South Sudan’s SPLM-IO party on Thursday said the detention of First Vice President Riek Machar has effectively collapsed the peace deal that ended the 2013-2018 civil war.
The U.N. peacekeeping mission in South Sudan also called for restraint, saying the country stood on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict.
“This will not only devastate South Sudan but also affect the entire region,” UNMISS said in a statement.
The civil war – fought between forces loyal to Machar and his rival, South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir, often along ethnic lines – left hundreds of thousands of people dead.
It ended in a deal that brought both men together in a fractious national unity government.
SPLM-IO party said South Sudan’s defence minister and its chief of national security “forcefully entered” Machar’s residence in the capital, Juba, on Wednesday evening to deliver an arrest warrant.
Machar was being held with his wife at his home, accused of supporting the White Army militia which clashed with the military in Nasir, Upper Nile State, this month, Reath Muoch Tang, a senior SPLM-IO official said in a statement.
Machar’s party denies ongoing links with the White Army, which it fought alongside during the civil war.
SPLM-IO deputy chair Oyet Nathaniel Pierino, said Machar’s detention meant the agreement had been “abrogated”.
It “effectively brings the agreement to a collapse, thus the prospect for peace and stability in South Sudan has now been put into serious jeopardy”, he said.
The U.N. Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said the arrests marked an unravelling of the peace process.
The African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development regional economic bloc also called for restraint.
