U.S. Kept Quiet After Americans Were Attacked by Soldiers in South Sudan

 
By Christopher Dickey

PARIS — It’s been more than a month since soldiers in South Sudan, a country that gets more than a billion dollars a year in U.S. assistance, singled out American aid workers for beatings and abuse amid an orgy of theft, intimidation, and gang rapes.

The U.S. embassy in Juba knew what was going on when it was happening, but proved powerless to stop it. And the Obama administration’s public reaction? Nothing until the story finally broke Monday through Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press.

“The United States is outraged by reports of assaults and rapes of civilians,” began a statement by Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as if her office and the administration had just discovered what was going on in the capital of a country that the United States had helped win its independence five years ago.

In fact, as Power conceded in her statement, on the day of the atrocities at a hotel complex called The Terrain, popular with foreign aid workers in the South Sudanese capital of Juba, the U.S. embassy was kept informed by victims and witnesses from the beginning.  

“We are deeply concerned that United Nations peacekeepers were apparently either incapable of or unwilling to respond to calls for help,” said Power, who made her reputation in 2003 with her Pulitzer-winning book “A Problem From Hell” about the world’s failure to stop genocide in the Balkans and Rwanda. 

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Source: The Daily Beast