The peace conferences

Peace meetings and special courts on intra-Gogrial conflicts between 2005 and 2018:

This chapter initially describes some of three key peace meetings, before describing their cumulative impact on peace and power.

People from across Greater Gogrial also came to see Mayen Rual as a safe space. After Kerubino Kuanyin Bol’s 1992 escape from prison, he came to Gogrial in 1993 to recruit forces against Garang and the SPLA. He reached the northern edge of the River Jur at Pan Acier (further north in the lil).3 Zoe Cormack, ‘The Making and Remaking of Gogrial: Landscape, History and Memory in South Sudan’ (PhD diss., Durham University, 2014), page 214. By 1994 he had received arms from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and based himself in Gogrial Town. Kerubino’s forces were brutal and predatory, raiding rural areas for food and to force young men to join their militia. For safety, many people in the north-west of the River Jur fled south and Mayen Rual proved a useful refuge.

One of the first post-CPA peace meetings in Gogrial was held 27– 31 May 2005 in Mayen Rual Town (Gogrial East County). This peace conference was organised just three months after the intra-Gogrial conflict erupted, but seventy people had already been killed.4 Anai, ‘Warrap State Peace and Reconciliation Conference – Mayen Rual’. PACT (an NGO) helped facilitate the meeting. Over four hundred people attended from the counties of Greater Gogrial and Greater Tonj. There was also a high-level government presence including Salva Kiir (then still deputy to Garang), Ambrose Riiny Thiik (then Chief Justice for Southern Sudan) and Pieng Deng Kuol (then commander in Bahr el Ghazal and later Southern Sudan police chief).

The holding of the meeting in Mayen Rual emphasised its role in reasserting post-CPA authority and order. The CPA’s ending of the SPLA-GoS war created uncertainty both for the future of Mayen Rual as a political and economic hub (as Wau suddenly became accessible), and also of the rights and obligations of those who lived there both over land in Mayen Rual and as citizens in the new Southern Sudan. There were new disagreements about whether those living in Mayen Rual had tax obligations to the chief there or to other chiefs in areas where they had previously lived. Some even started to claim that Mayen Rual should be seen as a town and not a payam as it did not belong to one section.5 Executive Chief of Tonj North County, ibid., page 21. Payams are administrative units that are below and smaller than the county and above the boma (the lowest-level administrative division). For authorities in Mayen Rual, as across Southern Sudan, the CPA brought uncertainty and questions over whether this amounted to a period of rupture or return to pre-war arrangements. While Mayen Rual’s own uncertainties were symptomatic of wider questions, the meeting was called to tackle the broader question of conflict across Greater Gogrial.

Before the meeting at Mayen Rual, a meeting had been held at Kuanyal. However, chiefs from one side of the conflict refused to go as ‘the artilleries taken to that meeting were used to kill Paan–Machar Mawien [the clan of Machar Mawien].6 Sub-chief from Konggoor, Tonj North County, Anai, ‘Warrap State Peace and Reconciliation Conference – Mayen Rual’, page 11. They were explicit that militarised rulers had used violence to kill and were now using the same violence – and the same physical guns – to assert peace. They saw this as intolerable. In many ways the presence of the same guns was demonstrative of the hakuma’s power to rain favour or destruction, peace or war, at their will.

The dominant item on the agenda of the 2005 Mayen Rual Conference was a discussion of the details of recent fighting in the newly formed Warrap State. Much of this was around who had taken which cattle, where they were now hidden or where they had been slaughtered, and who was responsible for this violence. People counted out various numbers of lost goats, sheep and cattle.

Salva Kiir himself opened the conference. His family and community in north-west Greater Gogrial had not yet been involved in the conflict, but historic allegiances meant that it was foreseeable that surrounding communities would be drawn into the fight.7 Anai, ‘Warrap State Peace and Reconciliation Conference – Mayen Rual’. At the meeting, Kiir opened by stating that ‘we come here to cry for the dead who died after peace [the CPA] was signed’. Kiir himself highlighted that it was all an issue of governance and a ‘lack of proper management’. He asserted that ‘people have to accept law and order’. He presented peace as demonstrative of compliance with the authority and order of the new Government of South Sudan.

In 2008, President Salva Kiir called and attended a peace meeting in Kal Kuel (Tonj) that finally suspended hostilities. Victor Atem Atem (then Commissioner of Gogrial East) and Wol Deng Aleu (then Commissioner of Gogrial West) played an active role in bringing the chiefs together. This was accompanied by a group of the Juba-based elite touring Gogrial with the slogan ‘akec akec’ – ‘enough is enough’. The hakuma’s unified insistence on peace meant that peace was realised for the following eight years. Peace was at the command of the hakuma.

In July 2017, President Kiir declared a state of emergency in Gogrial and deployed troops to carry out disarmament. This was the fourth disarmament campaign in Gogrial since 2005, and soldiers were accused of raping local girls as well as using violence to acquire guns. In September, a new state governor was appointed. He was accused of ordering violent arrests and summary executions against those accused of leading the implementation of the violence. Disarmament and summary executions were both spectacular displays of the power of the hakuma to enforce their demand for peace. They felt unable to demand peace without the threat of deadly consequences. In early April 2018, the summary execution of three men in Gogrial East County who were against peace, including popular youth leader Agoth Macholdit, was particularly surprising and provocative for people in this country. With burning hearts, people have repeatedly burnt this governor’s private home in revenge.

This governor also initiated a series of peace meetings, including in Ajiep (on the Gogrial East-Gogrial West border) in April 2018, in Kuajok (Gogrial State Capital) in August 2018, and in Wau in November 2018. These included chiefs and baany e biith, and sometimes had United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) or NGO support. Civil society organisations such as Community Empowerment for Progress Organization (CEPO) and Justice Africa have been active in encouraging a more inclusive attendance at these talks.

From 21 to 23 April 2018, hundreds attended a conference in Ajiep including chiefs, the state governors of Gogrial, Twic and Tonj States (the area covering the former Warrap State), as well as other politicians including the South Sudan Vice President James Wani Igga, senior army figures from Divisions 5 and 3, NGOs and UNMISS. This was the governor’s first major peace conference and attempted to assert through dialogue his power over peace. James Wani had been sent to represent the president, and Kiir’s support for the governor was important in asserting his demand for peace. At the same time, some people refused to attend, including those from his home area.