South Sudan opposition says vice president’s arrest ends peace deal

South Sudan’s opposition has said that the overnight arrest of First Vice President Riek Machar, longtime rival to President Salva Kiir, has invalidated their 2018 peace deal and risked plunging the country back into war.

A convoy of 20 heavily armed vehicles entered Machar’s residence in the capital, Juba, late on Wednesday and arrested him, according to a statement issued by a member of his party – a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has been building for weeks in the world’s youngest country.

media’s Malcolm Webb, reporting from Nairobi, said that “military vehicles came to his [Riek Machar’s] residence in the night and forcibly disarmed all of his guards. They removed all of the phones and the laptops from the property, arrested the guards and took them away to an unknown location, leaving only Machar at the residence.”

Webb said that “the area has been cut off by soldiers. In other parts of the city, life is continuing as normal. This comes off the back of weeks of escalating violence which IO [the Sudan People’s Liberation Army In Opposition, or SPLM/IO] describes as a series of attacks by President Kiir’s forces, in breach of the peace deal.”

A power-sharing deal between Kiir and Machar has been gradually unravelling, threatening a return of the civil war that killed around 400,000 people between 2013 and 2018.

“The prospect for peace and stability in South Sudan has now been put into serious jeopardy,” said Oyet Nathaniel Pierino, deputy chairman of Machar’s party.

There was widespread international condemnation, including from the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), warning that the reported arrest left the country “on the brink of relapsing into widespread conflict”.