Chapter 11
A War for the Dead and Wars Made by Peace
The wars did not stop. This chapter both introduces the wars in South Sudan since 2013, and then discusses the repeated international response of comprehensive peace negotiations and agreements. The wars from 2013 have often been narrated in terms of political contestations for control of the government’s power and wealth.
1 Alex de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113:452 (2014): 347–369. Through the wars, political configurations in the
hakuma (the broad government/socio-political sphere, including foreign traders and slavers) were re-arranged and Salva Kiir cemented his control over the security arena. There were further displays of a supranatural power to be able to wage war and peace with impunity. At the same time, these political contestations were taking place in a cosmic polity.
For many South Sudanese, the wars only really made sense if understood in terms of the moral demands for revenge and the lack of purity after the wartime pollution of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The moral contestations over the previous decades in rural Southern Sudan were carried by wartime recruits. The concept of revenge had been transformed over the previous decades through armed conflict and peace, as well as contestations to restrain the divinity of the
hakuma, as discussed in previous chapters. For the pro-government forces, demands for revenge based on histories dating back twenty years allowed armed conflict to be seen as a moral imperative. Among the nascent armed opposition, the moral imperative to mobilise was framed around demands for revenge after killings in Juba in 2013.
2 Naomi R. Pendle, ‘The “Nuer of Dinka Money” and the Demands of the Dead: Contesting the Moral Limits of Monetised Politics in South Sudan’, Conflict, Security and Development 20:5 (2020): 587–605. Military leaders, chiefs and the youth continued to claim that people had an obligation to carry out revenge, including for events a century before. For communities and combatants on either side of the armed conflict, the logics of revenge were central to the meaning of the violence and its legitimacy.
In previous decades, as discussed in earlier chapters, divine authorities had creatively remade norms of revenge and pollution to contest and resist claims of hakuma impunity and to reassert a system in which peace and purity were possible. This also reasserted that hakuma wars were subject to moral restraint and spiritual consequences. However, some post-2013 hakuma mobilisations manipulated these popular moral ideas in order to demand unrestrained violence. As patterns of violence disrupted historic norms of restraint, the fear among many communities in South Sudan is that recent violence has created an unending war.
Despite the centrality of revenge to the meaning of war, the international community quickly forged ahead with trying to broker peace and a new comprehensive agreement between the leaders of the warring parties. The first meetings started in Addis Ababa before the SPLA-IO had even met together and formalised as a group. The 2015 ARCSS only saw an escalation of conflict in South Sudan. The 2018 revitalised agreement did result in an explicit cessation of hostilities between the government and SPLA-IO, and they did eventually come back together to form a transitional government in Juba. Yet, the logics of the agreement did not fit with the logics of the war as a war of revenge. The peace agreement still left an absence of justice for the dead, and a latent moral demand for future vengeance. Therefore, with the lack of purity, whether there was war or peace was ambiguous. The actual details of the 2018 agreement also created a situation of even further conflict between parts of the hakuma. In this context, spiritual unease could easily be used to justify war.
***
The only car left in Tonj Town (Warrap State) that Sunday afternoon still planning to travel south-west to Rumbek town (Lakes State) was the car of an MP in the Lakes State Parliament. It was only a few months before that I had visited Prophetess Nyachol with the new commissioner, and now I was travelling to England for Christmas. That afternoon in Tonj, all the other commercial cars, where you could pay a fee for a seat, had already left to avoid the risk of still being on the road at night. The size and opulent interior of the MP’s car testified to the personal monetary benefits of being an MP in South Sudan. On that Sunday afternoon, the MP’s wife and four of his children were squashed together in the back of the car, but the MP himself was absent. A young driver with a good grasp of English sat in the front. As the MP’s income was erratic, reliant on an unpredictable bureaucracy and his personal relations with higher ranks in Juba, on that day the driver had no money for fuel. I was given the prized front seat in the car in exchange for my financing of the fuel for the journey. I was eager to get to Rumbek as fast as possible.
The journey to Rumbek started peacefully; the children in the back were just eager to test my attempts to speak Dinka. The road from Tonj to Rumbek has a history that dated back to the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government in the first half of the twentieth century. Between the towns, it is dominated by its passage through the notorious forest called Ror Cuɔl Akol (literally ‘The Forest of Sun and Darkness’). The name refers to the fact that, if walking, and you enter the forest (ror) at sunrise (akol) you will not leave it until the sun has set (cuɔl).
Halfway to Rumbek, while still in the Ror Cuɔl Akol, our car bumped over something hard and audibly gained a puncture. I insisted that we stop. The driver refused. When we were still in Tonj and aware that other cars had left earlier, I had asked the driver about the safety of the journey. Despite his previous assurances, he now claimed it was too dangerous in the forest to stop. Armed thieves and raiders were known to often hide in the forest to escape accountability, and also to ambush people passing through the forest. The driver’s fear of the potential of armed men kept him driving. We made it the last couple of miles to a village, safely changed the tyre and continued with ease the rest of the way to Rumbek. Yet, even in that mundane decision on a normal afternoon journey, fear of physical or even lethal violence was a background consideration in this post-CPA South Sudan.
When I reached Juba, I had planned to spend time with friends that I had met while researching in Gogrial, Mayendit and the communities surrounding the Bilnyang. Some of my closest friends in Gogrial had travelled from Kakuma Refugee Camp (in Kenya) to South Sudan, to their family homes in Gogrial a few years after the CPA. I had met them in the villages of their families’ homes. They spoke brilliant English which overcame my insufficient Dinka, and we worked together as teachers in a local school. In 2010, the South Sudan government started to reopen universities in the south that had been in the north during the decades of war. Having won places, my friends had moved to Juba to go to university. When I met people from Mayendit, they also introduced me to their networks in Juba. These included people studying, working in NGOs and working in the black-market Forex industry.
The night I arrived in Rumbek was the 15 December 2013. When I was back in the range of a phone mast, I texted a friend in Juba to say that I had safely arrived in Rumbek and would continue my journey to Juba in the next day or two. I had first met this friend in Mayendit when I started researching there in 2012. In response to my text, my friend called me. He announced: ‘The war has started’.
3 Phone conversation, South Sudanese NGO worker in Juba via phone from Rumbek, late evening, Sunday 15 December 2013.That evening, soldiers of the Presidential Guard in Juba had fought each other in a small barracks near the University of Juba. Political tensions in Juba were high at the time as the SPLM/A was meeting to decide its presidential candidate for the planned 2015 elections. Earlier in 2013, President Kiir had dismissed from government a host of senior figures including Riek Machar and some of those historically loyal to Garang. At the time of their dismissal, tensions were high but no shots were fired. Instead, those who had been dismissed had formed a loose political coalition to challenge Kiir’s leadership of the SPLM and government.
On the night of the 15
December, my friend immediately, accurately, interpreted this gun battle between a few dozen soldiers in one barracks as the start of a national civil war. He was not alone in perceiving its national significance. By the following morning, the SPLA in Juba had split, and fighting instantaneously remade the urban political and economic centre of Juba into an active battlefield. The division in the SPLA was largely along the lines of those who had fought for the SPLA in the 1990s and those who had fought for other armed groups, often against the SPLA, such as former members of the South Sudan Defence Force.
4 Douglas Johnson, ‘Briefing: The Crisis in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113:451 (2014): 300–309. Juba had hosted armed conflict in the battles of the 1980s and 1990s, but, since the CPA, had been remade into a booming capital city of international development workers and oil wealth. Until December 2013, while armed conflict might have been commanded from Juba, it had taken place at a spatial distance. On the morning of 16 December, the army fractured and started battling for weapons stores across the town. The capital city erupted as the epicentre of the new civil war.
While the army fought itself, young men in soldiers’ uniforms targeted thousands of people in their homes.
5 African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, Final Report of the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan (The Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan, 2014). Civilians were among those apprehended and killed in this violence during door-to-door searches.
6 Skye Wheeler, ‘South Sudan’s New War: Abuses by Government and Opposition Forces’ (Human Rights Watch, 2014). Tens of thousands of people ran to United Nations bases to seek safety. These bases, and their new use as Protection of Civilians sites, provided a new, urban, international, militarised sanctuary and enactment of nascent protection ideas.
Over the following few days, as violence escalated in Juba, I remained with South Sudanese and international NGO friends in Rumbek. There were friends from Lakes State, but also Nuer speakers from Unity State. As we watched the violence unfolding from a distance, my intuition was to repeatedly call friends in Juba to see if they were okay and to try to work out if I should be worried about the conflict spreading to Rumbek.
7 Rumbek Town itself never saw significant conflict between the government and a formal armed opposition group. My calls found these friends, who had been born near the Bilnyang and connected rivers, in a variety of different places in Juba. Most were hiding in homes and in hotels with friends. Some vanished from contact for a few days and later confirmed that they had fled to the UN bases for safety. Those friends who I had met in Mayendit, Ler and Koch feared that the political histories of their home areas would prompt government soldiers to classify them as rebels. Riek Machar, whose family was from Ler, was already establishing himself as the leader of the opposition. Many people from the east of the Bilnyang were killed in those December 2013 door-to-door searches that targeted Nuer speakers. Other friends who answered were moving around the town in army vehicles. Areas to the west of the Bilnyang and connected rivers had been key recruiting grounds for the pro-government militia forces that leaders in government from Gogrial and Tonj were trying to incorporate within the national army. People had joined the army to gain sponsorship for their education, to appease their uncles’ demands or because they perceived army service as a prerequisite for future authority. Their own family histories that were shaped in armed conflict around the Bilnyang since the 1990s, also gave many a deep fear of Nuer-led rebellions.
By Christmas Day, just ten days later, armed conflict had spread to the three states of Greater Upper Nile (the north-eastern third of South Sudan) and engulfed four of South Sudan’s major cities (namely Juba, Bentiu, Bor and Malakal). In Bentiu, James Koang, who commanded the SPLA’s 4th Division, defected from the Juba government and took the majority of his division with him. He justified this as an act of revenge for family members being killed by the government in their homes in Juba.
8 Interview, Nairobi, February 2014. James was an exception to the SPLA-SSDF split as he had been loyal to the SPLA in the 1990s and 2000s, but now rebelled against them. The initial focus of battles in Bentiu between the government and the emerging armed opposition was control of Bentiu and then the oilfields in the region. He quietly escorted Dinka soldiers in his ranks to safety away from Bentiu. Then he declared his opposition and with his remaining defecting 4th Division, captured Bentiu town. The 4th Division was numerically dominated by locally recruited youths from Unity State who defected with him.
Over the following months, the initial armed opposition formally coalesced around the name of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – In Opposition (SPLA-IO).
9 The SPLA-IO formalised its name and hierarchy after a meeting in April 2014 in Pagak on the Ethiopia-South Sudan border. Even at this time many of the commanders in the armed opposition were not sure about the ‘SPLA-IO’ title. This was especially the case among those who had fought with the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) against the SPLA in the 1990s. Riek Machar dominated the process of name selection. Shaped by alliances that repeatedly fragmented, the wars would continue over most of the following decade, with new theatres opening up. They resulted in millions being displaced and hundreds of thousands being killed or dying as an indirect result of the violence.
10 Francesco Checci, Adrienne Testa, Abdihamid Warsame, Le Quach and Rachel Burn, ‘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.