Fighting flares in South Sudan: Is the 2018 peace deal in danger?

South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, this week ordered a series of high-level arrests and dismissals of political and army figures as tensions between him and Vice President Riek Machar – a main opposition figure – threaten to reach boiling point.

Since Tuesday, soldiers of the South Sudanese army have surrounded Machar’s home in Juba, according to members of the vice president’s party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition (SPLM/IO). Kiir heads the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).Fighting between the two exploded into a civil war that rocked the young country beginning in 2013. Although calm returned after a peace deal in 2018, analysts said that agreement is now under threat from renewed tensions between Kiir and Machar. That hostility follows an eruption of violence in the northeastern state of Upper Nile thought to be over rumours of a planned forced disarmament of local groups.

South Sudan is Africa’s youngest country after it broke away from Sudan in 2011. Although rich in oil, the country of 11 million people is Africa’s second poorest nation and is grappling with a humanitarian crisis as a result of conflict and poverty.What is the history of conflict in South Sudan?
Shortly after independence from Sudan in 2011, the country’s independence movement, led by the SPLM, began to splinter.

Political tensions between the SPLM factions came to the fore, exacerbated by ethnic differences as factions aligned according to their tribes.The dominance of the Dinka ethnic group in the country has historically been a source of animosity with other groups.

In 2013, South Sudan descended into full-scale war when Kiir, a Dinka, fired Machar as vice president after escalating rows between them. Machar is from the Nuer ethnic group, South Sudan’s second largest.

Kiir also fired the entire cabinet after some ministers voiced discontent with his leadership. Machar challenged this move, calling Kiir a dictator, and went on to establish the rebel movement, the SPLM/IO, which fought against Kiir’s South Sudanese army.

How did the 2018 peace process unfold?
After five years of fighting, which displaced more than a million people and killed more than 400,000, the two warring factions agreed to talks along with a host of other groups that had joined each side during the war. They ultimately signed the 2018 Revitalised Agreement on Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) after several proposed peace frameworks had failed.The peace deal was facilitated by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) trading bloc. It was meant to see the two warring factions unite their armies under a single unit, write a new constitution, prepare for general elections, organise a census and disarm all other armed groups. None of those reforms has been instituted, and violence from local or armed ethnic groups has continued intermittently in parts of the country.