Chapter 13
Peace and Unending Wars in Warrap State post-2013
As described in Chapter 10, the post-2013 decade resulted in the cementing of national government power in the hands of a politico-military cadre close to Salva Kiir. From 2016, this included three of South Sudan’s most powerful people in the security arena – the President, the Director of National Security and the Commander of the Presidential Guard – all having Warrap State as their home state. The sons of the communities to the west of the Bilynang and connected rivers had immense military power. However, as was the case after the the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and, as described in Chapter 6, an autochthonous hakuma mixed with ancestral claims and liberal shifts in land and resource rights brought ambiguity and conflict.
***
The peace meeting in February 2022 in a Warrap Town (Tonj North County, Warrap State) was coming towards the end of its second and final day. Participants were seated on UNMISS-funded chairs on three sides of the rectangle, and officials and the speaker were on the fourth side. Two, small white bulls were now tied to two lɔ̈c (cattle pegs) in the middle of the rectangle. Most people had been there for the whole meeting and were slumped on their chairs in the heat of the afternoon. They were largely silent, and appeared to be almost in a state of slumber, as various bishops and local political figures got up to speak from the front. Then, suddenly, without warning, the approximately fifty people on the side where I sat spontaneously stood up and started running away. They did not run far, but they ran fast. They were afraid. My first thought was to think it was someone shooting, but there was no gun sound. Then I wondered if there was a snake that I could not see. Yet, in the vacated space, no snake was visible. I decided to move anyway; fifty residents of the area were bound to be a better judge of danger than me.
The panicked movement had been caused by the spear of a bany e bith who had started his invocations over the bull in the middle of the ground. He held the spear over the bull and spoke of how the bull would die to stop others dying in the conflict. He pointed the spear downwards but at an angle which meant that it sometimes pointed in the direction of where we had been seated. No-one wanted to be in the line of the spear as the bany e bith spoke words of death and curse. As the man next to me said, ‘after all, that would be worse than a bullet’.
Before the invocations started, there had been disagreement over the positioning of the lɔ̈c. Both communities had brought their lɔ̈c with them. The numerically larger community had wanted their lɔ̈c placed ahead; the government insisted the two lɔ̈c be placed side-by-side. At the time, there was some popular support for the meeting; it was described as a peace of the home community and not the peace of the hakuma. People were excited that the peace had been prompted by a woman’s group and backed by a local NGO, and was not just based on orders from the hakuma. People also said that this meeting differed from Wunlit as the cattle sacrifice concluded the meeting as opposed to opening it.
The peace meeting was held to end the 2020–22 fighting in Tonj North County. The peace only held for four months. In June 2022, cattle were raided. They were raided as part of a series of tit-for-tat raids between communities. However, on this occasion, political figures in Juba commanded the intervention of certain army divisions. Soldiers were sent in to reclaim the cattle. The soldiers themselves divided along communal lines, smudging the distinction between the
hakuma and the home communities. The peace-meeting curse of the
baany e biith was feared in the moment but was not enough to stop fatal violence. Nearly ninety people were killed that June.
1 Two eye-witness accounts from opposing sides of the community.