While international headlines are often dominated by South Sudan’s humanitarian crises, its floods, famine, and feuding elites, a more insidious war is unfolding below the radar. It is not fought with tanks or peace agreements but through silence, surveillance, and strangulation. Its targets are not generals or warlords, but poets, bloggers, lawyers, teachers, journalists, and human rights defenders. The people who dare to dream of a different South Sudan, one defined by rights, not repression.
This is a war of attrition. And right now, the defenders of democracy and human rights are losing.
A regime engineered for control
South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS), formed under the guise of national sovereignty, has morphed into the regime’s most ruthless instrument of repression. The NSS, particularly its Internal Security Bureau (ISB), has built a parallel state within the state. The NSS operates with sweeping, unchecked authority, detaining citizens without warrants, running clandestine torture sites like the infamous “Blue House,” and silencing dissent with brutal efficiency. Arbitrary detentions, sexual violence, unlawful renditions, and extrajudicial killings have become standard operating procedures. The agency’s ghost houses, secret detention centres shielded from judicial oversight, are where political opponents and civil society activists disappear, often indefinitely. This is not national security; it is organised state terror.
According to the United Nations, the NSS has become the nerve centre of repression in South Sudan, “primarily responsible for arbitrary and systematic restrictions on media and civil society,” and operating in “flagrant violation of the Constitution.” These conclusions, drawn from the 2023 report of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, are echoed in chilling testimonies. “Surveillance is everywhere,” a Juba journalist noted. “Sometimes it messes with your head.” “If you say anything against the government, be ready for death,” warned one exiled activist. Women human rights defenders face sexualised threats, “You’re talking about rape, wait til you experience one”, alongside constant misogynistic taunts like, “Who will marry you?” “Each time a UN report drops, we prepare ourselves,” for the worse, said a civil society leader, describing it as a “particularly careful” season. Security officers park outside family homes, demand “apologies,” and leave activists in a state of hyper-vigilance, depression, and chronic fear, never certain whether the next phone call or knock on the door will be their last.
But the NSS’s reach goes beyond brute force. It is the core engine of a sprawling patronage network that fuels South Sudan’s authoritarian survival. Functioning simultaneously as enforcer and benefactor, the NSS allocates state resources, doles out lucrative appointments, and protects regime insiders, creating a system where loyalty is rewarded with security, cash, and status, and dissent is met with disappearance.
Under General Akol Koor’s leadership until late 2024, the NSS became indistinguishable from the presidency itself, an unaccountable leviathan that answers only to one man, Salva Kiir yet dictates the lives of millions. Even his dismissal, amid swirling rumours of internal rivalry and international pressure, did little to disrupt this entrenched machinery. Instead, it marked a new phase in the regime’s consolidation.
Having outmanoeuvred and outlasted his most formidable internal rival, the equally ambitious General Akol Koor, President in waiting Bol Mel has now brought both Nilepet and the NSS firmly under his grip. Together, they form the dual engines of his rule: Nilepet fuels the financial backbone of a bloated patronage system, while the NSS enforces its loyalty through terror, surveillance, and systematic violence. With these two institutions at his disposal, Bol Mel is not just tightening control, he is institutionalising a regime model where oil money and secret police are the currency of survival and dominance.
The war against human rights defenders and democracy activists is not new but under the de facto tandem leadership of Bol Mel and Taban Deng Gai, the NSS has and will continue to turbocharge its operations. Recruitment quotas have jumped from 200 to 300 officers per state per year. Gulf states, including the UAE, have allegedly financed the acquisition of more surveillance equipment, while Israeli malware, like Pegasus and Verint’s interception tools, have equipped the regime with unprecedented capacity to track phones, emails, and encrypted messaging apps.
This new digital authoritarianism extends beyond borders. In cities like Nairobi, Kampala, and Addis Ababa, South Sudanese exiles are stalked by NSS agents, their hiding places infiltrated, and their relatives in Juba detained or punished in retaliation. Exiled activists describe receiving chilling texts: “We see you. You will be next.” And some, like Dong Samuel Luak and Aggrey Idri, abducted in Nairobi in 2017 and believed murdered in Juba days later, simply vanish without a trace.
Mechanics of oppression
In South Sudan, the war against civic space is not metaphorical, it is systematized, well-resourced, and escalating in sophistication. According to Amnesty International’s haunting report, “These Walls Have Ears,” the NSS has become the regime’s bluntest and most precise instrument of repression. But the violence isn’t only physical, it is legal, digital, structural, and psychological, and it targets every dimension of human rights defence.
- Criminalisation and legal harassment: South Sudan’s NSS operates under a legal mandate that is itself a violation of rights. The 2014 National Security Service Act, along with its sweeping 2024 amendment, grants the agency unchecked powers to arrest, surveil, and detain, powers routinely used to criminalize dissent. Peaceful assembly, independent journalism, and even social media commentary are met with fabricated charges such as “public incitement” or “national security threats.” Those who survive detention, often in infamous sites like the Blue House, describe prolonged incommunicado imprisonment, torture, rape, sodomy, mock trials, and denial of legal counsel. For female human rights defenders, the weaponization of rape and sexual threats has become routine, used not just to punish but to silence.
- Digital surveillance and invasive technologies: Once crude in its methods, the South Sudanese state has gone digital. Internal procurement records and third-party investigations (including those by The Sentry) reveal that the government spent over $760,000 on Israeli interception technologies such as Verint and NSO systems. These tools allow real-time phone cloning, email interceptions, and remote microphone and visual activation. Telecom companies, whether coerced or complicit, now serve as gateways to private information. Activists report unexplained disruptions to their encrypted apps, phishing attempts, and impersonation attacks. Those operating in exile in Nairobi or Kampala know their calls are listened to; they speak in code or not at all.
- Financial harassment and economic destitution: State repression in South Sudan is not limited to the ‘courtroom’ or the torture chamber, it extends to bank accounts, mobile money, and remittances. HRDs, especially those under NSS watch, often find their accounts frozen without explanation. Some are blacklisted from employment or denied tax clearances required for NGO operations. Others, especially exiles, are unable to renew their passports, rendering them stateless and ineligible for even the most basic services, ranging from enrolling children in school to renting an apartment. In some documented cases, family members of HRDs have been denied government jobs, expelled from university, or evicted from state support mechanisms as indirect punishment for their relatives’ activism.
- Gender-based repression and intersectional vulnerability: For women human rights defenders, the risks are not only higher, but they are also different. In interviews conducted by civil society monitors, WHRDs recount receiving explicit rape threats via text, often including information about their family members or home addresses. In detention, reports of sexual assault and threats of forced “confessions” via coerced nudity are disturbingly common. This intersection of gender and repression often extends beyond individual women to their communities, with female HRDs smeared publicly as “prostitutes” or “foreign agents,” stripping them of credibility and support.
- Lack of institutional protection or access to justice: The most alarming feature of South Sudan’s repression is the total absence of institutional redress. There are no independent oversight bodies with real power to investigate abuses by the NSS. Courts are easily manipulated, and few lawyers are willing, or able, to represent HRDs without facing repercussions themselves. National Human Rights Commission structures, where they exist, are underfunded and politically neutralised. Regional mechanisms, like the African Commission’s Special Rapporteur on HRDs, remain distant and reactive, often responding only after irreversible harm has occurred. HRDs under threat have no place to report, no hotline to call, and no rapid response mechanism to activate. In many cases, their only “protection” comes from staying silent or fleeing the country, neither of which guarantees safety.
- Exclusion from decision-making and donor support mechanisms: Despite being on the frontlines, South Sudanese HRDs are rarely at the table when donor strategies are formed. Funding models still prioritise large INGOs and intermediaries, bypassing informal defenders and community-based networks. This creates a cruel paradox: those closest to the risks are the furthest from the resources. Women, youth, and environmental defenders are especially excluded. Grassroots activists working in languages other than English, or outside the capital, are effectively invisible in donor databases. Funding that does exist is often short-term, overly bureaucratic, or culturally detached. There are no pooled relocation funds. No institutional grants to local protection networks. No dedicated digital security infrastructure for rural journalists or bloggers. And little to no psychosocial support for the trauma HRDs endure.
This architecture of repression is not accidental, it is designed. South Sudan has weaponised law, money, technology, and fear to dismantle the civic resistance that once dared to dream of a different country.
To reverse this, donors and policymakers must stop treating human rights support as a peripheral add-on to humanitarian assistance. The protection of HRDs must be central to any strategy that claims to build peace, democracy, or development. Otherwise, the architecture of repression will only grow taller, broader, and more impenetrable, one brick laid at a time, while the world looks away.
Names and faces of some of the victims
Yet fleeing the country does not guarantee protection. Exiled HRDs in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia live in legal limbo. Without valid passports, often confiscated or denied by South Sudanese embassies, they cannot access healthcare, work permits, or schools for their children. Many are trapped in urban poverty, too scared to speak and too poor to leave.
Some are quietly co-opted by the regime. After months of hunger and fear, activists are offered deals: cooperate with the NSS and your family will be left alone. Several exiles have admitted, off record, to being forced into reporting on fellow South Sudanese in exchange for survival.
This dynamic reveals a structural vulnerability. In South Sudan, where institutions are weak or captured, individuals are the last line of defence. When these individuals are crushed, economically, psychologically, and physically, the entire civic space collapses with them.
Rajaf Mohandis and Wani Micheal one of South Sudan’s most respected civic and youth leaders, are now living in exile after repeated threats on their life. Their offence? Advocating for a civic space protected by law and a constitution anchored in human dignity. Governor Kuel, who tried to shield protesting youth in Northern Upper Nile, has disappeared entirely from the public eye and left in exile. Abraham Awolich, the co-founder of The Sudd Institute, has endured a campaign of harassment for championing data-driven governance. And Dr Peter Biar, once a trusted policy adviser within the SPLM, has been blacklisted and sent to the Blue House and now in the US after publicly criticizing the government’s failure to uphold the peace deal.
These are not isolated cases. They are emblematic of a deliberate campaign of repression, a campaign targeting not just individuals, but the entire ecosystem of civic resistance.
The donor blind spot
The international community poured over $1.7 billion into South Sudan in humanitarian assistance in 2023 alone. These resources save lives. But they do not save the civic space. Despite countless resolutions, peace summits, and donor pledges, support for human rights defenders remains scandalously inadequate. Globally, less than 0.11% of official development assistance is earmarked for HRDs, and even less reaches them directly. In South Sudan, that percentage rounds down to near zero.
The bulk of funding continues to flow through large INGOs or multilateral agencies, bypassing the people documenting abuses, challenging impunity, and mobilising grassroots resistance. These defenders, lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, and independent journalists are the shock absorbers of civic life. Yet when they are targeted, they’re expected to survive on solidarity alone. Emergency relocation? Delayed. Legal support? Unavailable. Psychosocial care? Non-existent. By the time donor systems move, many defenders have already been silenced, through exile, co-option, imprisonment, or death.
This structural failure isn’t just about misallocated money; it’s a misreading of where democratic transformation happens. And that’s where the argument for investing in support for HRDs becomes impossible to ignore.
Protecting defenders demands more than general civic space support. It requires a focused, nimble, multi-level response that operates at the speed and specificity of threat. In South Sudan, this means building mechanisms that can respond when a journalist is abducted when a WHRD is receiving rape threats via text, when an activist’s passport is suddenly confiscated, or when a lawyer’s bank account is frozen after filing a case against the NSS.
A well-resourced HRD protection fund delivers not only protection but strategic leverage. When we protect those who protect our rights, the entire human rights ecosystem wins. In South Sudan, where repression is intimate and methodical, a HRD national funding mechanism is the firewall that protects democracy’s last line of defence. It transforms donors from passive observers into strategic allies, enabling them to shift from reactive statements to proactive protection. This is not about charity, it is a high-return investment in the people who keep truth alive when institutions collapse. Protect one defender, and you protect a hundred movements. Fund one safe house, and you sustain the oxygen for dissent.
In short: if donors are serious about rights, not just rhetoric, they must follow the threat, and fund those standing in its path.
This mismatch is not just unjust. It’s deadly.
Strategic shifts that matter
To reverse this trend, donors and regional actors must make six bold changes:
- Fund the individual, not just the institution: Establish rapid-response funds managed by regional NGOs (including increasing allocations to AfricanDefenders) that can disburse small grants within 72 hours, covering relocation, safe housing, legal fees, and psychosocial support.
- Equip the digital battlefield: Provide encrypted phones, VPNs, and training in secure communications. Surveillance is a weapon; activists must be armed with countermeasures.
- Build regional protection networks: Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia may wish to consider adopting a guarantee of non-refoulement and legal residency for HRDs. IGAD and the AU should develop regional protocols for HRD protection, modelled on the African Commission’s Guidelines on Freedom of Association. These frameworks should also provide for the issuance of travel documents, outside of traditional refugee status arrangements, to enable at-risk activists to continue their advocacy and organisational work for change in their home countries while in exile.
- Sanction the architects of repression: The UN, U.S., U.K., EU, and other countries must impose targeted sanctions on the NSS and key NSS figures, whose web of over 125 front companies bankrolls the NSS’s operations. Financial intelligence units must trace and freeze these assets.
- Integrate support for WHRDs and marginalised groups: Women activists, youth rights defenders, and environmental whistleblowers face compounded risks. Support must be intersectional and long-term.
A Pan-African imperative
This is more than South Sudan’s reckoning. If the AU and IGAD won’t protect those defending Africa’s future, their moral credibility collapses. Pan-Africanism must be more than a slogan. It must reach the village activist in Wau, the exile in Nairobi, the student protester in Juba.
South Sudanese human rights defenders are not asking to be rescued. They are asking to be supported. Strategically. Substantially. Sustainably. They are the eyes, ears, and conscience of a country that has been brutalized by war and betrayed by its leaders. If we abandon them, we abandon the idea of a democratic South Sudan.
The next time donors allocate funds for humanitarian kits or peace dialogues, they must ask: who will hold this government accountable when the cameras are gone? Who will expose the next massacre? Who will document the next theft?
Without defenders, there is no democracy. Without democracy, there is no peace.
It’s time to choose.
The writer, Dr. Remember Miamingi, is a human rights lawyer, governance specialist, and advisor to the Reclaim Campaign. He has worked extensively across Africa on transitional justice, human rights, and civic engagement.
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.