WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 (UPI) -- A U.S. Senate Committee on African affairs said Thursday it summoned a U.S. envoy and a top human rights leader to testify about South Sudanese policy.
The Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African affairs called on Donald Booth, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, and John Prendergast, co-founder of advocacy group Enough Project, to testify Feb. 26 about the troubled region.
The Sudanese government last year expressed frustration when Booth toured the region after taking over from former special envoy Princeton Lyman. The U.S. government helped broker a deal in 2005 that ended Sudan's civil war and helped pave the way to South Sudan's independence in 2012.
Fighting erupted along ethnic lines in South Sudan last month when South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, from the Dinka ethnic community, accused former Vice President Riek Machar, from the rival Nuer community, of trying to overthrow the government. Machar was sidelined when Kiir reshuffled his Cabinet in July, but denies waging a coup.
Prendergast told the independent Sudan Tribune this week "war crimes appear to have been committed by both sides in this conflict, and the nature of targeting on the basis of ethnicity has made a resolution of this war much more difficult."
