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Troops gathered at joint training sites across South Sudan were defecting due to lack of food, the UN says.
The United Nations special envoy to South Sudan said on Tuesday that little progress had been made in unifying the country’s warring forces under a single army, as promised in a disputed peace deal.
The promise to put the government and rebel soldiers under a national flag was the cornerstone of a September 2018 peace deal that paused five years of bloodshed in which 380,000 people died.
But troops gathered at joint training sites across the troubled country were defecting due to lack of food and other essentials, said David Shearer, special representative of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS).
“There has been almost no movement in the critical areas of security sector reform,” Shearer told a news conference in Juba.
“At the moment, the process is stagnant. It has not even passed the first stage, where forces are trained and graduated. Urgent action is needed to move the process forward. “
There was a risk that violence would resume as soldiers, disillusioned with the promise of peace, return to their villages hungry and frustrated, he said.
“Disappointment is not a good thing, it could lead to frustration and anger and possibly violence,” he said.
“Several people who are there promising to join the armed forces are now returning to the villages … and could cause further instability on the ground.”
Shearer also criticized the South Sudanese government army for interfering with the peacekeeping missions of UN troops tasked with protecting civilians and humanitarian workers at hotspots plagued by armed unrest.
Last month, he said that government troops who have been fighting the National Salvation Front (NAS), a resistance rebel, prevented 92 peacekeepers from taking up positions at a new UN base in Lobonok, some 110 kilometers away ( 68 miles) from Juba. group.
The September 2018 agreement, to which NAS is not a signatory, paved the way for the creation of a power-sharing government in Juba, which took control in February 2020 and formally ended the war.
But the young country, born in 2011 out of a struggle for independence with Sudan, remains fragile, plagued by local gun violence and levels of food security crises.
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