UN, US failed to prevent ethnic cleansing in South Sudan

YEI, South Sudan – When South Sudan's Yei region turned violent in the midst of the country's civil war last year, a handful of UN and US officials begged their leaders for help. Government soldiers were burning villages and slaughtering men, women and children, they warned.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears. The UN did not send peacekeeping troops to stay in Yei, and the US continued to support South Sudan's military, possibly in violation of US law, according to an AP investigation based on dozens of internal documents and interviews.

Yei became the center of a nationwide campaign of what the UN calls ethnic cleansing, which has created the largest exodus of civilians in Africa since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. More than 1 million people have now fled to Uganda, mostly from the Yei region. And tens or even hundreds of thousands of people in South Sudan have died.