A village elder from the town of Manyabol described a massacre in May where at least a dozen people were killed after the military opened fire on civilians. Government soldiers rampaged through the market in Pibor in January, killing seven civilians and burning 150 huts, local leaders said.

Image Attacks on civilians have taken place in Jonglei State. Credit... The New York Times

One Pibor resident, Mary Tarawach, said she had hoped that the troops would treat her decently as long as she served them stew and bread at her tiny dirt-floor restaurant in the market here. It did not help. Sometimes they hit her, even as her stomach swelled with a child. Finally, she went to work in May and found the same soldiers looting the market and destroying her business. She ran, but they caught and taunted her, accusing her of being the wife of the local rebel leader, David Yau Yau, also a member of the Murle ethnic group.

“They pushed me and they stomped on my stomach,” Ms. Tarawach said. “The child came out. The child is dead.”

The Pibor market, once thriving, remained empty one recent afternoon, the doors to the corrugated metal stalls creaking on their hinges as they swung open and closed, the grass now knee-high. “It’s a ghost city,” said Peter Guzulu, coordinator for the Murle Peace Committee, a group representing local interests.

In another episode, soldiers fatally shot two women in Pibor on July 31. Under pressure to act, the army chief of staff had the two soldiers responsible arrested, part of the new effort to crack down on abuses. The government also recently arrested a senior military commander over allegations of abuse by troops here in Pibor.

“Those who will be found to have committed those abuses will actually be punished,” Barnaba Marial Benjamin, the foreign minister appointed after the government reshuffle, said last month.

Human Rights Watch issued a report this month documenting nearly 100 killings by government forces, saying that “the potential for further grave violations and violence is high,” in part because of anti-Murle sentiment.