Standing outside the order – rituals, impunity and a written performance of power
As the parties rewrote the political order in the CPA, they needed to legitimately stand outside of this order to gain authority to be the sovereign that could reconstitute society.
1 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 74. The negotiations and signing of the CPA performed rituals that entrenched SPLA and Sudan government dominance and supranatural power. The CPA and the years of preceding negotiations were an opportunity for the SPLA/M to perform like a state for the international community and also for Southern Sudanese. As a rebel movement, the SPLA had already drawn on symbolic models associated with the state.
2 Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir and Zachariah Mampilly (eds), Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015). ‘Stateness’ had been part of their repertoire in claiming authority, with administrative structures, taxes and permits that mimicked state behaviour.
3 Hansen, Thomas B. and Finn Stepputat. ‘Introduction. States of Imagination’, in Thomas B. Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Duke University Press, 2001): 1–40. The CPA brought another opportunity for re-creating performances of statehood and new configurations of state power. Plus, the CPA also claimed the SPLA as ‘set apart’ and morally distinct from its people through the assertion that it could remake the political order. The CPA set the SPLA apart in various ways.
Firstly, the CPA negotiations made a ‘divine’ space in that it made a space that, in practice, could only be accessed by those who wielded the power to kill with impunity. The negotiations were held in large, foreign hotels, in spaces beyond the reach or familiarity of most Southern Sudanese. Being held in a lake-side resort in Naivasha, the talks were physically isolated even from everyday life in Kenya, and were even further from Southern Sudan. The hotel complex was guarded by security staff and access limited. Only the parties and mediators were allowed in this space, and these parties had spent the last two decades effectively asserting their divine power to kill with impunity. Therefore, the space could be seen as divine in that it excluded those who did not have such powers.
At the same time, the CPA negotiations themselves projected a civil vision of the state with an absence of military apparatus or costumes. Although many people at the talks had significant military experience and were there because of their military power, at the negotiations they dressed in business suits and were far from a parade of military might. Being hosted in another country and far from the battlefield also made this fitting. The SPLA/M performed in line with this neo-liberal vision of the state, with politics and the army separated.
The SPLA was set apart from Southern Sudanese people by the latter’s exclusion from the talks. Southern Sudanese spectators and participants were kept at a distance from the negotiations. They were physically excluded from the talks, but also from any events or participation in festivities surrounding the talks. Civil society and church groups who tried to attend, even when they had international funding to travel, were physically barred from proximity to the negotiations. A demonstration of support and cooperative relationship with the Southern Sudanese public was not part of these talks. This did not just exclude Southern Sudanese input into the constitution-like document of the CPA. It also meant that Southern Sudanese people were not part of the ritualised performance of the new Southern Sudan. These rituals helped reinforce notions of an exclusive class and a politically excluded public.
People in Southern Sudan heard about the CPA over the radio and through the commanders on the ground. The circulation of print media was limited and almost all the communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers did not have access to a phone network at the time. When the CPA was implemented back in Southern Sudan, it reabsorbed a militarised understanding of state power. After the signing of the CPA, Garang toured Southern Sudan (and parts of Sudan). At the local level, rivalrous commanders also met and toured together, giving public addresses and demanding cooperation. These tours are still vividly remembered. Annually, on the 9 January from 2005 until the referendum, people celebrated CPA day as a national holiday. On these days, people would gather in the state and county capitals for parades, speeches and dances. Soldiers paraded, mounted guns were on display, and government officials addressed gathered crowds.
Secondly, the long, written document of the CPA was also part of this performance and set it out-of-reach of most Southern Sudanese. The specialist lawyers employed by the CPA mediators worked on a detailed text, implying that the problem’s solution could be formulated in writing.
4 de Waal, ‘Sudan’, page 312. With the common use of legal documents in peace agreements, scholars have noted the benefit of formal legalised public agreements to increase the reputational risk associated with breaching the peace.
5 Kenneth W. Abbott, Robert O. Keohane and Andrew Moravcsik, ‘The Concept of Legalisation’, International Organisation 54 (2000): 401–419; Christine Bell, ‘Peace Agreements: Their Nature and Legal Status’, American Journal of International Law 100 (2000): 373–412. However, for many Southern Sudanese, this also acted to set the
hakuma apart from public knowledge and accountability. Few Southern Sudanese have the legal literacy to read and comprehend such a text. Whether or not those rulers could read it, they linked themselves to the text and set themselves apart by associating themselves with this superior, detached knowledge.
The written nature of the CPA also linked the SPLA into long histories of government power associated with written texts. Since the coming of government in the late nineteenth century, their power had included their production and circulation of vast amounts of written text. Yet, the lack of schools in Southern Sudan had limited citizens’ literacy. Literacy had radically changed during the 1990s, including many Southern Sudanese accessing education in refugee camps.
6 Abraham Diing Akoi and Naomi Pendle, ‘“I Kept My Gun”: Remaking and Reproducing Social Distinctions during Return in South Sudan’, Journal of Refugee Studies 33:4 (2020): 791–812. However, in Gogrial, Ler and nearby areas, illiteracy was still exceptionally high. Written texts were still associated with government and the epistemic access of government-like figures.
Thirdly, government impunity was a key part of setting the signatories outside of the rules of the political order. The CPA proclaimed the legitimacy of the warring parties’ assertions of being able to commit violence with impunity and, therefore, having divine-like sovereignty. The CPA contained no provision for GoS and the SPLA to be held accountable for their wartime behaviour. During the wars of the 1980s and 1990s, GoS and the SPLA had both carried out extreme violations of local and international normative codes of conduct in war, including in communities around the Bilnyang. The Sudanese government had bombed villages of civilians, forced brothers to fight against brothers, and killed children or recruited them into their armies, as well as causing widespread starvation. Violence had often been arbitrary, spectacular and devastating.
7 de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent’. Therefore, both the SPLA and GoS had a shared interest in entrenching notions of government impunity and this was confirmed at the outset of the negotiations in Machakos in 2002. The impunity granted at the CPA affirmed the ability of those in the
hakuma ‘to step outside of the confines of the human’.
8 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 7. By acting beyond the moral order, and by the CPA’s claims that they could do this with impunity, they could be seen as beyond the moral order. They were its makers, but acted beyond it themselves.