On 11 September 2025, the South Sudanese government announced that First Vice President and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-In Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) leader Dr. Riek Machar would stand trial for murder, treason, crimes against humanity, and financing terrorism. Lt. Gabriel Duop Lam and Oil Minister Puot Kang Chol were also indicted alongside him. Hours later, President Salva Kiir issued a decree suspending Machar and Puot from their official positions. The move reflects a government that is weaponizing the law to obscure its own crimes while scapegoating opposition leaders—especially those from the SPLM/A-IO—for atrocities it orchestrated. Although framed as a demonstration of accountability, the charges are widely seen as politically motivated, aimed at weakening the opposition and consolidating Kiir’s grip on power.
The prosecution of Dr. Machar had been widely anticipated in South Sudan, as it had been known since March 2013 that President Salva Kiir and the notorious Jieng Council of Elders (JCE) sought to remove him from the country’s political scene. Although it is an exclusively ethnic body, the JCE wields immense power and effectively functions as an extension of Kiir’s rule. Kiir has consistently resisted fully implementing the peace agreement, aiming to preserve a political system of near-total authority—the same concentration of power that sparked the December 2013 civil war. He has historically exploited divisions within the SPLM/A-IO.
In July 2016, he struck a deal with Taban Deng Gai to replace Machar. This move triggered the infamous J1 fighting, killing scores of people, including countless innocent civilians. Today, the regime appears to be repeating this tactic. On April 9, 2025, a faction of the SPLM/A-IO led by Stephen Par Kuol declared itself the legitimate leadership and promised to continue implementing the peace agreement, but it lacks genuine support in the movement’s traditional strongholds. Days after Machar was placed under house arrest in late March 2025, some senior government officials publicly stated that Dr. Machar would be replaced by Stephen Par, echoing the July 2016 situation when President Kiir installed Taban Deng as the legitimate leader of the SPLM/A-IO—a move that renders the implementation of the agreement impossible. The mainstream SPLM/A-IO, led by acting leader Nathaniel Oyet Peri, called this group a government-backed effort aimed at undermining the peace process.
In a prosecutorial document leaked to this author listing at least eighty-three charges against the accused leaders, the government claims that the First Vice President incited violence in Nasir County and directed the White Army to attack government forces. Yet the reality tells a very different story.
It cannot be overlooked that Sarah Peter Nyot Kok, the wife of Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel, was installed as Counsel-General in the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs just days before the government unveiled its charges against Dr. Machar. The timing is no coincidence—it smacks of orchestration, positioning a politically connected insider at the very heart of a prosecution designed to crush Kiir’s rivals under the veneer of legality.
Machar neither incited nor caused the March 2025 clashes between the White Army and SSPDF, nor did he cause the deaths of SSPDF General Majur Dak and United Nations personnel.
The conflict in Nasir County erupted after the local population demanded the replacement of government troops who had been stationed there for over a decade—a battalion notorious for raping women and girls, restricting livelihoods such as fishing, and committing other abuses.
If the March 2025 violence in Nasir County erupted as the predictable consequence of over a decade of abuses by government troops stationed there—rampant sexual assault, destruction of livelihoods, and terror against civilians—was then escalated by SSPDF forces, armed militias, and Ugandan airstrikes, all without any involvement or command by Riek Machar, how can the South Sudanese government claim any moral or legal justification for charging him with murder, treason, or crimes against humanity without exposing the trial as a brazenly orchestrated attempt to whitewash its own history of atrocities?
Instead of addressing these grievances in line with the 2018 peace agreement, which stipulated that unified forces composed of the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces (SSPDF) and opposition elements should ensure security, the government deployed a lethal combination of SSPDF troops and tribal militias, including the Aguelek (Shilluk) and Abushok (Ngok Dinka). This deliberate use of armed militias and the Ugandan Air Force escalated violence and reveals the government’s strategy to maintain control through terror while shifting blame onto opposition forces.
The accusations of treason and financing terrorism collapse under scrutiny. Days before the March 16, 2025 airstrikes, top military and political leaders openly threatened revenge campaigns in Nasir and other locations, targeting areas they deemed a threat to the regime.
Within days, government forces, backed by Uganda’s military, bombed Nasir County and other Nuer-majority areas in Upper Nile, Jonglei, and Unity States—killing civilians, burning villages, and terrorizing entire communities. For the government to deflect the narrative from its own appalling actions onto opposition leaders and hope that the people of South Sudan would accept this twisted version is both a political and legal fantasy, to say the least. In reality, Kiir’s administration orchestrated the violence it now seeks to criminalize while masking a systematic campaign of terror as a fight against “rebels.”
Finally, the charge of crimes against humanity levied against opposition leaders is a grotesque distortion of reality. In Nasir and surrounding counties, homes were destroyed, chemical incendiary weapons were deployed, women and girls were sexually assaulted, and civilians were stripped of their basic livelihoods. The government’s use of armed militias and foreign military allies, combined with deliberate airstrikes on civilian areas, meets the very definition of crimes against humanity. To accuse opposition leaders of these acts while shielding state actors from accountability is not justice—it is political theater, designed to legitimize persecution under the guise of legality.
South Sudan’s courts face a historic test: will they serve justice or become instruments of oppression, granting a veneer of legality to a tyranny that has already claimed countless lives? The world must watch closely, for the blood spilled in Nasir is not the work of opposition leaders—it was a deliberate act of Kiir’s regime—now attempting to rewrite history from the dock.
The writer, Duop Chak Wuol, is an analyst, critical writer, and former editor-in-chief of the South Sudan News Agency. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado and focuses on geopolitics, security, and social issues in South Sudan and the broader East African region. His work has appeared in the leading regional and international outlets, including AllAfrica, Radio Tamazuj, The Independent (Uganda), The Arab Weekly, The Standard (Kenya), The Chronicle (Ghana), Sudan Tribune, and Addis Standard (Ethiopia). In 2017, the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation highlighted his article on Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s role in Ethiopia’s economic transformation. He currently focuses on emerging security trends, including tensions over the Nile waters, and foreign involvement in conflicts in South Sudan and Sudan. He can be reached at duop282@gmail.com.
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.