South Sudan’s Bishops Denounce Wrongful Use of “military action”

“The past few months of the year 2025 have witnessed a rise in violence and insecurity. This is plunging our people once again into fear, displacement, suffering, and hopelessness,” the Catholic Bishops say in their four-page statement following the five-day meeting held at the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) offices in Juba. All the incidences of insecurity and violence, the Catholic Bishops say, “are happening because of the lack of implementation of the security arrangements as stipulated in the Revitalized Peace Agreement of 2018.”

“Military action is being wrongly embraced instead of genuine dialogue, as a solution to addressing political and social differences,” the Bishops say in the statement released after the meeting that was held under the theme, “Let justice and peace embrace," drawn from Psalms”. Following the manner in which the government and opposition leaders are handling conflicts in the country, the Bishops query if they have the South Sudanese people at heart or are just “obsessed with the pursuit of power and wealth.”

Despite their constant calls for peace, the Catholic Bishops in South Sudan say, “It is with heavy hearts of grief that we are now conveying our dismay about what we have been confronting daily; reports of aerial bombardments and shelling, armed ambushes on roads, rivers, and highways”. They further lament “military confrontations, shrinking of civic space and media restrictions, deadly clashes at cantonment sites and villages, abductions and rapes, devastating raids at community levels, detentions and alarming hostilities and insecurity across South Sudan.”

“We see communities torn apart, innocent lives lost, people injured, forced recruitment of the infamous gang groups commonly known as niggers, and torontos and families forced to flee their homes in fear and pain, exacerbated by economic hardships and hunger,” they say. The Bishops further lament that South Sudan has allowed itself to return to this “unfortunate spiral of conflict and large-scale violence” despite past experiences of “deadly guns and senseless killings.”

They pose, “Have we not seen too often how violence has silenced the hopes of our people and crippled peace and development?”

The Catholic Bishops in South Sudan fault what they term as repeated assurances of the country’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit on not taking the country back to war, and also the declared public statements of opposition leaders that they are committed to implementing the peace agreements. Despite all the assurances, the Catholic Bishops say, “We continue to witness a lack of concrete steps for peace and reconciliation.”

To address the conflicts and foster peace and reconciliation in the country, the Bishops “call for immediate, unimpeded humanitarian access across all conflict zones”. They advocate for the “establishment of protected corridors for aid delivery, granting tax exemption on humanitarian goods for faith-based and humanitarian organizations serving the vulnerable and suffering people of South Sudan.”

Making reference to the words of Pope Francis during his ecumenical visit to the country in 2023 when he said, “Brothers and sisters, it is time for peace!... No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence…,” the Catholic Bishops say, “it is time to turn the page.”

“We equally echo these wise words with urgent insistence to put them into practice so that South Sudan could be seen as a good country among the community of nations,” they say.

Silas Isenjia – ACI Africa