On the 26 June 2018, Kiir and Machar signed the Khartoum Declaration of the Peace Agreement on the instruction of then President Bashir of Sudan and President Museveni of Uganda. This was essentially a deal not between Kiir and Machar, but between Bashir and Museveni.
1 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘The Trouble with South Sudan’s New Peace Deal: The Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS)’, The Zambakari Advisory, Special Issue (2019), page 57. These two foreign presidents and close supporters of the warring parties were able to force an acceptance of a deal. Bashir’s new interest in prioritising peace in South Sudan was connected to his need for revenue to protect his increasingly fragile government. The Sudan and South Sudan ministries of petroleum agreed to resume oil production in Heglig and Unity State, and for Sudan’s army to provide protection for these fields.
2 Nyaba, ‘The Fundamental Problems of South Sudan’, page 21. Upholding the ARCSS framing, this deal was written into a ‘revitalised’ ARCSS agreement which was signed by the SPLM/A-IO, the government and the South Sudan Opposition Alliance on the 12 September 2018. ‘It was the devil that misled us in the first place, hence we fought … I therefore ask that we take brooms and clean off the pain and bitterness the war had created in our hearts’.
3 SPLA-IO Commander, Malakal POC Peace Celebration, 1 December 2018.People in Unity State, who had experienced the brunt force of
hakuma power, welcomed peace. At the same time, the peace of the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) was also arbitrary and a further expression of the
hakuma’s ability to rain favour. One of the most brutal, annual offensives into central Unity State took place in May 2018, just before the June 2018 deal.
4 UNMISS and UNHR, Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Unity State, April–May 2018 (2018), https://unmiss.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/unmissohchr_report_on_indiscriminate_attacks_against_civilians_in_southern_unity_april-may_2018.pdf, accessed 17 July 2022. As discussed, narratives of revenge, including for the death of Kolang Ket, were key parts of the cultural archive that was evoked to justify this violence. Yet, the peace deal now meant that, overnight, the politico-military leadership was demanding a lack of revenge and not compliance with its moral demands. Suddenly the demand was ‘peace’ and not ‘war’.
A lack of justice
In contrast and in recognition of the failures of parts of the CPA, ARCSS included a Chapter V that outlined provisions for justice, accountability, reconciliation and healing. However, the details of these provisions were left unsettled. Their existence did prompt discussion in NGO meetings in Juba and between diplomats in foreign capital cities about what justice might look like. Yet, the written words of the whole agreement carried the same fictional, mystical character as much of the CPA. No-one believed that Chapter V would ever be implemented in a way that offered meaningful accountability through challenging the impunity of the hakuma. If anything, the peace agreement prompted the international community to champion a new state-building agenda that sought to enhance the divine, sovereign nature of the new government of national unity.
As discussed throughout this book, the inclusion of justice in the resolution of the conflict was not only important to appease contemporary hot, hurting hearts and demands for revenge, but to uphold moral and spiritual obligations to the living and the dead. It was also important as a way to re-establish relationships between citizens and the government, to re-establish a judicial form of peace (and war) and to limit the violence of government. Government elites, during the wars and peace of the last three decades, had interrupted the potential for judicial peace and created unending feuds. This lack of judicial redress of grievances provided elites with opportunities to mobilise support along populist, moral lines.
5 Pendle, ‘“The dead are just to drink from”’. Justice was needed to remake government-citizen relations to the extent that citizens’ demands for judicial peace could be realised.
The very nature of the ARCSS and R-ARCSS, like the CPA, even further cemented the negotiated nature of peace that enhanced government powers. The R-ARCSS was presented as a rupture and making of a new government and constitutional arrangements, and not continuity with the past. It was now presented as the new document to justify arrangements of power. It was performed as if it was a blank slate, even if this dissonance from reality reduced its meaning. Yet, the R-ARCSS was a continuity of the turbulent politics where elites could give and take life, and give and take war.
At the same time, compensation was demanded by fighters from the elites under whose aegis they fought. Political elites in South Sudan have had to use various tactics to recruit armed forces to fight on their behalf. They have used popular narratives of revenge and explicit promises of financial payments. Plus, both government and opposition forces have been recruited with the promise of future financial rewards for those who survive and compensation for those who do not.
6 Peter Gadet, speech at funeral in Khartoum, 2015. Families on all sides of the Bilnyang are grappling with whether they should marry for relatives killed in these years of war. These expectations were entrenched after the CPA when many Southeern Sudanese married wives for those sons who had been lost in the wars.
The wartime dead were not settled by the peace agreements. While the hakuma demanded peace, there was ambiguity over the morality of not insisting upon revenge. These unsettlements and ambiguities meant that there was an easy potential for armed conflict to start again.
Peace that makes war
Craze and Marko argue that conflict in South Sudan after 2018 continued not despite the peace agreement, but because of it.
7 Joshua Craze, ‘The War They Call Peace’, Sidecar (9 July 2021), https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-war-they-call-peace, accessed 10 July 2021; Joshua Craze and Ferenc David Marko, ‘Death by Peace: How South Sudan’s Peace Agreement Ate the Grassroots’, Debating Ideas (6 January 2022), https://africanarguments.org/2022/01/death-by-peace-how-south-sudans-peace-agreement-ate-the-grassroots, accessed 16 July 2022; Joshua Craze, ‘When Peace Produces War: The Case of South Sudan’, Special Report, Risks of Peace in Post-War Yemen Series, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/535dcd87e4b08cab3cb3e421/t/61f9355bfe787d019f61b734/1643722075758/e6b9aed53703337d91b7c7946696764e61f8f68d857c6.pdf, accessed 17 July 2022. They argue that the R-ARCSS, by giving the parties the power to appoint all government positions, created ‘a centralized regime that appoints not only state governors, but even county commissioners, according to a political calculus determined in Juba’.
8 Joshua Craze, ‘The War They Call Peace’. As many of the parties were ‘briefcase’ rebels they were easily controlled by the governing regime.
9 Ibid. In order to control populations, especially when there is a lack of government funds, violence is used. This often involves a fragmentation that cements, and does not undermine, central control.
10 Ibid. Yet, as Chapters 5 and 6 describe, these dynamics were nothing new and only entrenched a post-CPA system of governance and armed conflict. In such a context, the unsettled dead, as discussed above, can easily be evoked to justify violence.