The commissioner of Ulang County in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State, Riek Gai Gatluak, has accused opposition officials of barring him from his office, as tensions escalate following the house arrest of First Vice President Riek Machar.
South Sudanese security forces confined Machar—the opposition leader and a key figure in the country’s fragile unity government—to his residence in Juba on Wednesday. The move has sparked protests from his Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army in Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) and heightened fears of renewed conflict in a nation still recovering from a five-year civil war that claimed nearly 400,000 lives.
A 2018 peace deal, the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), formally ended the war between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and Machar. However, analysts warn Machar’s detention risks unraveling the accord, which established a coalition government shared by Kiir’s ruling party, Machar’s SPLM/A-IO, and other groups, including the South Sudan Opposition Alliance (SSOA).
Ulang County, though predominantly controlled by the SPLM/A-IO, was allocated to the SSOA under the 2018 agreement. The SSOA—a coalition of political parties such as the Federal Democratic Party (FDP), led by Higher Education Minister Changson Chang—holds the county’s administrative mandate.
Gatluak, an FDP appointee, told Radio Tamazuj on Saturday that SPLM/A-IO soldiers had blocked him from his office since Friday, citing the collapse of the peace deal. He rejected the claim as baseless, stating: “I am still the commissioner because what SPLM-IO soldiers did was unlawful. They came to me and said the agreement had collapsed. This is not true because there is no official document.”
The embattled commissioner said he remained in the county voluntarily to avoid violence. “The SPLA-IO soldiers allowed me to stay if I wished but [said] I should not go to my office because they think the power-sharing deal is over,” he said.
Gatluak added that his party chairman had deemed the soldiers’ actions illegal but acknowledged limited recourse while Machar—the SPLM/A-IO’s leader—remains under arrest.
Several sources confirmed to Radio Tamazuj that Brig. Manpiny Pal, a senior officer of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-in-Opposition (SPLA-IO), has been appointed by the SPLA-IO officers as the acting commissioner of Ulang County.