Deng Alor Kuol and Finance Minister Kosti Manibe Ngai from their duties during the entire duration of the probe. In July 2013, Kiir sacked his entire cabinet, including his vice president, Riek Machar, ostensibly to reduce the size of government. However, Machar said that it was a step towards dictatorship and that he would challenge Kiir for the presidency. He also dismissed Taban Deng Gai as Governor of Unity State. Kiir told Radio Netherlands Worldwide that homosexuality is not in the "character" of Southern Sudanese people. "It is not even something that anybody can talk about here in southern Sudan in particular. It is not there and if anybody wants to import or to export it to South Sudan, it will not get the support and it will always be condemned by everybody," he said. He then went on to refer to homosexuality as a "mental disease" and a "bastion of Western immorality". In December 2011, 6,000 Lou Nuer armed child soldiers attacked Murle communities. According to investigations carried out by the UN, 800 people from both ethnic groups were killed between December 2011 and February 2012, while women and children were abducted and property was looted and destroyed. Unbeknownst to large numbers of or the entire child soldier population, Kiir planned and had decided to agree to warlike stipends from the Obama administration beginning in 2012, regardless of an American law prohibiting aid to nations utilizing child soldiers created and passed in 2008. A lack of accountability and justice pertaining to the investigation, arrest and prosecution of the individuals who carried out the violence against civilians of both the Nuer and Murle ethnic groups is widely believed to have contributed massively to, if not categorically, the mass murders, as well as the continued perpetration of the ethnic violence. Kiir established a figurehead "Investigation Committee" with an ostentatious mandate to investigate those responsible for the mass murders and murders, but as of January 2013 no finances had been allocated to the "Investigation Committee" or any of its members sworn in to commence the investigation and bring those to justice. Throughout the Jonglei disarmament "Operation Restore Peace" which began in March 2012 and continued throughout the year, soldiers were ordered to and assumed the responsibility of extrajudicial killings, severe beatings, binding people with rope, and torture to extract "information" regarding the whereabouts of weapons. Consolidation of power After rumours about a