May 11th 2018 (Nyamilepedia) – South Sudan’s president on Friday dismissed the country’s deputy minister of defense Lt. Gen. Thoi Chany Reat who was previously appointed on the ticket of Taban’s defunct SPLM-IO which was dissolved last week.
Gen. Thoi was dismissed by the president in a degree read out on the state-run South Sudan Broadcasting Corporation (SSBC) on Friday night. The degree however did not give any reason for the dismissal but as Taban’s group joins the government and the SPLM-IG faction under Kiir, the president is expected to dismiss anyone he no longer like and appoint who ever he want to appoint to any position.
Last month, Kiir dismissed foreign minister Deng Alor Kuol and appointed the cabinet affairs minister Elia Lomoro as the acting foreign minister. The position according to the collapsed 2015 peace agreement is suppose to be occupied by the country’s former SPLM political detainees led by the former SPLM Secretary General Pagan Amum Okiech. Lomoro is a member of an opposition party allied to the government of Southern Sudan.
South Sudan descended into civil war in December 2013 after forces loyal to the country’s president, Salva Kiir Mayardiit and his then Governor of Northern Bahr Al-Ghazal State Gen. Paul Malong Awan went door-to-door in the capital Juba killing civilians belonging to the Nuer ethnic group sparking a nation-wide protests from top army generals from the Nuer leading to a civil war.
A peace agreement signed in August 2015 by President Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar and negotiated under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the African Union (AU) in presence of Troika and other international observers collapsed in July 2016 following fighting at the presidential palace in Juba “J1” reportedly after President Kiir ordered a failed attempt to arrest the SPLM-IO leader Riek Machar.
Late last year, the IGAD decided to revive the peace agreement and had initiated a peace revival mechanism known as the High-Level Revitalization Forum (HLRF) to bring back to life the 2015 peace agreement. Previous rounds of the HLRF has been unsuccessful and the IGAD said it expect the warring parties to negotiate on the last round of talks on 17th of May.
Representatives of the negotiating parties are currently in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia after the mediation invited them for consultations.
