United Nations peacekeepers have been deployed in South Sudan since 2005, initially to safeguard a peace deal with Sudan, later to support state-building processes. They have faced major new challenges since the eruption of civil conflict in December 2013.

The peacekeeping mission, UNMISS, was mandated by the UN Security Council to “deter violence including through proactive deployment and patrols,” as well as “to protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence.”

In a three-part analysis, author Daniel van Oudenaren argues that UNMISS adopted a cautious, defensive strategy, both militarily and politically, which hindered its pursuit of its mandated objectives.

The analysis relies on exclusive interviews with top UN officials, leaked and publically released UN documents, anonymous sources within the mission, and other independent reporting.

Part One, ‘The Gate’, describes the fall of the Akobo base in December 2013 and the effect this had in forcing the mission into a defensive siege posture.

The Gate

On the morning 20 December 2013, four UN helicopters touched down at a dirt airstrip in Akobo, a remote town in South Sudan’s Jonglei state. They had come to evacuate a platoon of UN peacekeepers who had surrendered the day before, and whose captors had agreed to their release.

The Indian soldiers, together with a handful of aid workers and UN civilian staff, had just spent the night under guard, sleeping in the open, at a base of the South Sudanese national army (SPLA).

Just across the airstrip from the SPLA base was the UN’s own outpost – the Akobo County Support Base – which on the previous day had been overrun by an armed mob of soldiers, police, and civilians, both men and women.

The 43 UN peacekeepers, defending a fortified position, equipped with armored personnel carriers and facing only an undisciplined mob, did not fight to defend the base – a few soldiers possibly excepted. They were overwhelmed by the size of the mob, which may have been a few hundred to possibly over a thousand people.

“If they had opened fire or tried to defend, that many more people would have lost their lives,” said the deputy chief of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), Toby Lanzer, in a later interview.

A UN document released four months after the attack revealed that the base perimeter was breached at the gates. The attackers, all ethnic Nuers, forced their way into the UN base, disarmed and robbed UN peacekeepers, and began to execute a group of civilians who had sought refuge inside the base just days earlier, mostly Dinkas but possibly other ethnicities as well.

“It was terrible and inexcusable and cowardly by the perpetrators but I’m not sure the guys on the ground [the peacekeepers] would have had any other option,” said Lanzer. “People do have the authority to take those decisions locally,” he said, referring to the decision to stand down. “They minimize the loss of life.”

At least 20 people, most of them ethnic Dinkas, are ‘presumed dead’ in the attack, though the exact number of victims is not known because UN personnel were secluded under guard while most of the executions were taking place. Two peacekeepers were also killed during the attack, and one seriously wounded, though in what circumstances exactly has not been made clear.

Later UN investigations revealed that an SPLA Lieutenant Colonel, loyal to the defected general Peter Gadet, was present at the scene during the attack, and was accused of having incited civilians and security forces to attack the base with the express intent of killing the Dinka civilians who had sought shelter inside.

‘Our greatest fear is another Akobo incident’

Two days after the Akobo attack, on 21 December, three US CV-22 Osprey warplanes began a descent into Bor, the state capital of Jonglei, with dozens of elite US Special Operations fighters on board.

Like the UN choppers that had gone to Akobo the day before, the US aircraft were on a mission to evacuate civilians from a UN base, but this time mostly American expatriate aid workers and South Sudanese with dual nationality.

South Sudanese fighters on the ground opened fire on the incoming warplanes – perhaps mistaking them for enemy targets – wounding four US Navy SEALs. The warplanes turned around, flying off to seek treatment for the wounded.

On the following day, the US government launched another mission with the same purpose, this time in coordination with UNMISS helicopters. Dozens were evacuated.

Described by US officials as a success, the evacuation mission appeared to have been fairly straightforward and attracted little scrutiny from the press. Yet a number of questions lingered: Why had the US military sought to take control of the evacuation rather than leaving the responsibility to UNMISS? And why only in Bor, and not at any other field sites in the country where there were also US relief workers?

The evacuation mission was in fact highly unusual. First, it was a high-risk operation involving a landing in a combat zone. Second, it was carried out by one of the most elite units in the US military. Third, it targeted the only site in Bor that was supposed to be safe – the UNMISS base.

The most plausible explanation is that the US government received information that the UNMISS base was at immediate risk of being overrun, just as the Akobo base had been. Relief agencies had apparently reached the same conclusion, or were encouraged to leave, since they ordered the evacuation of their personnel in spite of the fact that 15,000 desperately needy people had just flooded the base seeking protection.

An UNMISS military source in Bor later confirmed that the base, though larger and better defended than the Akobo one, was under threat and that the UN soldiers during this period began taking urgent measures to try to better fortify the base.

Lanzer, likewise, said in a UN-produced video after a trip to Bor, “It’s been difficult but we’ve been reinforcing the base. We have been literally digging and reinforcing the position for the last 36 hours. We will not allow a repeat of what has already struck us in Akobo.”

The military source also confirmed that the UN was aware of killings being carried out in Bor town and surrounding villages during this time but took no action in part because the peacekeepers would have been militarily over-exposed had they attempted to do so.

Within a week of the start of the crisis in South Sudan on 15 December, the defected SPLA 8th Division had overrun Bor town and sent tens of thousands of people running in fear. Government forces advanced to retake the town from the south while the opposition rallied reinforcements – mainly armed civilians – from the north, including from Akobo itself.

“Current situation at UNMISS Bor: we've been fortifying our defenses,” the military officer said in a message on 24 December. “We're continuously hearing gunfire and mortars outside, but none has harmed the UNMISS camp yet.”

“Our greatest fear is not the rebel SPLA though, as Gadet's forces have been rational and cooperative with our flights. Our greatest fear is the Nuer Youth, that they might cause another Akobo incident,” he explained.

“We can't really conduct any patrols at the moment,” said the same source.

Meanwhile, as the UN dug in, civilians in Bor and in surrounding villages came under attack. Numerous human rights violations during this period later would be recorded by the mission’s human rights division.

National government officials would portray the Dinka Bor as the primary or only victims of the December to January violence, but in reality both Nuers and Dinkas were targeted during the back-and-forth fighting in the area.

Just before Christmas, ahead of the government’s recapture of Bor, the same UNMISS source explained, “Apparently remnants of the Dinka-SPLA forces are hiding in the bush during the day and conducting guerrilla offense during the night on Nuer people.”

“All of the gunshot patients treated at UNMISS Bor so far have been Nuer. Of course, with Nuer-SPLA and Nuer-youth dominating Bor area, things are difficult for Dinkas as well.”

UNMISS, he said, would try to defend itself if it came under attack. But beyond the walls of the base, he warned, the people were in danger of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Fortress UNMISS

The feared attack on the Bor base – the ‘next Akobo’ – would not happen until four months later, and not from the expected quarter. But the fall of the Akobo base and the threats in Bor and elsewhere shocked the UNMISS leadership and forced the mission into a defensive siege posture from which it has still not recovered.

Akobo was the first outpost to be abandoned. Yuai, a town nearby also in Jonglei state, was the next. Two UN helicopters were shot while evacuating peacekeepers there and one of the choppers was downed. Meanwhile in Juba, many of the mission’s ‘non-essential’ civilian staff joined the exodus of development workers, diplomats and foreign businessmen fleeing the country.

As war enveloped more of South Sudan, UNMISS pulled back most of its forces into a number of larger bases and began to dig in. What began as a default security posture in response to immediate threats at the outset of the crisis soon became a deliberate strategy of bunkerization.

Overstretched and apparently intimidated, the UN leadership narrowed its focus to what it saw as the most obvious and achievable moral imperative – defending the tens of thousands of civilians who had fled into their bases.

Hilde Johnson, the head of UNMISS, later described the decision to allow tens of thousands of civilians to enter UN bases starting on the night of 15 December. She explained the decision as significant.

“The United Nations decided to open its gates. Thousands streamed in… As head of the peacekeeping mission in this country, there was no doubt in my mind; we had to give protection to the civilians caught up in the crisis,” she wrote.

In other words, Fortress UNMISS was open for business. Those who could reach the safety of the bases would be protected, while those on the outside would have to fare for themselves.

But a decision of perhaps greater significance was not to open the gates to civilians, but to keep them closed to peacekeepers who otherwise might have gone out. No UN patrols were seen in the streets of Juba on those first bloody days, nor in other towns at key moments of the crisis. 

From day one, the prerogative of protecting the civil population more broadly was abandoned, while the security of UNMISS personnel and premises themselves became paramount. At the time, this must have seemed to the UN leadership a pragmatic, low-risk, morally defensible approach, with limited but achievable objectives. And no doubt, it saved hundreds if not thousands of lives.

Yet it left the mission exposed and inflexible. UNMISS’ defenses would break under pressure, time and again. Its lack of political and public outreach would make it largely irrelevant in the political arena and leave it vulnerable to demonization by more assertive political forces.

Ultimately, UNMISS would become the direct target of incitement and the subject of repeated attacks, harassment and threats. Its defensiveness would prove a liability when faced with powerful interests seeking not only to drive the mission from the country but also to kill the civilians who had sought its protection.

In the national capital, snipers targeted civilians at the UNMISS Tongping base; gunmen wounded displaced people huddled at the Malakal base; rockets wounded a child at the Bentiu base; and civilians were shot, killed or abducted while bathing or fetching water just meters from the Bor, Malakal and Juba bases.

And in one of the single most tragic and iconic events of the war, at least 58 civilians were massacred at the Bor base when gunmen breached the perimeter and rampaged through a camp of Nuer civilians sheltering inside (See Part 2: The Wall).

Rather than true safe havens, the ‘Protection of Civilians’ sites within the UN bases have become like prison camps in which tens of thousands of people live in floods of mud, rainwater and sewage, suffering from measles, malnutrition and diarrhea, at risk of cholera.

These people are in real danger. But for the UN, more is at stake than just the lives of the people it has been called on to defend. The failures of this UN mission are increasingly calling into question foundational assumptions about UN roles and capabilities globally.

Within diplomatic circles, and particularly among the UN Security Council members, there has been a debate over how to address this situation: The mission cannot be abandoned, nor merely reinforced. Much of the discussion has been focused on how to define and delimit the mission’s mandate – its authority and objectives.

In fact, no matter how the mandate is defined, the mission will face the same apparently insurmountable challenges, handicapped by the same systemic problems, failing strategy and overstretched leadership.

Writing by Daniel van Oudenaren; reporting by Jason Patinkin, Klaas van Dijken and Daniel van Oudenaren.

File photo: UNMISS peacekeepers at a base in Bentiu in January 2014 (Courtesy photo/Radio Tamazuj)

Continue reading: Part Two, ‘The Wall,’ recounts a number of mass killings carried out in or near UNMISS bases, and some reasons why the peacekeepers have been unable to stop them.