Nowadays in South Sudan the most prevalent building structures are none other than a bang-up old shipping container. They are 8-by-20-ft metal boxes which were once used to transport goods across the ocean. At present they serve a range of facilities in the form of homes, classrooms, play yards, medical clinics and even hotels.
The most horrifying part of this is that the shipping containers are being used as an ad-hoc prisons for government detainees says a new report from Amnesty International. Besides they are poor at ventilation and the containers turn into oven in the baking heat. Last year more than fifty prisoners died in one container incident.
The report elucidates on account of how dozens of detainees were locked in a container near the capital Juba. The prisoners were fed only once or twice a week and they were rarely given drinking water.
The dire conditions, says Amnesty, have already resulted in several deaths. “Detainees are suffering in appalling conditions and their overall treatment is nothing short of torture,” said Muthoni Wanyeki, Amnesty International’s Regional Director for East Africa, the Horn and the Great Lakes.
This is not the first time Amnesty has documented the use of shipping containers as prisons in South Sudan. In March they released a damning report about an October 2015 incident in which government forces asphyxiated more than 50 men by shutting them in a shipping container in Leer County, in October 2015. The only sole survivor of the massacre, was a 13-year-old boy, who shares his suffering in chilling detail.
Source: Time
