The U.N. Security Council on Thursday renewed its peacekeeping mission in South Sudan for another year and threatened an arms embargo if fighting continues.
The U.S.-sponsored text “expresses the council’s intention to consider all appropriate measures against those who take action that undermines the peace, stability and security of South Sudan.”
It says cutting off the export and sale of arms would deprive all sides of the means to keep fighting.
South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011. Ethnic violence and civil war broke out two years later between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar.
A peace agreement signed in December has failed to take hold.
South Sudan also faces severe food shortages. The flight of an estimated 4 million civilians from war, poverty and impending starvation has resulted in one of the world’s worst refugee crises.
U.N. human rights experts say more than 40 South Sudanese officials and army officers face charges of crimes against humanity for alleged torture, including beheading their victims, burning them alive or gouging their eyes out.
In talking about South Sudan’s leaders, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently said he “had never seen a political elite with so little interest in the well-being of its own people.”
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