Honour Pope by ending conflict – Vatican

South Sudan's rival leaders should ‘honour’ Pope Francis' legacy by ending the country's conflict, the Vatican's diplomatic representative to the nation has said, according to BBC News. ‘We must try to make concrete in the daily life of South Sudan his ardent wish to see a true, durable peace, to see dialogue as the condition of that peace and to see the silencing of the weapons of war,’ Archbishop Séamus Patrick Horgan said. The Pope, who died aged 88 last Monday, had urged the two sides of South Sudan's conflict to forge a permanent peace during a historic trip to the east African nation in 2023. Recent violence has threatened to end a fragile peace agreement struck in 2018 between the civil war's two factions. The head of the UN mission in South Sudan, Nicolas Haysom, recently warned that the country was ‘on the brink of a return to full-scale civil war’. Tensions rose at the start of March, when a militia group allied to Vice-President Riek Machar during South Sudan's civil war clashed with the army. Horgan said Pope Francis had called for ‘no more bloodshed, no more conflict, no more violence’, adding that the late pontiff's message was still ‘relevant’. The Archbishop, who spoke to congregants attending Mass at St Theresa's Cathedral in the capital, Juba, on Friday, said it was ‘disheartening’ to see continuing reports of violence.

Meanwhile, South Sudan's opposition accused government forces of attacking one of its military positions near the capital on Tuesday as the fragile power-sharing agreement unravelled further, reports News24. The southern state of Central Equatoria, which includes the capital Juba, was split into areas controlled by the government and opposition forces under a 2018 deal that ended South Sudan's five-year civil war, in which an estimated 400 000 people died. The agreement brought President Salva Kiir and his long-time rival, Vice-President Riek Machar, together in a unity government. However, the deal has become threatened recently as Kiir moves to sideline Machar, who was placed under house arrest last month. The South Sudan People's Defence Forces attacked Panyume cantonment site from multiple directions on Tuesday, opposition forces spokesperson Lam Paul Gabriel said on Facebook. The assault was ‘followed by an aerial attack targeting and destroying civilians' property and public buildings in Panyume’. Gabriel called on civilians in four counties to evacuate, ‘to avoid being caught up in crossfire’.