South Sudan: “This fighting will
continue to our Children.”
Freelance journalist based in Nairobi covering East Africa
David Salah sits on the South Sudan side of the Kaya river. A
wooden bridge separates him from Busia, a border crossing in Uganda. He wears a
black-and-red jersey and black shorts. His smile is friendly enough, but he
keeps a well-worn AK-47 by his side.
Salah spent most of his early life as a student in Uganda, where
he acquired the excellent English he speaks. In 2003, he moved back home to
South Sudan. Since then, he has worked as a farmer in the fertile southern
Equatoria Region.
This is not the future he had in mind. Salah wanted to return to
Uganda and study for a Bachelor of Business Administration at Makerere
University. But, he says, the government would not sponsor him to go.
Salah believes the South Sudanese government keeps scholarships
only for the Dinka, the largest ethnic group in the country. It is the
community to which President Salva Kiir belongs, as do the majority of senior
figures within his administration.
Like many non-Dinka in South Sudan, Salah thinks the government
is solely dedicated to keeping the Dinka people in power. Kiir is backed by the
influential Jieng (Dinka) Council of Elders and supported by military
chief-of-staff General Paul Malong Awan.
To the bush
Salah is a Kakwa, a relatively small ethnic group that straddles
southwestern South Sudan, northwestern Uganda, and northeastern Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
Last year, he joined the rebel SPLA-IO, a movement associated
with the country’s second largest ethnic group, the Nuer. But the insurgency is
also attracting the loyalty of existing community-based militia in the
Equatoria region and beyond – anyone to challenge the Dinka’s perceived hold on
national power and resources.
Salah is a captain in the SPLA-IO. Asked how he thinks fighting
will bring about the political resolution he wants, he laughs and says
something about how this is the only way to bring about change in this part of
the world.
Salah's comrade-in-arms, Samuel Denyag, was a policeman in the
capital, Juba, where he says he saw ethnic chauvinism first-hand. Denyag claims
his Dinka commanders fixed the books, adding dozens of ghost names to the
payroll, and then shared out the proceeds among just the Dinka cops.
When South Sudan’s civil war broke out in December 2013, over a
contest for power between Kiir and his rival, former vice president Riek
Machar, Denyag headed home to western Equatoria. He joined the Arrow Boys, a
broad militia originally formed to defend the community against attacks by
Uganda’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army.
The LRA are gone. Now there are new threats. Local anger has
long been stoked by the encroachment of heavily armed Dinka cattle herders onto
farmland, and the disappearance of young men in the government’s heavy-handed
counter-insurgency operations.
Rebellion spreads
As armed groups bubbled up in western Equatoria in 2015, some
Arrow Boy factions threw in with SPLA-IO. Denyag was one of them.
Some of these emerging armed groups looked to be absorbed into
the national army under an agreement negotiated in 2015 to end the civil war.
But the accord didn’t last. Although Machar finally returned to Juba to join a
government of national unity in April this year, three months later he was
fleeing for his life, heading south through Equatoria and over the Congolese
border.
Fighting followed in his wake. Yei, in southern Equatoria, was
previously thought of as one of the safest places in South Sudan. But Human Rights
Watch reported in October “numerous cases” of abuse by the army
against civilians as they hunted for SPLA-IO supporters.
IRIN was unable to get comment from the government.
Among the most brutal of the government’s forces are the
all-Dinka Mathiang Anyoor militia, created by Malong. They were instrumental in
the purging of Nuer neighbourhoods in Juba in 2013.
Revenge
The violence has spurred opposition, increasingly united in a
sense of victimhood. It has also generated a cycle of revenge. In October,
armed gunmen attacked a bus on the Yei-Juba road, separated the 21 Dinka from
the other passengers, and shot them.
“The history of mass atrocities suggests that ethnic violence is
normally a political tool waged for – often petty – political purposes. South
Sudan is no different,” researcher Alan Boswell told IRIN. “It’s a political
war for a new state that never fully formed, but is now being fought over as it
collapses.”
The brutality under way in Equatoria has forced 246,000 South Sudanese
to flee to northwest Uganda in six months. Tens of thousands of
them – if not more – have crossed Captain Salah’s rickety bridge.
“These atrocities are not an abuse of power per se, but rather
the desperation of the weak lacking true state power,” said Boswell. “This is
ethnic cleansing as desperation, not strength.”
Lona Saima walked for seven days with her family from Yei to
reach safety. In early December, she’d just been trucked from the South
Sudanese border to Kuluba Transit Centre in Uganda.
“If they [the Dinka] get you, they will slaughter you like a
chicken,” she told IRIN. “They want to kill anyone because they don’t trust
you… they think you are hiding rebels.”
Saima has tuberculosis and hasn’t been able to access medicine
for two months, since war shut the hospital and supply lines down. Her body
aches.
At least 85 percent of the people in the heaving camps are women
and children. The men have stayed to fight and to protect their property.
Otto John Adema bucks the trend. An HIV-positive preacher with
12 children, he arrived from Torit, in southeastern South Sudan, in August. He
sits against the mud brick house he built in Bidi Bidi camp, holding his baby
boy.
He saw three civilians shot, but doesn’t know if it was the SPLA
or the rebels who did the killing. He is sure, though, that it was five SPLA-IO
raping a woman in the street with a stick.
Ethnic killings have been a feature of South Sudan’s civil war
since it began. Kem Ryan, who was the head of operations for the relief and
protection section of the UN’s peacekeeping mission, has plenty of evidence.
“I have hundreds of photos from the three years of war in South
Sudan of people killed, mostly civilians, many bound and executed,” he told
IRIN. The violence forced 200,000 people from their homes in 2015.
Genocide
The UN didn’t use the terms “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide”
then, but now they do.
On 11 November, Adam Dieng, the UN Special Adviser on the
Prevention of Genocide, said South Sudan risked “outright ethnic war” and
genocide. The last time he was in the country was in 2014.
The UN Human Rights Commission said in statement on 30 November:
“there is already a steady process of ethnic cleansing under way in several
areas of South Sudan using starvation, gang rape and the burning of villages.”
No one knows how many people have been killed in South Sudan’s
civil war. There are estimates of up to 300,000, but the phrase “tens of
thousands” is normally used in news reports.
“The UN is the only actor in South Sudan with the capacity to
collect and verify death tolls and they chose not to,” said International
Crisis Group’s South Sudan senior analyst, Casie Copeland.
“Death tolls are important for our humanity, to raise awareness
and as empirical evidence of how the war evolves.”
Richard Batili also guards the bridge on the Kaya river. He sees
no end in sight to this conflict. “What is going to happen will be
unacceptable,” he told IRIN. “This fighting will continue to our children.”
TOP PHOTO: Bidi Bidi is the fastest growung refugee camp in
northwest Uganda CREDIT: EU/ECHO/Anouk Delafortrie
(Source: IRIN News)
