South Sudanese Christians hold Good Friday march for peace

Thousands of people joined a march for peace on Good Friday in South Sudan, where intensifying fighting between government and opposition forces is stoking fears of a return to all-out civil war.

Marchers in the majority-Christian country, the world's youngest nation, held a procession through the capital, Juba, complete with prayers for peace and a re-enactment of Jesus's crucifixion.

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but soon descended into civil war and remains mired in extreme poverty and corruption.

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."

United Nations experts said this week that South Sudan was at a "critical juncture", warning the scale and severity of the violence was alarming, including sexual violence against women and girls, and mass displacement.

"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.

South Sudan's civil war killed more than 400,000 people between 2013 and 2018.

"We are praying for peace every day," Juba resident Lucia Peter told AFP.

"We grew up in war," said fellow resident Joseph Kenyi Samuel. "We need to have peace, a new page for South Sudan."