South Sudan: The Unraveling of South Sudan

Photo: JC McIlwaine/UN^[1]

Thousands of South Sudanese civilians are living in camps under the protection of United Nations peacekeepers.

It's still not clear exactly what happened on December 15 in the Juba barracks of South Sudan's presidential guard. The government claimed it was an attempted coup, but has struggled to provide any evidence.

Others say soldiers loyal to President Salva Kiir Mayardit, a Dinka, disarmed soldiers loyal to the former vice president, Riek Machar, a Nuer. What we do know is that the presidential forces split - broadly down the lines of Dinka and Nuer, South Sudan's two largest ethnic groups.

They fought furiously, plunging Juba, the capital, into violence. The conflict spread like wildfire, and two weeks later much of the eastern part of the country had unraveled into deadly fighting. Thousands of civilians have been killed, often because of their ethnicity, and an estimated 1.5 million have been displaced. Now, South Sudan faces a new imminent threat - famine. Researcher Skye Wheeler speaks with Amy Braunschweiger about her new report, how alleged war crimes have contributed to this humanitarian disaster, and how the lack of justice after South Sudan's recent civil war brought us to where we are today.

Fighting spread across South Sudan shockingly quickly. Was this planned?

Tensions between Kiir and Machar worsened in the months ahead of the conflict, and there have long been tensions between the two groups. South Sudan has been in on-and-off conflict for 60 years, with multiple generations brought up in violence and war. Dinka and Nuer killed each other horrible ways before the 21-year civil war ended in 2005.

One problem was that the 2005 peace agreement didn't address war crimes and abuses during this conflict. There was no justice, and there was no national truth-telling process. Instead, everything simmered. Fear and anger never went away and ethnic loyalties were never replaced with a truly national identity.

I moved to Juba in 2005, and worked there for five years as a journalist. When you talked to Nuer or Dinka about what happened between them in the civil war, the conversation became strained and painful. Everyone knew it was a problem, but everyone wanted to carry on and forget about the past.

When South Sudan won independence in 2011, there was this real sense of things moving forward. But that's not what happened.

It's important to acknowledge the role of pain in the current conflict, of past trauma and violence and anger - how much people fear being attacked, and having what little they have taken away.

The presidential guard's barracks, where the fighting started, was in the capital. What happened when the fighting spilled into the city?

Juba has maybe half a million people from all over South Sudan, but most of the soldiers in the town were Dinka and Nuer. When the gun battles began, government security forces, mostly Dinka, cracked down on Nuer civilians, too. Cars were stopped and Nuer men, identified by their traditional scarification marks or the names on their ID cards, were beaten, arrested, or shot. Some Dinka soldiers demanded that men speak in Dinka, and attacked them if they couldn't. In some neighborhoods Dinka soldiers went from house to house, shooting or arresting Nuer. Sometimes if Nuer tried to run they'd be shot.

How do you research violence like this? How do you find out what really happened?

A big part of my job is to find witnesses or survivors and then cross check the cases. You talk to hundreds of people and patterns begin to emerge. First, you spread your net wide, and when you find a survivor you're initially pleased because you're getting your job done, but your heart also sinks because that means it's real. As you talk to more survivors, you get more certainty, more clarity, which is important. But there's a kind of shakiness in your body when you hear the same story for the sixth time, and you recognize details, and you know how it will end.

I spoke with seven survivors of the Juba Gudele massacre, one of the worst incidents in the conflict. One was a young Nuer man, a student, about 20, we can call him David. He was arrested by Dinka security forces, marched at gunpoint to Gudele and put inside a room in a building. Forces crammed 200 to 400 Nuer men in that room, he told me. They were squeezed together, and people collapsed from the heat. There wasn't enough air. They kept trying to open the windows along one side of the room, but couldn't, he said.

Then, after it was dark, men outside put their guns through those windows and started shooting. The only light came from the machine gun, David said, and all he could hear was the endless shooting. He lived because other bodies fell on top of him. An hour later, men came into the room with torches, shone them on the bodies, and shot anyone who moved. David tried to stay still.

The forces left the door open when they left, and David ran into the night, his clothes covered in blood. He didn't have any other clothes and had to stay in them for 24 hours before he reached a UN base and someone gave him a blue T-shirt. He was still wearing it when we talked. It was all he had.

When I asked him about the future, he told me that he had "no hope." He wasn't in tears, he wasn't dramatic about it. It sounds like a generalization, but South Sudanese have a tough way of talking about violence. They're angry. They also have very strong community networks. But David seemed devastated and lonely. He seemed broken.

References

1. ^{^} JC McIlwaine/UN (www.un.org)