Third S.Sudan official resigns

Juba. A third top South Sudanese military official has resigned, accusing President Salva Kiir’s regime of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, according to a letter seen by AFP Saturday.

Brigadier Henry Oyay Nyago, advocate general and director of military justice, was the latest military official to pen a damning resignation letter accusing the government of atrocities in the country’s three-year civil war.

“Your regime committed sundry war crimes genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing,” he wrote, accusing Kiir of ordering the killing of civilians not belonging to his ethnic Dinka group, and overlooking crimes committed by the Dinka in various probes into violence.

“I cannot continue to be silent or taciturn when you are finishing and slaughtering the innocent people of South Sudan,” Nyago wrote in the letter to Kiir, which detailed specific events in which civilians were ordered killed, or atrocities were overlooked.

In another letter released Saturday, the head of South Sudan’s military court, Colonel Khalid Ono Loki resigned, accusing the army chief of extra-judicial arrests of citizens based on their ethnicity.

Addressed to army chief Paul Malong Awan, the letter decried “unspecified and unstipulated arrests and detentions fluctuating from months to years without investigation and scrutiny ... on fabricated cases against individuals of non-Dinka ethnicity.”

Loki also accused Awan of dismissing rulings against members of his own tribe accused of murder, rape and theft. “Mr. Chief, you have often avoided the current courts, tried officers on your own, whilst crafting and forming alien ones paradoxical to the existent established courts which are in conformity with the law,” Loki wrote. (AFP)