Chapter 9
Cosmological Crisis and Continuing Conflict in Unity State, 2005–2013
For people, and especially young men, living to the east of the Bilnyang and connected rivers, the post-CPA period was a period of ongoing fear of deadly violence. This short chapter provides a political and economic introduction to the post-CPA conflicts between Warrap and Unity States, and within Unity State – the region to the west of the Bilnyang and connected rivers. It opens by discussing the ongoing armed conflicts between the peoples of Unity and Warrap states in the post-CPA era. These conflicts were a continuity of the politics of the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, some members of the hakuma resisted the re-establishment of border courts, creating a permanent relationship of feud between these states. The chapter then highlights the internal, intra-hakuma rivalries over this oil-rich state, and traces their shifting configurations after 2005. These internal Nuer wars created an endless state of feud and insecurity.
The chapter also introduces local understandings that linked spiritual impurity to the ongoing conflicts in Unity State. Parts of the hakuma had claimed a lack of pollution as a result of wars of the hakuma. However, in contrast, some people living locally claimed that the wars and patterns of violence of the 1980s and 1990s had brought intolerable levels of spiritual pollution. This forced the absence of significant Nuer prophets, such as MAANI, and this resulted in the continuation of suffering. While framing it in spiritual terms, this explanation highlighted the continuity between the ongoing armed conflict and the wars of the previous 1980s and 1990s. It saw the solution in divine authorities who could both oversee compensation exchange and remake a situation of purity through rituals.
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It was December 2012. With a little persuasion and financial promise, I managed to borrow a small Toyota pick-up truck to make a journey to the toc. This toc was the one that was fed by the River Jur, and waters that flowed north from the Bilnyang. I usually travelled by motorbike but a friend’s recent accident had made me more risk-adverse. At that point in my research, I was primarily concerned with observing the large chiefs’ courts that met on the western edge of the toc in Greater Gogrial in the dry season. This highest chiefs’ court of the county formally sat in the headquarters in Lietnhom. However, during these dry-season months, the paramount chief followed the cattle and moved his court to Thiek Thou – a small settlement on an island of higher land closer to the grazing lands and cattle camps. As so many of his cases involved an exchange of cattle, the proximity of the court to the cattle made justice swifter and more tangible. As some peace had been established after the 2008 Kal Kuel Peace Meeting, this chief would also sometimes sit with chiefs from Gogrial West in the toc when cases arose between parties from Gogrial East and Gogrial West. This allowed a re-creation of a judicial peace at least for cases that had freshly arisen.
If you journey from Lietnhom to Thiek Thou in the dry season, your path crosses a network of dried riverbeds that confront you with thick layers of golden, parched sand. The sand is a rich colour, baked and warm from days and days of pounding by an unobscured sun. For cars, the riverbed is almost impassable, for the tyres of cars only slide into the sands and struggle to gain traction. I had previously listened to local drivers discuss the tactics of passing through the sand without getting stuck. Some thought you should go fast and hard, others that you should start slow and not accelerate, hoping to skim and glide over the sands. The drivers’ theories varied widely but were all justified with a plethora of examples. That day, we made it through the first riverbed of the Jur. Yet, another twenty minutes drive further on, at a smaller riverbed, our car was almost immediately stuck. The sand covered the wheel hubs and the route was clearly impassable. The sand seemed to have a new malevolent character and held fast my car. There were no homesteads or villages in sight – nor even a tree for shade. My friend and I had no hope of shifting the vehicle.
As we waited and attempted to shuffle a little sand to preserve some hope of progress, a group of titweng (armed cattle keepers) appeared on the horizon. They were moving on foot from a visit to the local government county commissioner in Lietnhom back to their cattle camp near Thiek Thou. The previous month had seen large raids into the cattle camps from Mayom (Unity State) and the titweng continued a regular communication with the local government to ensure a coordinated security effort.
At that time, the county was littered with rumours of an imminent attack from Mayom by Peter Gadet’s rebel forces. In 2011, Peter Gadet took leadership of the South Sudan Liberation Army and declared his rebellion against the SPLA government in Juba. In May 2011, there was fighting between the SPLA and Gadet’s forces in Mankien (Mayom County). As the rebels were pushed out of the settlement, the SPLA followed and burnt seven villages.
1 International Crisis Group, South Sudan: Compounding Instability in Unity State (International Crisis Group, 2011), page 13. Peter Gadet had once been aligned to Matip but gained a reputation for regularly changing allegiances. At the time of this rebellion, Peter Gadet was based in Mayom, on the north-eastern edge of the
toc. Therefore, the
toc again became a frontline between opposing areas of armed group control, as it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. As one Dinka chief described in 2012, ‘It is now still as bad as the Anya-nya-2 times. There is no peace between us. They loot and kill us. We loot and kill them’.
When the titweng saw our car stuck in the sands, our need was quite obvious and they offered to help in exchange for a lift to Thiek Thou. The six of them simply picked up our car and lifted it out of the riverbed. They were happy with the reward of a lift on the back of our truck. I was happy with the promise of a strong work force to rescue us if we got stuck again.
When we arrived in Thiek Thou, the chiefs’ court was a dominant feature at the heart of the settlement. Dozens of litigants had already crowded under the shade of a large tree and sat on the floor in a dozen, semi-circular rows. In front of the semi-circle, five chiefs sat in front of a table. To their left, the paramount chief sat in a larger chair strung with dried goatskin. A pick-up truck mounted with a gun was parked at the edge of the shade of the tree. The paramount chief had travelled up to the court in Thiek Thou from his house in Lietnhom for the day in this truck. He was commuting daily to the court. While the pick-up was parked next to the court in an imposing fashion, this militarised security was described by the paramount chief as a way to protect himself in case of raiding as opposed to explicitly interfering with the workings of the court. None of the soldiers appeared to be engaged with the cases being discussed and seemed more interested in watching the cattle. Yet, the gun remained a material display of the government’s might that backed up the power of the paramount chief.
Later that day, the youths that had lifted my car out of the sand reappeared in Thiek Thou. We talked again. They mentioned that an NGO-funded peace workshop would be held the following week in Lietnhom. They invited me to attend. I was not sure if they had the power to invite me, but that week I sought permission from the commissioner and the NGO. In this post-CPA era of apparent peace, most international donor funding focused on development and state-building. One NGO, coordinating a consortium on a development project, had sought to prioritise peace-making in order that intra-Gogrial conflict did not interrupt their programming. They were hosting a series of workshops with chiefs, women leaders and youth to discuss peace. The commissioner at the time had a good relationship with the NGO and forced the chiefs to attend. Large meals were also an incentive.
I sat through the days of meetings, listening to different discussions about war and peace between people in Greater Gogrial. The youth were the last group to attend the workshop. Both titweng and educated youth participated. The titweng were always told to go first for lunch as they needed to build up their strength to defend the toc.
On the second day, as we sat under the tree, with a flipchart and further conversation, the commissioner’s pick-up truck rushed to the edge of the meeting. There were urgent fears of insecurity in the toc; the titweng were needed immediately. The titweng left the meeting and piled into this truck to rush to the toc. Others sped off in the same direction on foot. Despite this being the era of the peace of the CPA, and despite local peace meetings about intra-Gogrial peace, war was still anticipated and being fought.
The largest raid by Peter Gadet’s forces ended up coming a little while later in May 2012. The day of Peter Gadet’s raid had seemed like any other when we woke in the NGO compound further west, and away from the
toc. Yet, as I walked to the market, things were different. People moved quickly. Shops were not opened, but men sat outside in small, huddled groups. More public transport cars than normal were at the roundabout in the market. They were loading fast with people and quickly moving away. They were moving not to Wau but towards Lietnhom in the north-east. Gadet’s forces had killed over a hundred people and taken thousands of cattle during a dawn raid.
2 Discussion with Gogrial East County Commissioner, May 2012, Lietnhom; discussion with UNMISS civil affairs officer, June 2012, Kuajok. Titweng in Gogrial brutally fought back. Now women carried bundles of food and clothes with them, not knowing of their loved ones’ circumstances but wanting to be prepared to help them. Young men with guns were given the first seats on the vehicles so they could speed to help the defence.
Tensions in the toc escalated not simply because of momentary political divisions, but also over claims of authority over land. In more peaceful times, many ancestors had been buried there. Even in the most militarised moments after the CPA, young, armed men still took risks to visit and make sacrifices on the gravesites of ancestors buried here. These visits also became closely connected with asserting ownership over the lands in the toc. As one young man explained:
Our grandparents lived in the
toc. That is where they are buried. That was really our land. We need power to reclaim our land again so our cattle are well fed and so our children are well fed. So, a few of us go back with our guns. We went last year to sacrifice a cow to my grandfather.
3 Interview, Yiik Ador (Warrap State), December 2011.A lack of judicial peace
After the CPA, the lack of judicial peace between Warrap and Unity States entrenched a relationship of feud across the
toc. During the 1980s and 1990s, the
toc had become a ‘no-man’s land’ and a place where chiefs’ courts could not meet and where judicial peace was not possible.
4 Naomi Pendle, ‘Contesting the Militarization of the Places Where They Met: The Landscapes of the Western Nuer and Dinka (South Sudan)’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 11:1 (2017): 64–85. The Wunlit Peace Conference had tried to make peace across the
toc; the conference discussions and its agreements clearly saw joint Nuer-Dinka border courts as possible. Historically, there had been such courts.
5 Naomi Pendle, ‘“The Dead Are Just to Drink From”: Recycling Ideas of Revenge among the Western Dinka, South Sudan’. Africa 88:1 (2018): 99–121. However, the nationwide peace of the CPA brought new potentially for a deep peace through judicial redress and the subsequent reconciliation through spiritual cleansing and divine sanction against reopening a feud. If the CPA really was about peace, a major indicator of peace would be the reinstating of border courts.
As discussed in Chapter 6, the logics of the CPA did not make peace in South Sudan. The CPA remade political economies that required South Sudanese in the
hakuma to have easily mobilisable labour including military labour. Such labour was more easily conjured if communities remained divided along political lines. A lack of judicial peace, and a permanent relationship of feud, was a means to do this. In this context, judicial peace was resisted by those in Juba. When I asked chiefs why border courts were not re-created after Wunlit and the CPA, chiefs spoke of the lack of permission from Juba.
6 Interviews in Warrap and Unity States, 2012–13.The lack of chiefs’ courts between Unity State and Warrap State, the western Nuer and Dinka, constructed a post-CPA state of feud between these two regions. If times of apparent peace could not even solve the feud, the state of feud now seemed permanent. During the 1980s and 1990s, numerous acts of violence had been committed between these two communities. Legal and moral violations continued. With the prohibition of the courts across this borderland, people had no option to choose a judicial peace. Plus, a judicial peace, through compensation, was usually followed by a spiritual reconciliation process. The lack of chiefs’ courts also meant a lack of reconciliation. This lack of justice and redress of grievances, and the lack of reconciliation, left people across the Unity-Warrap borders in a state of feud.
7 Pendle, ‘“The Dead are Just to Drink From”’. The need for justice through violence was entrenched.
8 Ibid.