A South Sudanese Bishop has denounced President Kiir’s declaration of a ‘National Day of Prayers’, calling it a “political prayer” and a mockery.
In a statement broadcast by Sudan’s state-owned media, President Kiir announced a nationwide day of prayer for peace and forgiveness, scheduled for 10 March, last week. In his message, President Kiir appealed for a huge turnout “to pray, repent and forgive each other for the problems that we might have committed to each other.”
“It is a political prayer. It is a mockery,” Bishop Santo Loku Pio Doggale, Auxiliary Bishop of Juba, told Voice of America, according to the Sudan Tribune.
“Why should I go [to] pray where there is no holiness, where there is no forgiveness? It is a joke to hear the president of the country calling prayers while at the moment, the soldiers are hunting people across South Sudan,” he continued.
Kiir's proposed national day of prayer precedes the launch of three days of national dialogue, beginning on 15 March.
The president has insisted the proposed dialogue – which he is to direct - would be an open forum at which all issues affecting South Sudan would be addressed and resolved.
Speaking at a public rally in Yei in early February, Kiir appealed to armed groups fighting his Government to lay down their arms and turn their focus toward developing South Sudan.
“If they don't listen to the voices which call for peace, I will declare war against them. I don't think there is any one of you who will blame me again,” VOA news reports him to have said.
The bishops of South Sudan recently called for dialogue between the country's warring factions, adding that military forces on both sides are targeting civilians.
“Those who have the ability to make changes for the good of our people have not taken heed of our previous pastoral messages,” they said in a message released on 23 February. “We need to see action, not just dialogue for the sake of dialogue.”
The bishops said the war has “no moral justification whatsoever,” and expressed concern that some government officials seem to be suspicious of the Church.
Pope Francis said on 23 February that he is ‘studying’ the possibility of a joint visit to South Sudan with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.
Last week, a top Sudanese military official resigned, accusing Kiir’s Government of atrocities amounting to war crimes.
"Your regime committed sundry war crimes... genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing," Brigadier General Henry Oyay Nyago wrote in a resignation letter seen by Al Jazeera news.
Nyago also accused Kiir of ordering the killing of civilians not belonging to the Dinka group, and of 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 said, while detailing specific events in which civilians were ordered killed, or atrocities were overlooked.
The UN has warned that the escalating violence is setting the stage for genocide. Last month, they declared that parts of South Sudan are suffering famine, with an estimated 100,000 facing starvation.
South Sudan has been embroiled in civil war since December 2013 when Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, accused his former deputy, Riek Machar, who is Nuer, of attempting a coup. Since then, brutal fighting has increasingly fractured the world's youngest country along ethnic lines, leading the UN to warn that the violence was setting the stage for genocide.
PICTURE: Soldiers man a checkpoint in the town of Bunj, Maban in the Upper Nile Blue Nile state of northeastern South Sudan, Africa.
Loading ...
