South Sudanese security forces detained senior figures aligned with Vice-President Riek Machar, including opposition military commander Gen Gabriel Duop Lam and oil minister Puot Kang Chol, in a sequence of events that prompted warnings about the country’s fragile peace agreement.
Lam leads the military wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition, or SPLM-IO. He was taken into custody on Tuesday along with other senior party officials. Chol, another close Machar ally, was detained by security forces during the night. The opposition said it did not know how the detainees were being treated or where they were held.
Troops from the South Sudanese army also surrounded Machar’s home in the capital, Juba, overnight before withdrawing. Other senior military officials linked to him were placed under house arrest, according to the BBC’s reporting.
An SPLM-IO spokesperson called Lam’s detention a grave breach of the 2018 peace accord that ended five years of civil war. The spokesperson, Puok Both Baluang, said the opposition was trying to prevent escalation but wanted its partners in the agreement to show the political will needed to keep the country from returning to conflict.
The government offered a different account. Its spokesperson, Michael Makuei, said the detained opposition officials were in conflict with the law. He also relayed President Salva Kiir’s insistence that South Sudan would not go back to war. The supplied evidence did not identify specific charges against those arrested.
The detentions followed reports of fighting in Upper Nile state, where the White Army militia had seized a strategically located town near the Ethiopian border after clashes with government troops. The militia fought alongside Machar during the civil war, and some military figures loyal to Kiir accused Machar’s allies of supporting it. Machar’s spokesperson argued that the violence could have been avoided if the national army’s leadership had followed the peace agreement.
South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011. Civil war erupted two years later after Kiir dismissed his cabinet and accused Machar of attempting a coup. The conflict killed about 400,000 people and displaced 2.5 million before the 2018 agreement was reached. Lam’s opposition forces had still not been integrated into the national army. The detentions therefore also exposed military arrangements that remained incomplete years after the accord.
The United Nations and African Union warned that the Upper Nile violence could spread. A Juba-based peace advocate also cautioned that renewed war was possible without intervention by the country’s top leaders. Those concerns were intensified by repeated delays to South Sudan’s first election, which at the time was scheduled for 2026.
