Since 2005, there have been repeated episodes of extreme intra-Gogrial conflict. The conflict has often been framed as a conflict between the Apuk Dinka of Gogrial East County and the Aguok Dinka of Gogrial West County – new counties that were formed around the time of the CPA. In more recent years, the Kuac Dinka of Gogrial West County were also accused of playing an active role in support of others from their county. These conflicts have been heavily armed; in the 2018 disarmament, over five thousand guns were collected by the army.
1 Legislator, speech during Ajiep conference, 21 April 2018.Like many conflicts in South Sudan, to the outsider and on the surface, these conflicts have often been dismissed as ‘communal fighting’, almost suggesting that people had a natural propensity to violence. However, these assumptions contrast sharply with local diagnoses of the conflicts. In Gogrial, the repetitive accusation is that these conflicts in Gogrial are started by those in urban centres, and those with military and political connections.
2 Interview with Chief A, Ajiep Kuach (Gogrial), 20 April 2018; Interview with Chief C, Ajiep Kuach (Gogrial), 20 April 2018. Supplies of ammunition for these conflicts have repeatedly been transported to Gogrial by government vehicles. One chief explained at a 2018 peace conference, while contrasting contemporary wars with those of the past:
Today this war with Aguok, it has its root from urban areas … We, the elders today, are pointing the finger at the educated leaders who are the ones killing our children. This kind of division is brought by the circulation of written messages and letters around the communities.
3 Interview with Chief B, Ajiep Kuach (Gogrial), 20 April 2018.On Facebook, one youth leader wrote: ‘We the youth are being fooled into war by the people who sleep in the lodges and hotels, their children learning in a clean environment. They even sleep as far as Nairobi but making us to die of their frictions.’
4 Youth leader, Ajiep Peace Conference, 20 April 2018. A South Sudan Member of Parliament for neighbouring Twic also described how politics in the state’s centre was being fought out violently in Gogrial:
We don’t fight in Juba. We don’t fight in Kuajok. We are staying together. But, you fight in your own areas. Why do you stay in Juba in peace with people from all the communities in Gogrial, yet you insist on fighting yourself here [in Gogrial]?
5 MP for Twic in the South Sudan National Assembly, opening speech Ajiep Peace Conference, 21 April 2018. People in Gogrial have been grieved by the lack of consequences for those who incite the fighting. It is ‘fuelled by the politicians but the funny thing is that their children are schooling and none of them attend any battle. So, others’ children are left orphans while their children have parents’.
6 Chief C, Ajiep Peace Conference, 20 April 2018.