South Sudan needs arms embargo; leaders killing civilians - U.N. experts

The United Nations Security Council should place an arms embargo on South Sudan, say experts, who signaled that the oil-rich country's President Salva Kiir and a rebel leader who was once his deputy qualify to be blacklisted over a brutal two-year civil war.

The latest confidential report by the United Nations panel of experts, seen by Reuters on Monday, states that Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar are still completely in charge of their forces, implying that the pair are directly to blame for killing civilians and other actions that warrant targeted sanctions.

The 15-member Security Council has long-threatened to impose an arms embargo, but veto power Russia, backed by council member Angola, has been reluctant to support such a move.

A political dispute between Kiir and Machar sparked the civil war. But it has widened and reopened ethnic fault lines between Kiir's Dinka and Machar's Nuer people. More than 10,000 people have been killed.

The experts added that "there is clear and convincing evidence that most of the acts of violence committed during the war, including the targeting of civilians ... have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals at the highest levels of the Government and within the opposition."

However, they say that the government appears responsible for a larger share of the bloodshed in the oil-rich country.

The South Sudan mission to the United Nations in New York was not immediately available to comment on the report's accusations.

U.N. peacekeepers in South Sudan are also "regularly attacked, harassed, detained, intimidated and threatened."

The conflict in South Sudan, whose 2011 secession from Sudan had long enjoyed the support of the United States, has torn apart the world's youngest country. The experts said some 2.3 million people have been displaced since war broke out in December 2013, while some 3.9 million face severe food shortages.

The U.N. report also describes how Kiir's government bought at least four Mi-24 attack helicopters in 2014 from a private Ukrainian company at a cost of nearly $43 million.