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Thousands of Christians in South Sudan held a procession through the capital city, Juba, on Friday to commemorate Good Friday, a Christian observance.
The group prayed for peace and re-enacted the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation, plunged into a civil war shortly after its independence and has been plagued by extreme poverty and corruption since then. Over 400,000 people were killed in the civil war between 2013 and 2018.
Intensifying fighting between government and opposition forces is stoking fears of a return to all-out civil war.
A 2018 power-sharing deal between President Salva Kiir and his long-time rival Riek Machar has been unravelling since 2025, with clashes in multiple areas.
“We are now asking Jesus Christ himself to intervene. All efforts have been tried but our leaders… don’t want peace,” Santo Loku Pio Doggale, the auxiliary bishop of Juba, told a tightly packed crowd.
“They want only to oppress. They want only to divide. They want to fight.”
“We have had… too much suffering in South Sudan. We pray earnestly, my dear friends, that it may come to an end,” the Vatican’s envoy to South Sudan, Archbishop Seamus Patrick Horgan, said at the march.
Lucia Peter, a resident of Juba, told AFP that the Christian-majority country prays for peace daily.
“We are praying for peace every day. We grew up in war,” said fellow resident Joseph Kenyi Samuel. “We need to have peace, a new page for South Sudan,” said Peter.
United Nations experts said this week that South Sudan was at a “critical juncture”, warning that the scale and severity of the violence was alarming, including sexual violence against women and girls, and mass displacement.
