How political mistrust, greed turned South Sudan into a slaughtering field

By DANIEL WESANGULA

SOUTH-SUDAN: Two and a half years ago, goodwill messages marking the birth of South Sudan were overwhelming, coming in from around the globe.

But privately, for every congratulatory message for the birth of Africa’s newest nation, there was an unnerving disquiet… the violence preceding the referendum that voted for secession from the north had left scars, too deep and difficult to recover from.

The truce between former rebel leaders that held the country together was too fragile and the country struggled to hold the peace that international and regional powers helped broker after decades of a brutal secessionist war against Khartoum.

Not long after independence in 2011, renewed fighting broke out between Sudan and South Sudan, but after a truce was negotiated, peace finally seemed to be beckoning. But, still, there were other forces to reckon with.

The bitter recriminations of previous internecine conflicts between communities in South Sudan were simmering. Finally, the deep suspicions between President Salva Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar boiled over and what began as personal differences between the two leaders soon erupted into a full-scale inter-ethnic war between the president’s Dinka tribe and his rival’s Nuer ethnic group.

But analysts warn that there are more political and social undercurrents to what has degenerated into a Dinka-Nuer conflict.

“It is foolhardy to think that the conflict began from Kiir’s State House. The signs had been there and the complexities around this nation are too many that any diversion from the charted path takes it back to war,” says Ng’etich Bitok, a foreign affairs expert and lecturer at Egerton University.

Within months of the trigger, the conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, according to aid agencies.

But beyond ethnicity, poverty, conflict over resources, tribal wars, corruption and the death of an infant political system, greed for power has been ever present. 

This particular round of fighting began when Kiir accused members of his army loyal to Machar of attempting to oust him from power. The fighting between loyalist forces and Nuer soldiers soon spread from the capital Juba to other parts of the country.

“Politically, a coup and the insecurity that arises from this gave Kiir a chance to consolidate his grip on power. This, he did by purging the civilian threat and sacking his entire cabinet. And then, with the excuse of the coup, he reorganised his army,” says Philip Roessler, a Political Science Professor and author of various works on Sub-Saharan Africa. 

“But by doing this, he also legitimised the interests of other groups,” the scholar observed.

The ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), is a collation of several war generals who at the time of its formation had a similar enemy in Khartoum. Some of the generals may take advantage of the war to chart their own path of tribal entrenchment and pillage of natural resources.

Inherent differences

“These groupings were strong as societies, but collectively weak as a state,” says Bitok. 

But after the vanquishing of this enemy, inherent differences were bound to emerge if political systems within the country were not strengthened.

“The party constitution has not been followed by President Kiir. He has abandoned all party organs to make decisions by himself, some of which are not to the benefit of the country’s future,” says Rebecca Garang, wife to the country’s founding father the late John Mabior Garang.

Increasingly fearful that the party might not re-elect him as party leader and would instead swing its support to Machar or Pagan Amum, secretary general Kiir maneuvered to undermine the party’s institutions. For example, he refused to call to order party organs such as the SPLM’s political bureau.

The disintegration of SPLM along ethnic lines has spilled over to the battlefront.  On April 17, a large group of unidentified armed people, some in security uniform and others in civilian clothes, attacked the United Nations base in Bor, in Jonglei State, where about 5,000 civilians, most of them ethnic Nuer, had sought refuge.

The armed group breached the compound’s perimeter and began shooting into the base, killing 50 people and injuring scores of others.

Speaking to rights watchdog group Human Rights Watch, witnesses said just before the attack, members of the group gathered outside the base and gave UN officials a petition calling for all the Nuer residing in the camp to leave within 72 hours. Later that day, about 300 government soldiers and civilians threatened a barge belonging to the United Nations Mission in Southern Sudan in Bor, shooting in the air and pointing their guns at the barge. The warring groups have little respect for mediators and international institutions.

Nuer opposition forces have also attacked and killed Dinka civilians on account of their ethnicity, including in January in Bor and in Malakal in Upper Nile State in February and March. As far as Human Rights Watch has been able to determine, leaders in Machar’s opposition forces have made no efforts to hold abusive soldiers to account. 

Root cause

“From the outside, the conflict might look like a tribal affair. But it goes beyond this,” says Bitok.

There are Nuer rebel forces in Unity State that continue to side with President Kiir (a Dinka), and there are prominent Dinka political figures such as Mrs Garang, who continue to work alongside fMachar (a Nuer).

“The root cause of all this needs to be addressed. And people should not overlook the critical role corruption and intolerance of the current leadership has played in all this,” Rebecca told The Standard on Sunday.

She said a consistent lack of trust and belief in the country’s governance structures was the cause of the current problems and laid the blame for all the bloodshed squarely on Kiir’s hands.

“He should take responsibility and listen to what we have to say. It will be difficult for any meaningful peace talks to occur if he does not want to listen and cede some ground,” she said. Peace talks in Addis Ababa have been an on-off affair for the better part of the year with little success.

The Kiir faction pushes the argument that his fall out with Machar began when he fired the former vice president and the entire cabinet as part of the war on corruption. This is captured in a letter written by President Kiir to his cabinet in mid 2012.

“An estimated $4 billion are unaccounted for, or simply put, stolen by former and current officials, as well as corrupt individuals with close ties to government officials,” Kiir wrote.

Official statistics are hard to come by in the fledgling state, but at the time, financial news wire service Reuters estimated the looted figure could amount to around one third of the estimated total oil receipts allotted by Khartoum to the South between 2005 and independence in 2011.

Experts remain skeptical that Kiir was unaware of the mass looting going on under his watch. In the same letter, Kiir sought to remind his generals, and cabinet of their initial goal of waging war on corruption.

“We fought for freedom, justice and equality. Many of our friends died to achieve these objectives. Yet, once we got to power, we forgot what we fought for and began to enrich ourselves at the expense of our people,” he wrote.

Some believe the mass sackings were a cloak used to fire Machar for his role in the Bor massacre during which the former VP’s forces were reportedly responsible for thousands of deaths of Dinka civilians.

In 1991, Machar launched a failed bid to overthrow the then-leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), John Garang. The failed coup triggered an intra-SPLA civil war and large-scale violence along ethnic lines. Machar was prominently involved, mobilising support from his Nuer people in targeting Garang’s Dinka. This led to the infamous Bor Massacre of November 1991 in which it is estimated that at least 2,000 people perished.

Wake-up call

Over the next decade, Machar would align himself with the central government in Khartoum and continue to fight against the SPLA until he reconciled with Garang and rejoined the SPLM in 2002. The reunification of the SPLA was integral to the rebels’ ability to win the right to independence.

“And for this reason, I have chosen to forgive him (Machar) for his past mistakes,” Mrs Garang says.

But the ill feeling among the Dinka persisted, and the tensions were fuelled by tribalism, corruption and a lack of developed resources in a land endowed with almost an obscene amounts of oil reserves – South Sudan was producing about 350,000 barrels of oil per day before the fighting began, a figure that has now dropped by a third, according to Free Oilprice.com.

Some experts believe neighbouring regional blocks have not done enough to stop the fighting in South Sudan. The Executive Director of the Africa division Human Rights Watch Daniel Bekele accuses regional heads of focusing on the wrong issues.

“The leaders in the region and South Sudan’s donors have focused excessively on the failing peace talks in Addis Ababa, but this is not enough,” says Bekele.

“The Bor and Bentiu attacks (where hundreds of civilians were killed last month) should serve as a wake-up call. Commanders and leaders responsible for abuses on both sides have been let off the hook for too long,” Bekele noted.

“Unless they are held accountable for their crimes, the ethnic violence will continue to engulf this country, with UN peacekeepers left to pick up the pieces.”

Targeted sanctions have been floated by the US. In his Africa tour last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry voiced his outrage over the massacres that implicate both government and rebel forces in indiscriminate acts of rape, attacks on UN bases and recruitment of child soldiers.

“There are disturbing leading indicators of the kind of ethnic, tribal, targeted nationalistic killings taking place that raise serious questions,” Kerry told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on the first leg of his tour.

“Were they to continue in the way they’ve been going they could really present a very serious challenge to the international community with respect to the questions of genocide,” he added, and announced targeted sanctions against some military leaders.