From late February 1999, the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC) gathered 1500 people in the village of Wunlit (Greater Tonj, to the south-west of the rivers connected to the Bilnyang) for a peace conference.
1 Dinka-Nuer West Bank Peace and Reconciliation Conference (New Sudan Council of Churches 1999), www.sudanarchive.net/?a=d&d=SLPD19990200-01, accessed 11 December 2022. In the weeks before, with funding from international churches, a team of three hundred labourers had built one hundred and fifty
tukals (grass, thatched huts) and a large meeting hall. A convoy brought supplies over a three-week road journey from Kenya.
2 Chiefs of Dinka and Nuer Stir Crowds, Emotions and Perform Rituals – Dinka-Nuer West Bank Peace and Reconciliation Conference (NSCC, 1999) page 2,www.sudanarchive.net/?a=d&d=SLPD19990220-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN%7ctxTI%7ctxAU-----------, accessed 13 December 2022. Holes were also dug around the village as hiding places in case of an Antonov attack from the Sudan forces. Chiefs and church leaders were dominant at the event, but SPLA commanders, ‘traditional spiritual leaders’, women and international journalists also attended. This meeting brought together people from the communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers. It was described by its organisers as a Nuer-Dinka peace conference for those on the west bank of the Nile, and included people from what became Warrap, Unity and Lakes states. The conference hoped to reconcile communities that had fought since the mid-1990s after the rebellion of Riek Machar from John Garang’s leadership of the SPLA and their attempts to mobilise along ethnic lines.
3 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.Michael Wal Duany, from eastern South Sudan, had been a political leader in the Anya-Nya, before going to the USA for education. He married Julia whose home area was to the east of Wunlit. Michael and Bill Lowrey (an American Presbyterian Church leader), with the backing of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, had attempted to reunite Riek Machar and John Garang through a personal mediation process. Yet, in the end, these protagonists had refused to meet. As an alternative route to peace, they instead decided to initiate a people-to-people process. The Nairobi-based New Sudan Council of Churches became the institutional channel for external funding. Initially, in June 1998, they brought a handful of chiefs together in the safe, distant location of Lokichogio (north-west Kenya). This was followed by a series of visits of chiefs across warring lines in order to build trust for the large Wunlit conference. Lowrey and his colleagues, such as John Ashworth, emphasised that the people-to-people approach of Wunlit was not just a meeting but a process of bringing people together.
4 John Ashworth, ‘Wunlit Peace Conference (1999)’, in John Akec et al. (eds), We Have Lived Too Long to Be Deceived: South Sudanese Discuss the Lessons of Historic Peace Agreements (Rift Valley Institute, 2014).The Wunlit Peace Meeting was explicitly inspired by a global turn to the ‘local’ in the context of the failure of national-level peace-making attempts. In the Sudans, from the early 1990s, the warring parties had shown some appetite for peace. From 1993, the Government of Sudan accepted the role of IGADD (that transformed into IGAD in 1996) in the negotiations.
5 John Young, The Fate of Sudan: The Origins and Consequences of a Flawed Peace Process (Zed Books, 2012), pages 83–84. From 1993, President Moi of Kenya played a major role in the negotiations, partly to bolster his waning domestic legitimacy. The first significant achievement in the peace process was the 1994 Declaration of Principles that stipulated the right to Southern self-determination through a referendum and, as an alternative, secular democracy within a unified Sudan. However, for years, the Sudan government refused to sign these principles.
6 Mathew Arnold and Matthew LeRiche, South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence (Hurst and Co., 2012), page 107. Peace was not fast coming. For the Government of Sudan (GoS), growing Middle East tension around Israel meant that there was new international pressure to be visibly aligned to the new global poles. This strengthened Sudan’s Islamic inclinations resulting in the northern declarations of the war as
jihad. From 1995, the USA became increasingly active in supporting ‘frontline’ states that had an antagonistic relationship with Khartoum. The SPLA also aligned itself with these new global poles and it sought opportunities in Christian sympathies.
7 Andrew Wheeler, ‘Finding Meaning Amid the Chaos: Narratives of Significance in the Sudanese Church’, in Niels Kastfelt (ed.), Religion and African Civil Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 54–81, pages 56–57. With the USA’s support, the SPLA grew in strength on the battlefield, while the Sudan government became increasingly desperate to access the oil revenue from Southern oilfields.
In this context, the Sudan government initiated the Khartoum Peace Agreement which was signed in April 1997 between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and non-SPLA Southern armed forces. For the SPLA, this cooperation between GoS and non-SPLA Southern forces was more akin to an assertion of war than a declaration of peace. Southern forces that signed with GoS included the remnant Anya-Nya II forces under Paulino Matip, Riek’s forces and other Equatorian groups. By signing this agreement, these forces were brought together under the umbrella of the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF), which the Sudan government then funded to fight the SPLA and clear the Southern oil fields.
8 Douglas Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Peace or Truce (James Currey, 2003); Young, The Fate of Sudan, pages 56–57. Divisions between the Southern Sudanese
hakuma continued to be extremely violent for soldiers and citizens. As the war in Southern Sudan was mainly being fought by divided Southern forces, peace appeared to need not only the involvement of GoS and the SPLA, but also the SSDF and other Southern armed groups. At this time, rival political elites, such as Garang and Riek, were even refusing to meet.