JUBA: South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has replaced its foreign minister with his deputy, Monday Semaya Kumba, state media reported, following a migration dispute with the United States.

No explanation was given for the sacking of Foreign Minister Ramadan Mohammed, which was announced on the state radio station late on Wednesday.

The move follows a row with Washington over Juba’s refusal to admit a Congolese man deported from the US, which led to the Trump administration threatening to revoke all US visas held by South Sudanese citizens.

South Sudan yielded to Washington’s demands on Tuesday and allowed the man to enter the country.

Separately, a faction of South Sudan’s main opposition party said on Wednesday it had replaced its chairman, First Vice President Riek Machar, with an interim leader, Peacebuilding Minister Stephen Par Kuol, until Machar was released from house arrest.

Analysts said the move, which other party members criticized, could allow Kiir to sack longstanding rival Machar and consolidate his power over the government by appointing Kuol.

“President Kiir (would) want people who would agree with him ... so that now the government’s legitimacy will be created,” said Kuol Abraham Nyuon, professor of political science at the University of Juba.

Machar, who has served in a power-sharing administration with Kiir since a 2018 peace deal ended a civil war between fighters loyal to the two men, was accused of trying to stir up rebellion and detained at his home last month.

Machar’s party denies government accusations that it backs the White Army. 

This ethnic militia clashed with the army in the northeastern town of Nasir last month, triggering the latest political crisis.

African Union mediators arrived in Juba last week to try to rescue the peace deal but did not appear to have made any immediate progress.

On Thursday, embassies based in Juba, including France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, the UK, US, and the EU, reiterated their call for the immediate release of all political detainees.

“South Sudan’s leaders must meet their obligations and demonstrate that their priority is peace,” they said in a joint statement.

The SPLM-IO said Machar’s detention had effectively voided the agreement that ended the five-year civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. The party later said they were committed to upholding the deal.

The SPLM-IO’s military wing remained loyal to Machar and was “not part and parcel of the betrayers in Juba,” its spokesperson, Lam Paul Gabriel, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Tunis: A man from Guinea died after migrants clashed at a makeshift camp in northern Tunisia, a parliamentarian who visited the site and the National Guard said on Thursday.

Tarak Mahdi, the MP for Sfax, around 30 km from camps set up in olive groves, said the violence began on Tuesday and that “dozens were wounded” by “machetes and knives.”

Mahdi said the violence erupted between two groups, one from Guinea and the other from the Ivory Coast, after a Champions League football match.

National Guard spokesman Houcem Eddine Jebabli said the dead man had been hit in the head by a stone and that six people have been arrested.

The clashes followed a significant security sweep last week to clear olive groves around El Amra, a town south of Tunis, where thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa had set up home a few kilometers from the coast.

Tensions between residents and migrants have been rising in Tunisia.

Tempers flared in 2023 after President Kais Saied said that “hordes of sub-Saharan migrants” threatened to change the North African country’s demographics.

On March 25, Saied called on the International Organization for Migration to accelerate voluntary returns for irregular migrants to their home countries.

Tunisia has, in recent years, become a key departure point for migrants making the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossing in hopes of reaching Europe.

People staged two protest rallies on Wednesday against what they say is the authoritarian rule of President Kais Saied and demanded the release of political prisoners, while six detained opposition figures held a hunger strike.

The rallies highlight the opposition’s growing concerns about what it sees as Saied’s muzzling of dissent and efforts to establish one-man rule, accusations he denies.