Chapter 7
The Proliferation of Peace in Gogrial, 2005–2020
After the 2005 CPA, there has not only been a proliferation of conflict in Warrap State, including in Gogrial, but also a proliferation of peace meetings. There were at least eight of these between 2005 and 2018. These peace meetings were organised by local governments, church leaders, NGOs or the UN, and were attended by people from local and national government, chiefs, other local leaders, sometimes youth, and often the international sponsor. The many peace meetings did provide opportunities for people to ‘vomit truth’, speak about issues (even if prohibited by the hakuma) and to mock certain elites. One woman compared the government to a farting man. However, they did not challenge the hakuma’s claims to impunity nor reverse the dynamics that drove conflict.
The meetings and agreements entrenched the power of the
hakuma and limited change. The
hakuma’s god-like power was enhanced through asserting the government’s impunity for spectacular, arbitrary violence, by establishing a negotiated, non-judicial model of peace. When governments rain with arbitrariness and impunity, they are setting ‘outside the confines of the human’ and are acting as if they were god.
1 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017). Peace meetings have repeatedly legitimised the
hakuma’s authority to do this. Therefore, the peace meetings become entangled in the cosmic politics, as a tool of the
hakuma. The frequency and multiplicity of peace became an assertion of its arbitrary nature, and also another expression of the divine nature of the hakuma. As it could demand peace at will, peace was just a peace of the hakuma, self-enforced, and based on its current interests in peace. At the same time, despite their frequency, they were not routine. Peace was temporary, and politically dependent on the will of the political hakuma of the moment. Peace meetings became short-lived. People knew that, as they agreed to peace and new post-peace political and security arrangements, they would likely be overturned within a year or two.
Peace meetings did sometimes support judicial solutions, but courts overturned previous understandings of compensation and justice. For example, at the court at Pan Acier (present day Gogrial East), legal rulings about responsibility for compensation remade the social unit responsible for compensation and entrenched a larger-sized social unit as appropriate to wage war. This holding of this large group accountable for compensation payments also removed responsibility for compensation from members of the hakuma and those who incited violence. The way compensation was exchanged also detracted from its use to quieten the social demands of the dead.
As the hakuma continues to be akin to the divine, divine authorities have been key contesters seeking to set limits to the power of the hakuma. MABIORDIT became a significant divinity in these cosmic contestations. Through peace meetings, the hakuma sought to assert their legitimacy to end MABIORDIT’s violence. Supporters and possessors of the divine authority MABIORDIT were criminalised for their violence, while the government’s violence was asserted as beyond accountability.
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I would often hitch a lift with an NGO vehicle and that is how I first travelled to Kuajok – the Warrap State capital. It was 2010 and I joined half a dozen others on the side-facing benches at the back of an NGO Land Cruiser. We twisted our bodies to try to face frontwards so the ride was more comfortable. The air conditioning in the Land Cruiser had broken long before, so we slid open the windows to catch some breeze despite the flying dust. It was the dry season and so, to access Kuajok, we could drive through the parched grasslands and the emptied, sandy riverbed of the River Jur. At the time there was no bridge over the river at Kuajok. This was the first time I had crossed the
lil. As we drove, a local NGO worker described to me the significance of the dried grass landscape in the centre of Greater Gogrial. The
lil is an area of high grass, where water remains longer into the dry season than on the higher, drier, tree-covered land nearby.
2 The lil is changing. More and more trees are starting to grow in this landscape that is being reshaped by cattle and environmental changes. However, that is a discussion for another book. It is a place for grazing until the grass fully dries out and the cattle move on to the
toc for the height of the dry season. Ajiep is a large village on the edge of a
lil and near the River Jur
. When Gogrial was divided into Gogrial East and Gogrial West Counties, at the time of the signing of the CPA, the
lil was close to the un-demarcated boundary between these two counties. Much fighting has taken place in and around Ajiep. They say that so many have been killed in the area that if you walk through the grass, human bones can be seen scattered around.
As Ajiep has hosted fighting, it has often also hosted peace meetings. In 2018 a peace meeting was held to try to end the latest escalation of conflict. During the meeting, one woman stood up and compared the government-citizen relationship at peace meetings to the relationship between an abusive husband and his wife. She said,
The situation in our homes is that your husband can beat you up and claim that you do not know how to do things. Your sister, neighbour or friend will come to you to give you hope …. With all this support you will go back to prepare the meal for your husband despite the bruises on your face. In the evening, he will take his food and will be given water to bath. We women again accept to sleep with him in the same bed despite all that he has done. My sisters, is that not the same as this peace?
3 Woman leader from Kuac, speech Ajiep Peace Conference, 21 April 2018.In the decade and a half since the CPA, there has not only been a proliferation of intra-Gogrial conflict, but also a proliferation of peace meetings. It would be easy to be optimistic and assume that these peace conferences were expressions of local agency pushing back against interests of the hakuma and claims of impunity. However, these multiple local peace meetings are not a simple inverse to the political dynamics that drive conflict. Instead, they are best understood as continuous with conflict and part of the entrenching of power that makes it hard to contest supranatural claims of the hakuma.
As this woman at the 2018 peace conference highlights, peace, like conflict, has been part of the structures of violence that have forced citizens into abusive relationships with hakuma over time (just as many women suffer forced, abusive relationships with their husbands that are tacitly supported by the courts’ and the law’s resistance to divorce). Rituals and words of comfort, as for an abused wife, serve to assert violent hierarchies and not contest them. This chapter highlights how peace meetings did provide an opportunity to ‘vomit truth’ even against the government. Yet, this did not bring change and, if anything, entrenched structures of violence by appeasing dissent through listening to complaints. Instead, in many ways, peace meetings were crafted to assert the power of the hakuma including through regulating divine authorities such as MABIORDIT, by asserting the government’s impunity for spectacular, arbitrary violence, by establishing a negotiated, non-judicial model of peace and by quietening the dead. This has provided the government a further opportunity to overcome the ambiguous tension, outlined in the previous chapter, of both being autochthonous rulers and legitimate holders of power to kill with impunity. At the same time, the government is not homogenous in its response, understandings or interests.
This chapter first outlines the peace agreements held and the opportunities for speaking truth to power. Then it discusses peace meetings as assertions of hakuma power including by regulating MABIORDIT, asserting their impunity to commit violence, promoting a non-judicial peace and quietening the dead.