The rivalry between President Salva Kiir and his first vice president, Riek Machar, ratcheted up from tense to combustible last week when Kiir’s defense minister led a convoy of troops to Machar’s residence, disarmed his bodyguards and detained him.

Many South Sudanese fear a repeat of the country’s last civil war, which raged from 2013 to 2018 and killed some 400,000 people. In an ominous development, Machar’s party says his arrest has effectively shredded the peace deal that ended that conflict.

“Another war will destroy our lives,” said Choul Magil, whose brother and father were killed in the earlier war. Magil fled to neighboring Sudan with his mother and sister after his brother and father were killed at the war’s start. Now 40 and again living in South Sudan, he reports unusually large numbers of soldiers on the streets of Juba, the capital.

South Sudan, meanwhile, is facing worsening economic pressure. A typical resident has seen their income contract to less than a quarter of what it was at independence in 2011, according to the International Monetary Fund. More than half of South Sudan’s 11 million people are experiencing hunger.

The country broke from Sudan after decades of war that pit the predominantly Christian and animist south against the mostly Muslim north. Ethnic rifts soon surfaced in the south, exploding into violence between Kiir’s Dinka people and Machar’s Nuer, a rivalry that remains highly flammable.

“The big fear is that the political deterioration leads to large-scale ethnic violence,” said Alan Boswell, Horn of Africa project director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
The 2018 peace pact created a fragile power-sharing arrangement, in which Kiir controlled 60% of cabinet seats and gave both sides a cut of oil revenues, the greatest source of wealth in what the IMF considers the world’s poorest country.

The unity government has now fractured amid a worsening economic crisis, caused by historic flooding, a flailing currency and the interruption of oil exports piped through war-torn Sudan. Unpaid troops and militia fighters roam the countryside wreaking violence and pillaging.
Kiir has already postponed elections six times since coming to power in 2005, when South Sudan was a semiautonomous area of Sudan. His current term ends next year.

“It’s almost starting to mirror the scenario of 2013,” said Edmund Yakani, a South Sudanese human-rights activist and head of a Juba-based nonprofit, the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization. “Ethnicity is taking dominance, and we are using ethnicity as a political ticket to access power. The situation is alarming.”

Early last month, a militia known as the White Army, dominated by Machar’s Nuer ethnic kinsmen, overran an army garrison in the northern town of Nasir. Militia fighters detained hundreds of government troops, including the Dinka base commander, Gen. David Majur Dak.

Dak and dozens of wounded troops were later killed after White Army gunmen fired at a United Nations helicopter attempting to evacuate them, according to U.N. and South Sudanese officials.

Renewed fighting between government forces and ethnic militias has displaced some 100,000 people in the oil-producing Upper Nile state, forcing many to seek refuge in neighboring Ethiopia, aid agencies say.

Ugandan warplanes, backing up Kiir’s troops, have struck civilian settlements in the town of Nasir, killing dozens of people, according to local activists. The airstrikes have targeted militia positions, not civilians, South Sudan Information Minister Michael Makuei said.
A Ugandan military spokesman didn’t comment when asked about the allegations

Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, commander of Uganda’s military and the son of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, vowed on social media to suspend military operations if the White Army stopped its offensive attacks. “I am tired of killing Nuer,” he wrote.