New Estimate Sharply Raises Death Toll in South Sudan

NAIROBI, Kenya - As fighting continued to rage across South Sudan on Thursday, a new estimate raised the death toll in the conflict significantly and a senior American official questioned the government's insistence that a coup attempt was responsible for setting off the violence and instability there.

The International Crisis Group said Thursday that the number of dead from the conflict was close to 10,000 people, a major increase from earlier estimates by the United Nations.

'Given the intensity of fighting in over 30 different locations in the past three weeks, we are looking at a death toll approaching 10,000,' said Casie Copeland, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research and advocacy institution.

The United Nations special representative for South Sudan, Hilde Johnson, said on Dec. 26 that more than 1,000 people had been killed.

Even then, some analysts said they suspected that the United Nations figures were low, and that was before two more weeks of sustained, often intense fighting with heavy weapons. Still, some officials cautioned that the 10,000 figure was more speculation than a hard count.

Hervé Ladsous, the United Nations under secretary for peacekeeping operations, said after a meeting with the Security Council on Thursday that the death toll probably was substantially higher than the 1,000 figure reported in late December, right after the fighting began.

'We are not able to provide final figures,' he said. 'We know it will be very substantially in excess of the 1,000 figure.'

The fighting began in a military barracks in Juba on Dec. 15. President Salva Kiir said that there had been an attempted coup, led by his former vice president, Riek Machar. The issue of whether there was a coup plot remains a significant stumbling block in the peace negotiations to end the conflict, and on Thursday a senior State Department official challenged the version of events put forward by the South Sudanese government.

'We've not seen any evidence that this was a coup attempt, but it certainly was the result of a huge political rift between Riek Machar and the president,' Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the assistant secretary of state for Africa, told a Senate committee in Washington on Thursday.

Mr. Machar has said that the 11 senior politicians held as suspected plotters have to be released before there can be a cease-fire. Mr. Kiir has said they must be tried for their conspiracy to overthrow the government and cannot be freed summarily.

'The United States strongly believes that the political prisoners currently being held in Juba must be released,' Ms. Thomas-Greenfield said. 'And each day that the conflict continues, the risk of an all-out civil war grows as ethnic tensions and more civilians are killed, injured or forced to flee.'

She added that the humanitarian situation had worsened with every passing day. More than 200,000 people have been displaced inside South Sudan, including about 60,000 taking shelter at United Nations compounds. More than 30,000 refugees have fled to neighboring countries like Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia and Sudan.

Thursday was the ninth anniversary of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that created the framework for South Sudan's independence from Sudan. It was also the third anniversary of the referendum in which an overwhelming number of people officially voted to split off and create their own nation, South Sudan.

Now, the conflict is nearing the one-month mark, with neither side prepared to give ground in negotiations or on the battlefield. Col. Philip Aguer, a spokesman for the South Sudanese military, said that there had been fighting on Thursday near Bentiu, the capital of the oil-producing Unity State.

In Bor, the government's military, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, 'is fighting a huge number of armed civilians together with the forces that defected from the army some weeks ago with all their equipment,' Colonel Aguer said.

The World Health Organization had no figures on overall fatalities in the conflict, but it had documented 2,566 cases of gunshot wounds as of Wednesday, spread across six of South Sudan's 10 states. Displaced people have described both indiscriminate killing of civilians as well as targeted attacks against ethnic groups.

'We are aware that there might have been large numbers of human rights violations,' said Ariane Quentier at the United Nations Mission in South Sudan. 'We are trying to collect evidence and document what has happened and on what scale.' Ms. Quentier said that with the continuing fighting, access had been difficult.

John Prendergast of the Enough Project, a nonprofit antigenocide organization, cautioned that precise death tolls would be difficult until it was safer for researchers to get to the scenes of the worst fighting. 'The most accurate way - mortality study - is not possible now because of lack of access to the hottest conflict zones,' he said.

The United Nations has said that it will deploy an additional 5,500 peacekeepers, but the organization now says it will take another four to eight weeks to get the additional troops on the ground. Two weeks after the Security Council authorized the reinforcements, only police units have arrived in South Sudan to help with crowd control inside camps for displaced people.