South Sudan: Reflections On Crisis
14 January 2014
analysis
Negotiations and fighting are both continuing this week in the conflict in
South Sudan which erupted into open violence on December 15. It may be that
coordinated international pressure will soon bring about a ceasefire. But
both South Sudanese and foreign sources stress that any long-term solution
must deal not only with the political competition between President Salva
Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar, who was dismissed at Vice President
along with others in the Cabinet last July, but also with fundamental issues
of the South Sudanese state.
Strikingly, many news reports as well as virtually all political analysts
agree that the root of the current conflict is not "tribalism" or ethnic
rivalry as such but rather internal political conflict in which political
leaders have sparked an escalation of violence playing out along ethnic
lines.
[Any attempt to generalize about what "the media" say is inevitably
subjective. But it is interesting to note that a Google news search for
"South Sudan" and "political" turns up far more hits than "South Sudan" and
"tribal." And, in recent coverage of both South Sudan and the Central
African Republic, many news articles specifically caution against the common
tendency to regard such conflicts as based on "age-old rivalries," noting
previous peaceful relationships across ethnic or religious dividing lines.]
It is less often noted, however, that portraying the conflict as one between
the two top leaders ignores the fact that those dismissed by President Kiir
in July, and the political prisoners now held in Juba, include many who
support neither Kiir nor Machar, and come from Dinka, Nuer and other ethnic
backgrounds. The release of these political prisoners, and their involvement
in future dialogue on the future of Sudan, has been one of the key elements
in negotiations to date, and is essential to any long-term solution.
So too, stress many analysts, is involvement in the dialogue of not only
diverse political voices but also of civil society, which has been bypassed
both in previous peace negotiations and in the postindependence Sudanese
state.
One of the most prominent Sudanese voices pressing for a more inclusive
dialogue is Jok Madut Jok, of the Sudd Institute, and a former deputy
Minister of Culture. This AfricaFocus Buletin contains excerpts from his
analysis from last week, the full version of which is available on the Sudd
Institute website (
http://www.suddinstitute.org)
Additional analytical articles particularly worth reading include the
following:
"Breakdown in South Sudan: What Went Wrong -- and How to Fix It," By Alex de
Waal and Abdul Mohammed, Foreign Affairs, January 1, 2014
http://www.foreignaffairs.com / Direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/qfujwus
"The way forward for South Sudan," by Mahmood Mamdani, Al Jazeera, 6 Jan
2014
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/ - Direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/p85owtp
"An integrated response to justice and reconciliation in South Sudan," by
David Deng and Elizabeth Deng, African Arguments, January 8, 2014
http://www.africanarguments.org / Direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/olrrowp
Several additional articles of interest appear in the latest issue of
Pambazuka News
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/660
U.S. Senate Hearings on South Sudan, January 9, 2014
http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/010914am The statement by former U.S.
envoy Princeton Lyman has a particularly clear statement of the background
(
http://tinyurl.com/jw4elm4).
For ongoing news coverage and commentary, see particularly
http://allafrica.com/southsudan and
http://www.sudantribune.com
South Sudan and the prospects for peace amidst violent political wrangling
Jok Madut Jok
Sudd Institute Policy Brief, January 4, 2014
[Excerpts only: full text available at
http://www.suddinstitute.org/publications/policy-briefs/ and at
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/90076]
[The Sudd Institute is an independent research organization that conducts
and facilitates policy relevant research and training to inform public
policy and practice, to create opportunities for discussion and debate, and
to improve analytical capacity in South Sudan. Jok Madut Jok is a cofounder
of the Sudd Institute.]
Introduction
The unfolding unrest in South Sudan, beginning with the events of December
15, 2013 in Juba when fighting broke out within the presidential guard and
spread to Greater Upper Nile within two days, may not have been exactly
predictable, but it was not entirely surprising. Surely, the abrupt nature
of it, the scale of violence within a single military unit, the rapid spread
to other branches of the armed forces in other states, the speed at which it
begun to take on ethnic overtones and the death toll of over 1,000 people,
many of them civilians, has shocked the population. How South Sudan seemed
to have gone from one day of confidence that it would weather the political
disagreements within the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the
country's ruling party, to the next day of near total unraveling was
definitely terrifying for Juba residents. It has also caught the
international community within the country - represented by the United
Nations, European Union, African Union and various diplomatic missions -
totally off guard.
Most alarmed by these developments were neighboring countries in East Africa
and the Horn. Uganda scrambled to intervene and the Prime Minister of
Ethiopia Haile Mariam Deslaigne and the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta
descended on Juba on December 26 to explore any possibilities of mediating a
dialogue between President Salva Kiir Mayardit and his wayward Vice
President, Riek Machar Teny, who is now heading what is increasingly
referred to as a rebellion, which the government says followed a failed coup
attempt. The Inter-Governmental Agency on Development (IGAD), a regional
grouping that has been central to peace negotiations of Sudanese conflicts
before South Sudan's Independence and understands the complexities of the
conflicts more than few other bodies do, convened a summit in Nairobi on
December 27, 2013 in order to explore how to end the mayhem that has already
caused huge casualties in revenge attacks by the Nuer on the Dinka in Unity,
Jonglei and Upper Nile states for the attacks against the Nuer that were
orchestrated in Juba by government soldiers.
[Talks are now ongoing in Addis Ababa] ... Whether or not this situation was
triggered by a failed coup attempt is now a mood point. The priority now is
how to get the country out of this mess and back onto its path to stability
and development. Peaceful dialogue is the only viable approach, but what is
to be discussed at such talks, what could possibly end the violence
immediately and what the role of the international community beyond east
Africa should be are some of the questions that remain unclear at this
stage.
What caused this crisis?
Many former politicians turned analysts and critics in Juba were quick to
deny that this was a coup attempt. [But the story seems more complex than
that.]
It is perhaps important to explore the above-mentioned squabbles within the
ruling party as part of the genesis of the current crisis, especially the
reaction of Kiir's government to the calls for reforms that were made by the
party leaders he had fired from both the party leadership and the SPLM-led
government. These party officials, many of whom had been members of the
party's highest organ, the Political Bureau, and had been demanding that
President Kiir, himself the chairman of the party, convenes a meeting of the
Political Bureau to sort out the differences between the chairman and over
two-thirds of its members. These leaders held a press conference on December
6th, 2013 in which they accused the president of running the party in ways
that violated the party constitution. The press conference called for
convening the Political Bureau in order to organize the agenda for the
meeting of the National Liberation Council, the party's legislature. But
instead of responding to what seems like a legitimate constitutional right
of the people who held the press conference, the president instructed his
deputy, Vice President James Wani Igga, to issue a very crude response in
which he dismissed outright their claims and accused them of being
"disgruntled" for their loss of power. When the current crisis began, the
president did not help the situation and the image of his government when he
appeared in military fatigue to deliver his statement in the wake of the
revolt, signaling his readiness for a military confrontation. So it is fair
to say that the demand for reforms within the party and the president's
frustration of these demands was a clear factor in this crisis.
But did these political differences have to turn violent?
Our investigation shows that there were two streams of thinking in this
quickly forming opposition body, with multiple aspiring leaders. The first
stream is the one involving Rebecca Nyandeng de Mabior (the widow of the
SPLA/M former leader, the late John Garang de Mabior), Pagan Amum Okiech,
the sacked Secretary General of the SPLM, Deng Alor Kuol, the former
Minister of Cabinet Affairs and few others, all of whom seem to be committed
to a civil political battle to replace the president, whether through some
sort of a deal within the party or through the 2015 general elections. The
second stream involves the former Vice President Riek Machar Teny, Taban
Deng Gai, the former elected governor of Unity State, who was fired by the
president in May 2013 and who is extremely angry for the unconstitutional
presidential decree that removed him, and a number of senior military
officers commanding divisions in Bor, Bentiu, and Malakal. While Taban Deng
Gai, an ardent loyalist to President Kiir then, was a recent recruit to this
group, Riek had been planning to depose the president by force for quite
some time, and was ready to take action if his political alliances with the
other group did not bear fruit. Each of the two groups participated in the
alliance without revealing what each had in mind, as they were both joined
together by a common goal, the removal of President Kiir, but with varying
approaches. They were bound to fail given multiple competing leadership
aspirations, however.
In the hours leading up to the night of the revolt, these personalities were
all still together, deciding to boycott the last day of proceedings of the
NLC, with the political action to depose the president looking rather
unlikely. So Riek Machar made his move without telling the others, as he was
unsure all along if the rest would support him to become the head of the
pack. One of the officers who was in on the uprising within Tiger Battalion
lined up a number of his immediate officers and executed them by himself and
the fighting broke out inside the main military command center, known to
locals as al-Qayada, located to the southwest of Juba town. By 11 PM, hell
broke loose and Juba residents could not hear anything else but gun and
artillery sound for the rest of the night, all day and all night Monday and
all the way until about 3:30 pm on Tuesday when the government forces
finally neutralized the revolting forces. Meanwhile Riek Machar had slipped
out of the town on Monday morning around 4 AM ... On Tuesday Riek Machar
went from denying knowledge or any involvement in any coup to being the
leader of the rebellion, almost overnight, which would have been quite an
about-face if he had indeed been truthful about being unaware of a coup
plan.
Many local analysts and people in the media have been reflecting on these
events and have been able to tease out some of the signs that the intense
competition for political power within the ruling SPLM was bound to spark
violence, as it was likely to touch the wounds of the last three decades of
liberation wars during which South Sudanese had turned guns against one
another over leadership of the movement. Those moments of violence during
the liberation period, though often extremely destructive, particularly to
ethnic relations, were often patched up or swept under the rug in the
interest of keeping the eyes on the common goal, but they were never
sufficiently resolved and far too many communities were left wanting for
justice. One of such moments was the 1991 split in the SPLA, in which Riek
Machar and Lam Akol Ajawin, then senior deputies to John Garang, attempted
to depose the latter and sparked massacres in Jonglei state. This revolt
happened in the midst of war against the government in Khartoum, and led to
a prolonged and destructive conflict. It saw Machar ordering massacres
against the Dinka of Jonglei state, which gave rise to a protracted
Dinka-Nuer conflict for the subsequent seven years. In the end and despite
the reunification of the SPLA, no one was held accountable to this incident,
and many others similar to it, and there was no recompense to the affected
citizens. This set the precedent for the kind of politics whereby the
political ambition of the individual or small groups of individuals
translates into efforts to gain power by force. It is this history that has
the whole country standing on edge, as the risks of a repeat of 1991 are
written all over the current row and are all too scary to fathom.
...
Also related to this confrontation is another aspect of the liberation wars
that brought the independence of South Sudan in 2011. This aspect concerns
the failure of the post-war development programs to meet the dividends that
the citizens highly expected going into independence. Poverty and dashed
aspirations are linked to this; and so are the security situation, isolation
of various communities from one another due to poor infrastructure, denying
them the opportunity to interact with one another at market places or travel
across ethnic lines with ease. Negative stereotypes that various ethnic
nationalities harbor about one another have also created a barrier to social
interaction, cross-ethnic marriages and sharing of space. When small
disagreements happen between communities that are separated, these
stereotypes become the only references upon which to base their reactions.
It is evident that the Juba incident that eventually ushered in what seems
to be a Dinka-Nuer killing and counter-killing has exposed the fragility of
the new state that many had been pointing out since long before
independence. It has also shown serious challenges regarding social cohesion
and national unity across ethnic lines, something the stability of the
country cannot be ensured without. It has shown fragility of the democratic
processes, the result of which is that when some politicians fail to get a
path to office, they still have the capacity to resort to violence and
attract their tribesmen to their side. This was unsurprising due to the
absorption of large militia forces from the many rebellions in Greater Upper
Nile into the SPLA, the liberation army now turned national defense force.
... Striking peace deals with these militias was the only immediately viable
way forward. But on the other hand, inviting all of them into the national
army meant compromising on the endeavors to professionalize the armed
forces, as many members of these militias were hardly ever disciplined
enough to be part of a professional national defense force. Instead, they
simply saw the army as the quickest way to salaried employment and joined
even without proper training as soldiers.
The result was that the army was made up of an amalgamation of previously
warring factions, with no institutional culture or common ethos to which all
soldiers subscribe. There was no coherent or unified command hierarchy and
no respect for a central command. An additional side problem was that many
young people who had not even been part of the militias were able to join
some of them right on the eve of absorptions, taking advantage of the
opportunity to get themselves absorbed into the army without prior
background in military discipline.
...
These issues may not have caused the violence currently underway, but they
contributed to its escalation, and have not been given the attention so many
people had been calling for over the past two years. The Sudd Institute has
been ringing alarm bells since its founding in 2012 about the poor
management of the security situation of the country, lack of reckoning with
the history of ethnic relations that had been wrecked by long liberation
wars, limited attention to the swelling ranks of unemployed youth and the
urban bias that had left the swath of rural populations unable to share in
peace dividends. ...
Power politics or tribal wars?
The question that has recently bedeviled the media and various analysts
covering the tragically unfolding situation in South Sudan is the question
of whether or not this has anything to do with ethnicity or tribal hatreds.
My answer to this question is that, while ethnic politics in South Sudan is
complex and is undeniably part of everyday sociopolitical life, there is no
doubt that it has sometimes been overplayed in analyzing the recent
developments. But the real question is not so much about ethnic identity
fueling violence but rather the mechanisms by which ethnic relations get
deployed in the contest between politicians that are vying for control of
the state and the services it provides. ...
Historically, conflict within South Sudan has taken three forms: the
liberation wars in which the south fought the north in the old Sudan; ethnic
feuds over resources, especially among cattle herding communities; and
rivalries between political leaders. With the independence of South Sudan in
2011, the liberation wars against Khartoum are now over. Ethnic feuds,
despite the occasional stamping of politics with an ethnic hue, remain
relatively easy to reconcile in the context of traditional cultures, and are
often confined to the ethnic groups directly involved and rarely affecting
the rest of the country. The most devastating stream is that of political
wrangling among various leaders vying for power, whether at the national or
state level, as politicians sometimes become desperate, unable or unwilling
to make political gains by focusing on ideas, and as a consequence reach for
the ethnic card, drawing their kin into conflict by explaining to them that
it is the survival of the whole group that is at stake. In this sense, the
last two trends, the ethnic composition of the country and the political
rivalries, are interlinked, and they are at the root of what happened in
Juba on December 15th.
...
What is the solution to this crisis?
South Sudan is at a crossroads. Either the current efforts by regional
powers will persuade Riek Machar and the government of South Sudan to
immediately end military confrontations and start dialogue on reaching a
peace deal, or they will fail and a civil war might ensue. President Kiir,
trying to make good on his usual pronouncements about commitment to peace
and avoidance of a return to war, has extended an olive branch to his former
deputy. Riek Machar, however, has made mere overtones to do likewise, but on
conditions that seem either unworkable or extremely difficult to meet, like
the possibility of the president stepping down, the release of political
detainees and a power-sharing arrangement. Machar's demands for
power-sharing will surely put the government in the same trap as the leaders
of armed militias have been doing over the years. To object to it on grounds
that politicians should not be rewarded with power after using violence
risks pushing Machar toward the civil war route. But to bribe him back with
a share in government risks encouraging the trend whereby failed politicians
have to revolt against the state, kill people, destroy property, and then
get rewarded with power and resources for their deadly actions.
A politically mature and stable country may see Machar's actions as crimes
punishable by law and pursue him in that regard, but South Sudan is not such
a country. The country is in seriously dire straits, with its two biggest
nationalities, the Nuer and the Dinka, severely divided and at each other's
throats, its oil production (the country's primary source of revenue)
currently under threat, foreign reserves depleted, difficulty in honoring
its obligations to its citizens, and foreign lenders and the whole economy
likely to buckle at the knees, especially if the current situation becomes a
civil war. With all of that needing immediate attention, if the country is
to be viable, it might be the case that the government will have to swallow
its pride and negotiate a deal that will indeed reward Riek Machar's
unconstitutional and deadly political actions. Any temptations that the
current government leaders might have to punish Mr. Machar could well be the
start of unraveling of the gains the country has made since independence.
South Sudan is thus held at ransom by an ambitious politico-military
personality. The country might have to pay that ransom in order to save its
own life.
...
Conclusion
We conclude with statements we have heard from various South Sudanese in
Juba about the way out of this mess. This situation has also thrown up a lot
of questions that we do not have answers for and are presented here. The
efforts being made by IGAD heads of states should not just focus on
resolving the immediate situation at hand, as if it is a confrontation
solely between Riek Machar and Salva Kiir. Clearly the two warring parties
and their leaders need to reach a deal that would immediately stop the
fighting and contain the continued emotional ethnic retaliations. But when
the discussions move into processes of political settlement, the mediators
should look at both this fighting and the mediation efforts as an
opportunity to take a comprehensive look at all the problems that made the
current situation possible in the first place. There is an opportunity here
to include all the stakeholders, especially all the political parties, in
the spirit of the 2010 all-party conference that was held in Juba to rally
everyone behind the independence referendum. ...
What about all the people who did not have to die, but have died because of
the political ambitions of a few? Should this fact be buried again in the
expediency of reaching a deal, so that victim communities are once again
left without justice? What about the ethnic relations that have been
destroyed by these actions? Can the country move past these consequences and
build a nation where ethnic affiliations can no longer be appropriated by
power-seekers? ... Whatever solutions arrived at, they must include some
form of justice mechanism built into the final deal so as to ensure that the
victims of these atrocities are not just swept aside as collateral damage as
they were under the CPA. A peace deal that only focuses on ending the
conflict and without exploring complex social, legal, governance, security
and historical issues, simply defers the resumption of conflict. This was
the mistake that previous agreements had made and it is what has directly
led to the crisis of today. Sweeping away the calls for justice for wartime
atrocities, as was the case with the CPA, is part of the reason behind the
current tragedy, and must not be repeated in the search for a solution to
it.
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Received on Tue Jan 14 2014 - 16:30:32 EST