4th anniversary of December 15th

 

On December 16th, 2017, Nuer Community and members of the wider community of South Sudan in the United Kingdom gathered in Birmingham to commemorate innocent lives that are being lost since December 15th, 2013, the day when the ongoing genocide in South Sudan was initiated by government of the country.

 

Between Dec 15th and Dec 18th, 2013, twenty-one thousand innocent Nuer children, their mothers and fathers were brutally killed in their houses and on streets in Juba by the government of South Sudan. Victims were oblivious, everyone was in chock, and the motives are yet to be fully understood, but the killings were pre-planned, funded and executed by the state, and were specifically targeted on the Nuer. The perpetrators were selective by identifying Nuer people through either traditional scares or combination of both names and inability to speak Dinka language. Some innocent Dinka people, who share cultural characteristics with the Nuer, were erroneously eliminated too.

As stochastic criminal situation was instantly introduced by South Sudan government, the UN and its peace keeping forces in the capital, Juba, did not hesitate to open its gates to fleeing Nuer survivors. That was the onset of the ongoing genocide in the country of South Sudan, emergence of UN-protected camps and first exodus since independence of the East African country in 2011.

 

For the last four years, the Nuer Community, wherever its members reside, has kept organizing annual commemoration services for innocent lives that are being lost since December 15th, 2013. The blood of innocent lives brutally killed in Juba and in other parts of South Sudan shall continue to cordially unite the community in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.