The peace of the 1970s collapsed within a decade. During this time, the Sudan government was loaned large amounts of money to carry out large-scale mechanised agriculture. However, food exports fell during the 1970s alongside global declines in food production. Sudan’s debt quickly escalated into the billions and there was little money to spare to support the nascent Southern government.
1 Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, pages 43–44. This meant that the new Southern Regional Government, created by the 1972 Addis Ababa Peace Agreement, was significantly underfunded. Along with this, there was an increased drive by the government to extract resources from the South to increase the Sudanese national income. For example, the 1970s brought the re-initiation of the Jonglei Canal project to drain the southern swamps in order to increase water flow downstream in northern Sudan and Egypt.
2 John Garang, ‘Identifying, Selecting and Implementing Rural Development Strategies for Sudan’ (PhD diss., Iowa State University, 1981).In the 1970s, Chevron also discovered oil in Southern Sudan. The first oil sites were discovered just to the east of the Bilnyang Rivers, between these swamps and the Bahr el Jebel. The government was now eager to secure its control of the oil. In the early 1980s the Sudan government had already started arming militia groups to the north to raid south into the lands of the oilfields.
3 Georgette Gagnon and John Ryle, ‘Report of an Investigation into Oil Development in Western Upper Nile’ (Canadian Auto Workers Union; Steelworkers Humanity Fund; Simons Foundation; United Church of Canada, Division of World Outreach; World Vision Canada, 2001), page 13.From the perspective of the Anya-Nya, from the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement there was resistance from some and especially those from Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile. For example, in 1972, an ex-Anya-Nya soldier encouraged chiefs in the western Nuer to not collect taxes in opposition to government and to intentionally violate the new peace deal. He was arrested on the 21 December 1972 and his rifle and ammunition were confiscated. He was taken to Malakal for investigation and trial.
4 Letter to Minister of Regional Administration, Juba, from Moese Chuol, Commissioner, Upper Nile Province, 4 January 1973. SSNA.UNP.SCR.36.B.3/3. Small cohorts of the rebels resisted integration into the army and fled to Ethiopia where the Ethiopian government allowed them to establish bases. Throughout the 1970s, Southern sympathy grew for the what became Anya-Nya II. For example, when Samuel Gai Tut, its leader, was arrested in Juba in 1982 for smuggling arms to the rebels in Ethiopia, Southern leaders working with the government, namely Barrister Ambrose Riny Thiik (from Gogrial) and Appeal Court Judge Justice Michael Makuei, secured his release.
5 Kuyok, South Sudan: The Notable Firsts, page 415.Kerubino Kuanyin Bol was born in Twic County (northern Gogrial) and fought with the Anya-Nya. After the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement, he was absorbed into the Sudan army and put in command of Battalion 105 in Bor (to the east of the Bahr el Jebel). On 16 May 1983, Kerubino led a mutiny of this battalion. At the time, John Garang, himself from Bor, was a senior general in the Sudan army, posted at its headquarters in Khartoum. He was sent by President Nimeiri to solve the problem of Kerubino’s mutiny, but instead joined the revolt. After these defections, they fled to Ethiopia, were joined by others who were defecting and formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). This rebellion against the Sudan government continued until the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005.
At the inception of the SPLA, support for this rebel army grew quickly among former Anya-Nya from Bahr el Ghazal and in Gogrial. For example, Salva Kiir (from Gogrial), having fought for the Anya-Nya, had become a major in the Sudan army, stationed in Malakal. Kiir defected to join the SPLA from its inception. Kiir encouraged former Anya-Nya, such as Bona Bang Dhel, to also defect. Bona recruited students and former Anya-Nya from Wau and Rumbek to rebel and travel to Ethiopia.
6 Dolku Media, ‘Gen. Bona Bang Dhel on SPLA DAY’, YouTube video, length 27:52, 1 June 2018. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXENcSq3HpI&t=653s, at 10:53, accessed 20 December 2020. Popular support for the SPLA grew around the Bilnyang as the Sudan government backed militia raids into Southern Sudan. Many early SPLA recruits narrate that they travelled to Ethiopia to get guns from the SPLA to defend their homelands.
7 Cherry Leonardi, ‘Paying “Buckets of Blood” for the Land: Moral Debates over Economy, War and State in Southern Sudan’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 49:2 (2011): 215–240.Garang’s core justification for the SPLA’s rebellion was not the demand for Southern autonomy but his complaint that development was behind throughout the peripheries of Sudan. The SPLA’s manifesto evoked Marxist analysis and was heavily influenced by Dar es Salaam theorists and dependency theory.
8 Thomas, South Sudan; Sudan People’s Liberation Movement Manifesto, 1983, GB-0033-SAD.89/6/53-92. This stance was more palatable to the Ethiopian government. The SPLA also received significant military support from the Eastern Bloc and from Libya in the context of the then-ongoing Cold War, and in later years from President Museveni in Uganda.
9 John Young, The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process (Zed Books, 2012), page 49. From its earliest days, the SPLA’s power was intimately connected to its international, regional relationships, which brought with them military might and a degree of legitimacy. Therefore, it was never solely dependent on South Sudanese people for its legitimacy and claims to authority. This reshaped the relationship the SPLA had with Southern Sudanese and often allowed it to have a predatory relationship with the communities it controlled.
The SPLA inception alienated the Anya-Nya II forces. Although some of these forces joined the SPLA, many Anya-Nya II forces refused. In May 1984, at the encouragement of the Ethiopian regimes, Garang turned on the Anya-Nya II movement and killed their leader, Gai Tut,
10 Ibid., page 48. which led to a lasting rupture and deep distrust between these different armed forces of the South. Paulino Matip took over from Gai Tut as the leader of the Anya-Nya II forces and returned to his homelands in Bentiu and Mayom (to the north and east of the Bilnyang Rivers) as a base for his alternative Southern armed rebellion against Khartoum. Initially Anya-Nya II remained hostile to the government in Khartoum. In 1984 the rebellion abducted and killed Chevron oil workers, stopping this initial phase of oil exploration in the area.
11 Gagnon and Ryle, ‘Report of an Investigation’, page 16.Over the next two decades, battles took place across many regions of South Sudan and also in the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains regions of northern Sudan. Lethal, armed violence took place in rural areas, as well as large, bloody campaigns for urban settlements. Some of the worst fighting was not directly between the SPLA and the Government of Sudan (GoS) but between these divided, Southern armed forces. Anti-SPLA forces included Anya-Nya II but also other community defence forces who resisted the SPLA’s governance of the South.
The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in significant southern divisions. By 1989, the SPLA had achieved impressive military victories over the Sudan government and controlled two-thirds of the South.
12 Gérard Prunier and Rachel M. Gisselquist, ‘The Sudan: A Successfully Failed State’ in Robert Rotberg (ed.) State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Brookings Institution, 2003). The fall of the Soviet Union and the linked fall of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopian regime in 1991 had dramatic repercussions for the SPLA. The new regime in Ethiopia expelled the SPLA from its terrorities, which meant that it had to appeal to a new global configuration of powers to maintain its international support. The uncertainty and weakness of the SPLA at this time also created internal tensions. In 1991, Dr Riek Machar Teny rebelled against Garang. He justified the revolt based on accusations of Garang’s dictatorial leadership, and Machar also highlighted that the SPLA under Garang had committed widespread human rights abuse and recruited large numbers of child soldiers especially from the Nuer. Riek’s justification for rebellion played into the international post-Cold War concern with good governance and upholding basic standards of human rights and humanitarian law, and his rhetoric also made ethnic claims about the way that power was configured under the SPLA.
13 Jok Madut Jok and Sharon Hutchinson, ‘Sudan’s Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities’, African Studies Review 42:2 (1999): 125–145. Army leaders on both sides sought to remake ethnic boundaries and divisions as ways to mobilise supporters to war.
14 Ibid. In the mid-1990s, the Bilnyang was deeply impacted. Riek’s father had lived in Ler, and Riek had been born there. In the mid-1990s, he mobilised support to carry out violent raids across the Bilnyang and connected rivers into SPLA-controlled Greater Gogrial and Tonj. This killed hundreds and remade the grazing land as a place of danger.
15 Naomi Pendle, ‘Contesting the Militarization of the Places Where They Met: The Landscapes of the Western Nuer and Dinka (South Sudan)’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 11:1 (2017): 64–85.At the same time, intra-Dinka and intra-Nuer wars were just as deadly. A year after Riek Machar’s rebellion against Garang, Kerubino Kuanyin rebelled in Gogrial. In the late 1980s, Kerubino had been imprisoned by Garang. He was released in 1992, immediately mobilised anti-Garang forces and moved Nuer forces to Gogrial. He started campaigns of forced and voluntary recruitment across Twic and Gogrial, as well as displays of extreme violence. Between 1995 and 1997, Kerubino led various raids on the populations of Gogrial that killed and abducted, looted cattle, and burnt crops. This gave rise to the 1998 Bahr el Ghazal famine.
16 Peter Adwok Nyaba, The Disarmament of the Gel-Weng of Bahr El Ghazal and the Consolidation of the Nuer – Dinka Peace Agreement 1999 (Pax Christi for New Sudan Council of Churches, 2001).Alliances between Paulino Matip (Anya-Nya II leader) and Kerubino, and Kerubino’s growing predation in Gogrial, prompted SPLA attacks into Unity State. From 1994 to 1997, the SPLA confrontation with Matip was enacted through tit-for-tat raids over the grazing lands of the Bilnyang Rivers.
17 Ibid., 129. This Nuer-Dinka fighting violated previous ethics of war, such as restraining from violence against women and children, and acted to militarise ethnicity.
18 Ibid., 131. For example, an attack in the
toc resulted in the burning of twenty-five Dinka villages, killing of many people and the capture of thousands of cattle.
19 Ibid., 131. This also transformed the
toc of the rivers of the Bilnyang from a place of meeting and abundance, to a violent no-man’s land.
20 Pendle, ‘Contesting the Militarization of the Places Where They Met’. The unrestrained violence suggested the genesis of ‘a war that does not end’.
21 Peter Adwok Nyaba, Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider’s View (Fountain Publishers, 1997), page 5.The Nuer civil wars in Unity State (to the east of the Bilnyang) were also incredibly deadly. In Mayom, Paulino Matip had significant forces, controlled key trading routes and had significant support from Khartoum.
22 Johnson, Root Causes. His ability to protect Talisman Energy’s oil concessions in Block 5a from the SPLA and to clear civilians from proximity to the oil fields gave the Sudan government a strong incentive to court him as an ally.
23 Jok Madut Jok, Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (Oneworld Publications, 2007). Machar had formally appointed Matip as governor of Liec State (approximately equivalent to contemporary Unity State) in 1994, but Matip already had control over the region. In 1998, when Machar attempted to remove him from the governorship, Matip’s forces attacked Machar’s forces in violent raids into southern Liec. Khartoum backed Matip, who was able to forcibly displace large swathes of the population from near the oil fields and from areas to the north. With support from Matip, the Sudan government was able to open the oil pipeline into the most northerly Southern Sudanese oilfields in 1999.
24 Jok and Hutchinson, ‘Sudan’s Prolonged Second Civil War’, page 130.