The government of South Sudan on Friday denounced what it called a groundless report that accuses the president and other figures engaged in the country’s civil war of fomenting violence in order to amass illegal wealth.
The report, released on Monday by the Sentry, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to expose corruption in Africa, said that relatives and associates of President Salva Kiir, as well as his political rival, Riek Machar, a former vice president, had enriched themselves with impunity.
It asserted that the leaders of both sides had stoked ethnic hatred and carried out atrocities, including systematic rape and killing, as a pretext for seizing more wealth in South Sudan, the world’s youngest country.
The authors of the report said the investigation took two years and was based on public information and documents provided by sources that required anonymity for safety reasons.
The report concluded that the principal antagonists in South Sudan and their associates had “benefited financially from the continuing war and have effectively ensured that there is no accountability for their human rights violations and financial crimes.”
In a statement, Mr. Kiir’s spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny, questioned the motives of the report’s authors, suggesting that the anonymity they provided to the sources in the report called into question whether “those sources really exist.”
Mr. Ateny said he was “shocked by the irresponsibility shown by the so-called investigators of this report.” He said the report would aggravate the mutual distrust that had punctuated the conflict, which erupted nearly three years ago.
“Would any Western leader accept to be accused in such a groundless way?” Mr. Ateny said in the statement. “We will make sure that each of those allegations are challenged with a counter forensic and legal analysis of the shortcomings of this report.”
Representatives of Mr. Machar, whose whereabouts is unknown, have not responded to requests for comment about the report.
Mr. Ateny’s response came after the government took steps to limit access to the report’s findings in South Sudan. On Wednesday, a South Sudanese newspaper, The Nation Mirror, which had published some of the findings of the Sentry report, was ordered closed indefinitely, Reuters reported.
John Prendergast, a human-rights activist and former United States government official who founded the Sentry along with George Clooney, the activist actor, said Friday that he was not surprised at the South Sudan government’s response. “We stand behind our report,” he said.
The South Sudan conflict has created a humanitarian crisis, uprooting more than two million civilians and leaving more than five million — roughly half the country’s population — in need of food.