Canadian diplomat queries company’s arms sale to South Sudan
September 5, 2017 (KAMPALA) – A former Canadian ambassador has questioned the ethics of a Canadian company’s sale of dozens of armoured vehicles to the South Sudanese military, reports say.
Coghlan reportedly said he was tipped off to the export deal in early 2015 on social media when someone sent him a photo of the South Sudan military using the armoured vehicles to attack rebel positions.
“I followed up and the allegation was correct,” he reportedly writes in his book, Collapse of a Country, which was published this month.
Coghlan was first posted to South Sudan’s capital in 2012, a year after it won independence and became the world’s newest country.
Last year, United Nations experts’ report said South Sudan purchased 173 armoured vehicles from Streit in the United Arab Emirates in 2014, after the civil war began.
Lawyers in the federal government reportedly said the vehicle export could not be prohibited by export-control laws because the vehicles were manufactured at an overseas Streit factory in the United Arab Emirates, even though it was a Canadian-owned company.
Coghlan, according to Mail and Globe, observed that the vehicle export made it possible for people to accuse Canadian diplomats of “hypocrisy” for criticizing South Sudan’s crimes while a Canadian company was simultaneously selling arms to the East African nation.
In his book, the former Canadian ambassador reportedly described South Sudan’s city of Malakal as “a lawless wasteland where all that mattered was your ethnicity and the calibre of your weapon.”
Several reports from UN agencies UN and other human-rights entities have implicated the parties involved in the South Sudanese conflict of gross human rights violations such as massacres, rapes and lootings.
More than 80 humanitarian workers have been killed; food convoys looted and relief agencies harassed by government troops and rebels as the agencies try to provide aid to the displaced civilians.
In one incident, South Sudanese soldiers hijacked and looted a large convoy of UN food aid, including $300,000 in Canadian food aid, Coghlan wrote, and that the UN wanted the incident covered up.
Under a resolution the UN Security Council approved in August, former Secretary General, Ban ki-Moon’s list of South Sudan government obstructions of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was meant to trigger a council meeting within a few days to consider imposing an arms embargo and other options on the young nation.
The world’s youngest country, which gained independence in 2011 from Sudan, saw civil war break out in December 2013. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and both President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar have been accused of war crimes.
(ST)