street and asked something in Dinka language. I was unable to answer. They said ‘Are you Nuer?’ in Arabic. I said yes and then they started to shoot me, I had seven bullets in my body. The soldiers left me for dead but I survived.”
File photo: Shilluk peace demonstrators in Malakal