Despite its refusal to produce a clear evaluation of the casualties, UNMISS has been effective in documenting a large number of human rights violations. In May of last year, it released a lengthy report on the crisis, which shed light on the myriad offenses committed by both the SPLA and the rebel forces.

However, an unknown quantity of abuses — some of which could constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity — have not been researched by UNMISS, partly due to decisions by staff to avoid sensitive areas and blatant opposition to investigations.

“U.N. staff have been intimidated by security forces in South Sudan, who have also sometimes turned [U.N.] patrols around and not allowed them to proceed,” Skye Wheeler, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, told me on the phone in September 2014. “This kind of action has made it harder for the U.N. to do some investigations.”

Apart from hindering investigations in Juba, the SPLA and other security forces made a concentrated effort to hide the bodies that littered the streets of the capital in December 2013. The commanders responsible for the cover-up knew that the U.N. and other agencies couldn’t document what wasn’t there. Realizing the damning significance of the dead, security forces loaded the corpses into military vehicles and transported them to various locations for disposal.

Sources within the military have stated that the SPLA buried a large number of the dead in mass graves at the SPLA General Headquarters, the epicenter of the violence that overtook Juba. Evidence to support these allegations has not been found. Some witnesses and human rights groups claim that several truckloads of corpses were taken outside of the capital and either buried or burned.

Everyone in Juba seems to have a theory about where the security forces disposed of the bodies. However, the method by which they were collected from streets and homes is no mystery. The writers of the UNMISS report cautiously noted that “there is information suggesting a concerted effort to remove and conceal evidence of crimes, such as bodies.”

Wheeler was unequivocal in her analysis, saying that the government implemented an extensive cleanup operation. “Witnesses described SPLA and other security forces coming to their neighborhoods to pick up bodies and carry them away in trucks,” Wheeler wrote in a Human Rights Watch report released last August. “Nuer family members were sometimes told by soldiers not to touch bodies of relatives. Many families still do not know what happened to their relatives’ bodies.”

With workmanlike efficiency, the SPLA and police forces removed the sickening tableaus that were on display in neighborhoods throughout the city. The military commanders did not order their grunts to count or identify the dead — they instructed them to erase the evidence.

As the new war dawned in South Sudan, leaders in the SPLA realized that, for all intents and purposes, they’d gotten away with murder.

Since they were able to accomplish such a feat in the capital city, which has the highest concentration of journalists and watchdog humanitarian groups in the country, they believed they could commit atrocities with impunity anywhere within their nation’s borders.

Commanders in the rebellion followed the example set by their counterparts in the government, and, as the first months of the war unfolded, human rights abuses became commonplace. South Sudan has been transformed into a mirrored hall of atrocities, the vengeful killings by the opposition forces reflecting the government’s own appalling actions, and vice versa.

Foot soldiers and generals in both parties have acted with extraordinary cruelty and with little or no concern for the fact that their abuses warrant punishment.

“There’s a complete and utter lack of accountability for war crimes, atrocities, torture, and extrajudicial killings,” Justine Fleischner of the Enough Project told me last December. “We’ve seen the tendency to engage in these kinds of abhorrent actions go completely unpunished on both sides. And really this culture of impunity existed before this conflict.”

Few South Sudanese leaders have suffered legal consequences for the war crimes that they committed in the last civil war. In the midst of the country’s latest crisis, what can possibly stop the old masters of war and their new acolytes from replicating the bloody acts that have plagued the South Sudanese for generations?

Tattered bits of sleep were all that Okot could beg, borrow or steal from the darkness. His eyes snapped open whenever the edge of a dream was too jagged or the report of a rifle too close. A few hours before dawn, he gave up and simply waited, like a patient trying to outlast a malarial fever.

Wide awake and lying on his back, he felt an idea stretching itself over the night, over the fires and the bodies in Mangaten, and over the day that hadn’t yet broken. He couldn’t stop his country from tearing itself apart. There was nothing he possessed that could persuade the government forces and the rebels to disarm themselves. But he had something he could offer to the war’s victims.

In the morning, he called Joseph and asked him for a lift to the hospital.

As fear and violence coiled around the capital in the opening days of the conflict, people started to bring the dead and the wounded to the Juba Teaching Hospital, which holds the double-edged distinction of being the only referral hospital in the entire country. Even before the war started, the facility was overwhelmed by the medical demands of the citizens in Juba as well as the needs of patients who traveled to seek treatment that wasn’t available in their towns and villages.

When the victims of the war began to arrive, the hospital was faced with a seemingly impossible task — to care for the injured with limited resources and personnel while finding a way to identify the dead and then dispose of them before they became a health hazard.

Near the gates of the hospital, Okot climbed out of the Land Cruiser, thanked Joseph for the ride and slammed the door shut. He had a pint of blood to give, but first he needed to see what the conflict had done to his people. Morbid curiosity mixed with compassion coursed through his veins.

He walked through some of the wards and across the open spaces in between the buildings, taking in the damage and the death. He did not merely inventory the war’s first round of carnage. He felt it in his bones.

Outside the mortuary he saw a “forest of flies” hanging above heaps of corpses in body bags. He watched a woman giving the bodies a wide berth, but the smell still got to her and she suddenly doubled over like someone had stabbed her with a knife. After minute or two on her knees, everything she’d eaten that morning was haphazardly arrayed on the ground before her.

Later Okot stepped into a crowded ward and saw an injured Nuer soldier splayed out on a bed and vehemently refusing a blood transfusion. The man said he’d seen a Dinka giving blood under the mango tree. Now he’d rather die from his gunshot wound than be saved by the blood of a man whom he considered an enemy.

“It was something that really provoked me so much,” Okot, who is neither a Nuer nor a Dinka, explains. “Someone is at the point of dying and he’s refusing the blood because of tribal tendencies.”

The memories from December are still sharp in Okot’s mind, partly because they keep returning unbidden. Sometimes he closes his eyes in the stillness of his room or catches the scent of raw meat on a butcher’s counter and his stomach starts to churn, his thoughts become tremors, and the dying in the hospital and the dead in Mangaten surround him.

One day a peace agreement will be signed but for Okot and countless others the war will persist.