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A ruined country

The new peace agreement will be implemented within 30 months. But is there hope for a ravaged South Sudan?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

It's Wednesday afternoon the 26. August in South Sudan's capital Juba. A few hundred guests are gathered in the Freedom Hall. The host of the meeting, the country's president Salva Kiir, looks sadly over the assembly.
He sits down and eager diplomats from the African Union put the peace deal on the table. It just lacks Salva Kiir's signature. Kiir gets the pen, hesitates a bit, and then signs. The applause is immediate and great. An 20 month long and extremely tantalizing and tiring negotiation process is at an end, and a devastating war may be over.
But then one of his staff delivers a list of about twenty reservations. The smiles stiffen.
It takes a few minutes. Then the messages pop in. The first comes from the President of the UN Security Council, Nigeria's UN Ambassador, then one from the UN Secretary General, one from the African Union and one from the White House in Washington. All reports state that the Kiir government's reservations are irrelevant, and thus rejected.
Salva Kiir's regime has been at odds with the world community, and he has become isolated and friendless.
How is it possible that a president as a whole world cheered during the 9 Freedom Celebration. July 2011, four years later has made the world community solely abandoned and despaired over what the regime has accomplished? Why did it go so wrong?

South Sudanese celebrate the country's final detachment from Sudan 9. July 2011. PHOTO: AFP PHOTO / ROBERTO SCHMIDT
South Sudanese celebrate the country's final detachment from Sudan 9. July 2011. PHOTO: AFP PHOTO / ROBERTO SCHMIDT

Slavery and colonization. We have to go back a long way in history to find some of the explanation.
The people of South Sudan have been brutally oppressed, violated and ravaged for several generations. It began with the Ottoman Empire, which 200 years ago had its borders to the south in Sudan. Every year, military units capture tens of thousands of youth from the south. The women were used as sex slaves. The men who were big and strong became soldiers. The others were castrated and used as labor slaves. When the British became colonial rulers, they formally banned slavery – but the Arabs in the north continued their ravages on the same scale as before. When Sudan became independent in 1956 and the Arab clans took power, slavery continued.
As a reporter, I have experienced up close how slaves were used as recently as in 1982 in North Sudan. There is not a single family in the south that has no painful and humiliating memories of the slave era.
On top of this comes the British colonization of the South Sudan. They regarded the people groups in the south as extremely primitive. In line with this, South Sudan was supposed to be a kind of human zoo. Guys could get basic education and training in practical subjects, the girls nothing.
Whenever there was opposition, the British used the split-and-rule method. They sowed distrust and set people groups against each other. When the British left Khartoum in 1956, the Arabs used the same methods to rule the African peoples.

Internal battles. From time to time, the liberation war from 1983 to 2005 was characterized by internal tensions and power struggles in the Sudanese people's liberation organization and army (SPLM and SPLA, or SPLM / A). The most difficult was the split in Nasir in 1991, when Riek Machar and Lam Akol rebelled against SPLM / A leader John Garang.

The invisible loom that holds peoples groups and communities together is far from being destroyed.

Then, from 1994, Garang's SPLM / A was again the major liberation organization. But in southern Sudan's large lands, militia groups that were paid and equipped with weapons from the Khartoum regime ravaged to fight SPLM / A. They were brutal, raped and destroyed communities.
All this has been devastating to the traditional African values ​​that bound society together. What came instead was a culture of xenophobia and suspicion of the motives and actions of others.
When peace came in 2005, people were relieved and grateful. Then the disaster happened; the well-equipped and visionary leader of the liberation battle through 22 years, John Garang, died in an 30 helicopter accident. July 2005.

Screen Shot at 2015 09-15-19.54.20A difficult start. Garang's deputy chairman and commander, Salva Kiir, will be his successor in SPLM / A, and thus president of South Sudan.
While Garang was a world veteran with solid academic and military education from the United States, Salva Kiir had never been to school, and was previously a child soldier. During the peace period between 1973 and 1983, he received his only formal education – a six-month sergeant course. Before Garang's death, Salva Kiir had hardly imagined that he could become head of state.
Much seemed to be going well in South Sudan in the first few years after 2005. However, it did not take long for this to change. The leaders of the SPLM / A, who had fought a long war, were weary and poor when peace came. They were used to wars, and most had no experience of working in democratic contexts, and no experience of running a state. The new state started completely without institutions such as the National Bank or the Ministry of Finance. At the same time, the country had large revenues from oil production. Hundreds of millions of NOK poured each month into a fresh Ministry of Finance where the vast majority were inexperienced when it came to responsible use of money. At the same time came the international deadlines that would have licenses for the use of land and other natural resources. They offered large sums under the table to get things done quickly.
The temptations eventually became too great for many in the leadership. The corruption spread. The vision of peace, freedom and development went wild. Instead, it was a struggle of the authorities to seize as much of the state's funds as possible. Tens of billions of NOK have been lost in this way.

The grip tightens. When Salva Kiir became head of state in 2005, he had 40 years as a soldier and officer. Before 2005, he knew no other life than the soldier's.
The view is that Kiir, especially in the period after 2010, became increasingly authoritarian. During that same period, he has surrounded himself with advisors recruited from his own people group, the Dinkas. These have seen it as their most important task to ensure that Kiir holds the presidential power. To achieve this, they have used the old divide-and-rule method in their advice to the president on how to handle both the SPLM and the SPLA.
In January 2013, after such advice, Kiir fired the country's chief of police, replacing him with a Dinka lieutenant. At the same time, he fired 35 higher officers and retired 117 generals in the SPLA – all without warning.
Three months later, in April 2013, he deprived Vice President Machar of all powers not provided for in the Constitution. 25. June the same year he fired SPLM Secretary General Pa'gan Amum. A month later, he fired the entire government, accusing the ministers of incompetence and corruption.
A few days later he appointed a new government, which he demanded in parliament in a thundering speech for parliament to approve. Several key government ministers had a past as politicians or government officials in Sudan's capital Khartoum. At the same time, the most skilled SPLM / A leaders from the liberation struggle were pushed out into the cold. At the president's office, the administration at this time was dominated by officials and advisers from the Dinka people and others with a former
attachment to the Khartoum regime.
In the summer and fall of 2013, Paul Malong, the self-serving and powerful governor of northern Bahr el Gazaal, launched a secret military project in the states where the Dinkas lived. The project came about in agreement with Salva Kiir. They brought young boys who were mostly illiterate, into military training. The plan was for these to form the new presidential guard. In addition to training in brutal military behavior, they were pumped full of propaganda about the excellence of the Dinka people and the unreliability of the Nuer people. In November 2013, 3000 was transferred to a camp near Juba.

The killing blow. In the same year there was an increasingly fierce power struggle in SPLM. Due to poor leadership of the party and the state, Kiir was in the process of becoming a minority in the SPLM's governing bodies. As a party leader, he therefore prevented meetings in arenas where such a power struggle could find some clarification. Thus, the opposition in the SPLM, which probably had the majority in the Politburo and the Liberation Council, went open and criticized Salva Kiir for the mismanagement. Kiir and the circle around him were furious. In December, they decided to put in the final pardon.
The National Liberation Council met with 13. and 14. December. It is alleged that several of them had received large sums of money to support Kiir. Before the meeting, all church leaders in South Sudan had strongly requested dialogue and reconciliation.
But Salva Kiir was in a mood of war. He thundered at the critics and made proposals for several exclusions, which were immediately adopted. Within a few hours, tens of dozens of emancipation leaders were cast into the political darkness. It was then decided that Kiir should be the only candidate in the presidential election, and that after the election he should have the right to appoint members of the Politburo and the National Liberation Council. Kiir had thus secured all power in the party. A party dictatorship was in the offing.

The massacres of the nuns. On the evening of December 14, fighting broke out between two groups within the SPLA forces in Juba. One group came from the Dinka people, the other from the Nuer people. As the day dawned, it became clear that this was planned by the circle around the president. That is when the massacres of the nuns began. They were carried out by the new presidential guard with raw systematics. No one knows the final death toll, but South Sudanese writers such as Peter Adwok Nyaba claim that at least 20 people were murdered in a matter of days.
Deputy Vice President Riek Machar and his wife, who are both younger, escaped as if by a miracle then troop forces on Monday 15. December stormed their home. Most others who were there were killed before the house was leveled with the earth.
On the same day, Salva Kiir appeared on television in the general's uniform. He asserted that the government forces were about to crack down on an attempted coup, and said many would be arrested. The claim of coup d'état was pure poetry. But it was a battle for political power in the country – which Kiir and his circle would decide with arms power.
Later that day, most of the SPLM's most capable leaders during the liberation struggle were arrested and charged with coup attempt. A few months later, they were released due to demands from the international community.

The huge ravages of war. The conflict and massacres before Christmas in 2013 triggered an extensive civil war. The two main players have been Salva Kiir – formally as president, but also as the leader of the Dinka people – while Riek Machar has been the leader of the Nuer people.
The war has been very costly. No one knows the final death toll, but more than 100 people may have lost their lives, while just as many are physically and mentally injured for life. 000 million in a total population of 2,2 million have been displaced from their homes, and about 10 of these are refugees in neighboring countries. 700 percent of the population is dependent on emergency aid. Most of the infrastructure in the states of Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile has been destroyed. 000 percent of oil production has been eliminated. The state is bankrupt, while the National Bank is printing South Sudan pounds, which in just the last few months have fallen by more than 40 percent in value. And worst of all: the invisible web that holds peoples and societies together is far from destroyed.

Truce. Return to the Liberty Hall in Juba at the end of August this year. The peace agreement signed is on 72 pages, and Norway, along with a number of other countries, are among the signatories. The agreement will commit Norway for many years to come. It has clear provisions on ceasefire and a gradual merger of the two military forces that have
fought each other, into a new national army. The capital, Juba, will during a transitional period be demilitarized and under international supervision.
The agreement also has provisions on the division of power at national and state level. The same goes for prosecution of those who have committed crimes during the war. And not least: The peace agreement must be implemented within 30 months. Towards the end of the period, elections will take place and new leaders will be elected.
In the new South Sudan there should be no room for either Salva Kiir or Riek Machar.
The country has other capable leaders who can take responsibility for a policy that can provide peace and development with freedom and security in the everyday lives of South Sudan's troubled people.


Hanssen is the former head of Norwegian People's Aid. joe-hall@online.no

Halle Jørn Hanssen
Halle Jørn Hanssen
Former Secretary General of Norwegian People's Aid, TV correspondent, politician and author.

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