NEW YORK (AA) – South Sudan’s embattled former Vice President Riek Machar left for neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the United Nations announced Thursday.
The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or MONUSCO, carried out an operation to extract Machar, his wife and 10 others from a location inside DRC “on humanitarian grounds” to transfer them to Congolese authorities, UN spokesperson Farhan Haq told reporters.
DRC authorities who requested his extraction Wednesday and “it was felt that the MONUSCO was the best party that could move him from one area to another one” near the border with South Sudan, Haq said.
Machar, who consented to the operation, is currently in the care of Congolese authorities, Haq said, declining to confirm his location.
Haq did not refer to an official asylum application by Machar at this time.
Machar’s spokesman, James Gatdet Dak, said in a statement late Wednesday that the former vice president who went into hiding three weeks ago, would return to the South Sudanese capital, Juba, only after a neutral regional force was deployed in the city.
Dak confirmed Machar had been successfully relocated outside the country Wednesday, exactly a year after he inked a peace deal with his rival, President Salva Kiir.
“This is after more than one month after President Kiir and his forces attempted to eliminate him, right from the Palace in Juba, in his residence at Jebel and in the bushes around Juba,” the spokesman said.
A peace deal was reached last August and a transitional government of national unity was formed in April by Kiir and Machar after tens of thousands of victims were killed in fighting, and more than 2 million residents were uprooted from their homes since December 2013.
Fighting broke out again in early July between troops loyal to both men in Juba, in a move the international community says would return the young nation back to an all-out civil war. At least 300 victims were killed in the fighting, which the UN said involved targeted ethnic killings and rapes, mostly by soldiers loyal to Kiir.
The United Nations last week renewed the mandate of its peacekeepers and added an additional 4,000 protection forces with a tough mandate to protect civilians in South Sudan, which the government said would undermine the country’s sovereignty.