The United Nations has warned that the detention of Vice President Riek Machar threatens to plunge the world's newest country back into civil war.
South Sudan's Vice President Riek Machar has been placed under house arrest, according to his party, as the escalation of tensions that the United Nations has warned about puts the world's newest country on the brink of civil war.
According to Machar's political party, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement in Opposition, the country's defence minister and national security chief “forcefully entered” Mr Machar's residence late on Wednesday, disarmed his bodyguards and “served him with an arrest warrant on unclear charges”.
Mr Machar's wife, Angelina Teni, who is the interior minister, has also been placed under house arrest, the party's deputy leader said in a statement. All of Mr Machar's aides and security personnel “have been arrested and transferred to different locations,” he added.
The arrests threaten a fragile peace deal signed in 2018 between Mr Machar and President Salva Kiir that ended a five-year civil war that has killed some 400,000 people. A resumption of war in South Sudan could draw neighbouring countries into the conflict and worsen already dire conditions for the country’s more than 11 million people.
The peace deal established a power-sharing agreement between the country's largest ethnic groups – Mr Kiir's Dinka and Mr Machar's Nuer – who fought a bloody civil war that erupted about two years after South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
But all that appears to be unraveling in recent weeks as deep-seated political and ethnic tensions have flared and forces supporting both sides have clashed in the northeastern state of Upper Nile. The violence has displaced at least 50,000 people since February, the UN has said, with 10,000 of them crossing the border into Ethiopia in search of safety.
