Chapter 6
The Proliferation of Conflict in Gogrial, post-2005
Since 2005, Warrap State has had an autochthonous hakuma in that people born in Warrap State, and with families in Warrap State, have held powerful positions in the local, state and national governments. As Salva Kiir became president and other people from the region gained power in politics and business, the highest positions of state were held by sons of their own soil. Even though people in Warrap State often welcomed this, it brought new ambiguities as ruling elites tried to assert their power and distinction in the homelands of their families. Through the state they were claiming god-like powers and impunity. At the same time, liberal economics and land reform meant that resources, including labour and land, could be accessed through autochthonous claims that asserted their ‘sameness’ with home communities. The new autochthonous hakuma demanded land and labour by identifying as members of these communities, while simultaneously struggling to assert their distinction to give them the authority to do this.
This chapter explores how armed conflict proliferated in Warrap State after the CPA, and acts to introduce the context that allows discussion of peace-making in the region in Chapters 9 and 10, and links this to this new complexity over understandings of the hakuma itself. One way that ruling authorities claimed legitimacy to control killing, while still being members of the community, was by demanding new patterns of violence during conflict. These patterns of violence evoked and remade custom to manufacture unending wars and peaceless feuds. Some (but not all) elites used their intricate knowledge of local cosmologies to re-craft these norms to incite violence and create these longer-term dispositions to conflict. For example, by advocating for the killing of women and children, previous normative prohibitions of such killings could be cited to demand further revenge and the impossibility of peace. Revenge was remade as a moral necessity as judicial justice was made unavailable. Some elite politicians contested these subtle creations of unending wars.
In Pinaud’s 2021 book, she describes how ‘violent ethnicised wealth accumulation was one of the engines of extreme ethnic group entitlement’.
1 Clémence Pinaud, War and Genocide in South Sudan (Cornell University Press, 2021), page 3. The intra-Dinka wars in Warrap State, and the complexity of intra-Dinka relations discussed in the following chapters, pushes against Pinaud’s claims of ethnic homogenisation.
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In 2005, as a result of the signing of the CPA and the death of John Garang in a helicopter crash, Salva Kiir, from Akon in Gogrial West (Warrap State), became leader of the SPLA and President of Southern Sudan. While Kiir’s government over time has included a broad range of leaders from different places and political backgrounds, his premiership has included significant power for other government figures from Warrap State. As discussed in the previous chapter, the CPA created a bunch of complex ambiguities for the Southern Sudanese across the country about the nature of political authority, citizenship and the new state itself. While the CPA document itself was full of ambiguities and unsettlement, what primarily mattered to Southern Sudanese was not the clauses of a written constitutional document, but the realities of how these ambiguities and uncertainties, as well as the written certainties, were being contested and reshaped in politics that manifested locally. Uncertainties in the real implications of the CPA took a particularly acute form in Warrap State, especially after the national leadership fell to Warrap’s sons. Salva Kiir was born in 1951 in Akon (Gogrial West), and was educated in Akon, Kuacjok and Wau. During Kiir’s 1960s service in the Anya-Nya, he had been part of the Bahr-el-Ghazal command. In the SPLA, from 1995, he had overall command in Bahr el Ghazal. Many of those from Warrap State who grew in power in Kiir’s government have similar histories. From 2005, Warrap State (to the west of the rivers of the Bilnyang) had one of its own ‘sons’ as the head of the emerging Southern Sudanese state. This autochthonous hakuma was a new experience for people in Warrap State and inevitably brought uncertainty.
‘Autochthony’ or ‘sons of the soil’ are ideas of belonging and rights that have become widespread in discourses worldwide as politics seeks to include and exclude in the context of globalised political economies.
2 Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere (eds), Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (Wiley-Blackwell, 1999). Such ideas are based on an essentialist ideology of culture and identity that imitate colonial discourses about ‘primitive people’.
3 Adam Kuper, ‘The Return of the Native’, Current Anthropology 44:3 (2003): 389–402. At the same time, these ideas have become important in claims over land, especially in the wake of liberal reforms.
Over the following, post-2005 years of ‘peace’ and an autochthonous national leadership from Warrap State, brutal and often arbitrary armed conflict continued in Warrap State. In Greater Gogrial (south of Twic and north of Greater Tonj, in Warrap State) alone, by 2018, senior chiefs calculated that intra-Gogrial conflict had directly killed 4,028 people.
4 Deputy Governor, opening speech at Ajiep Conference, 25 April 2018. This excluded indirect deaths through increased hunger or lack of access to health facilities. For example, for years, people from Gogrial East County did not feel safe to access the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) health facility in Gogrial West County because of their fears of having to sleep there, effectively denying them access to adequate healthcare. In other Southern Sudan conflicts, excess mortality from causes such as ill health has been double the number directly killed by conflict.
5 Francesco Checchi, Adrienne Testa, Abdihamid Warsame, Le Quach and Rachel Burns, ‘Estimates of Crisis-attributable Mortality in South Sudan, December 2013–April 2018’ (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 2018), www.lshtm.ac.uk/south-sudan-full-report, accessed 7 December 2020.Warrap State has seen extractive, violent political economies and hakuma for over a century. As this book narrates, histories of the region from the mid-nineteenth century included violent raids by ivory and slave merchants, and violent patrols by British and then Sudanese officials in the Sudan government. At the same time, the emergence of an autochthonous hakuma meant that people in Warrap faced new uncertainties about implications for the power of the hakuma and its contestations with other divine powers.
In commentaries on national politics, de Waal has argued that violence in South Sudan can best be understood through the South Sudanese kleptocratic political market. He argues that this system is characterised by violence as ‘contending elites use violence as a means of bargaining’.
6 Alex de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113:452 (2014): 347–369, page 349. Leaders lay claim to resources through rebellion and conflict. They demonstrate their strength through extreme violence, and this establishes their bargaining position with the president and government leadership that allows them to demand resources including positions of power.
Some commentary in Gogrial resonates with these explanations and suggests that violence is also used as a means to bargain for power at state level. In South Sudan, in practice, the president directly appoints state governors. Even at state level, elites who are not given power are said to use violence in order to demonstrate to the president that they must be taken seriously and included in the bargaining for power in the state. Violence also acts to undermine the current leader’s ability to control his state and prove that he could access the government’s claimed authority to kill with impunity. As one chief proclaimed at a peace meeting with governors present,
Are you guys [the
hakuma] done now? Have you finished with the civilian killing? A little while ago, it was the position of governorship that made you kill us. It happens that whenever a person wants the post of governorship, he starts thinking up what will make the incumbent leader fall – to discredit him as inferior leader. He politically carries out atrocities.
7 Chief, speech during Ajiep Kuach Peace Conference, 20 April 2018.However, focusing on intra-elite competition too easily misses the important role of shifting political economies, including about land and labour, and how violence and conflict are often part of the wider complexities of having an autochthonous hakuma in a context where the hakuma has long been associated with being god-like. The combination of the CPA and this autochthonous leadership increased conflict in various ways: firstly, the CPA changed the political economies of land and labour, re-entrenching resource acquisition through claims of autochthony; secondly, the hakuma suddenly had epistemic insights that previous hakuma in Warrap State had lacked, allowing them to more explicitly grapple with cosmic politics; thirdly, as leaders were from these communities, it increased their need to establish their distinction as governing forces, and control over and impunity for violence was a way to do this.