SOME people say a misleading social media post led to the recent outbreak of violence in South Sudan. According to others, everything started after clashes between the two rival sides at a checkpoint on Thursday killing several soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir.
But those who have keenly watched the developments in South Sudan after it won independence in 2011 are convinced that what happened last week was a sequel to the clashes in 2013.
There has been more than one peace deal after the fighting broke out in 2013. They were broken by one party or the other to the conflict. So the chances of success for the deal signed by President Salva Kiir and his Vice President Riek Machar in April this year were rated very slim.
The 2013 fighting started after Kiir fired Machar and the entire Cabinet after a protracted power struggle within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM). The two men have jostled for power even before South Sudan’s independence from Sudan. Kiir accused Machar of engineering a coup against him. Has he not attempted to overthrow John Garang, the late founder of South Sudan’s liberation movement? An estimated 2,000 civilians were killed in the fighting that ensued. The same thing happened when Machar withdrew his forces from Juba and launched a full-scale insurgency after he was sacked by Kiir. Since the antagonists belonged to two different tribes, the fighting soon assumed an ethnic complexion. The president hails from the largest Dinka tribe (36 percent) while the Nuer tribe that forms 16 percent of the population backs Machar. Reports say militias used to separate terrified residents by ethnicity and kill those from rival tribes during the two-year civil war.
Kiir and Machar signed the peace deal in August 2015, but spent months wrangling over details. Machar returned to Juba in April and was reinstated as Kiir’s deputy in a unity government, but troops loyal to each side were not as forgiving and clashed sporadically. Thursday’s skirmishes were especially lethal and exploded into urban warfare over the weekend and running street battles that only ended on Monday. The fighting coincided with the fifth anniversary of South Sudan’s independence.
Several hundred people have already been killed, including civilians seeking refuge. Some of those killed were reportedly targeted based on their ethnicity. Initial government reports said at least 272 people, including 33 civilians, were killed in the recent fighting. Forces loyal to longtime rivals fought each other in the capital during a five-day period until a ceasefire was reached on Monday. In Juba, government troops maintain control. Though both the president and his deputy have ordered their respective forces to cease hostilities, residents remain tense and the US, India, Germany and others have started evacuating their citizens.
Given the developments since 2011, many see possibilities of a massacre on the scale of the 1994 Rwandan genocide which claimed one million lives in just 100 days. There are also fears of the fighting degenerating into a regional conflict as evidenced by the presence of Ugandan troops fighting on the side of the government in 2013.
Today’s strife and disarray is a far cry from that night on July 9, 2011 when the people of Africa’s fifty-fourth sovereign state celebrated wildly as they made a longed-for new start after one of the world’s most destructive and protracted civil wars. What went wrong? Everything, in a sense. But the biggest mistake was for Western powers, especially the US which midwifed the birth of the new nation, to assume they could build a state without addressing more profound problems of internal conflict and political reconciliation. Their focus was on reconciliation and mutual viability between the North and the South. Western media always railed against the Muslim and Arab “oppressors” in the North. They failed to anticipate their Christian and animist victims in the South would one day turn against each other.
