Analysis of war in South Sudan
Solly Rakgomo | Friday August 26, 2016 14:56
His choice of verb, soon to become fashionable, is revealing, not only about the motivations and world view of the speaker and government he represents but it also raises the question of what child was brought into the world. What does the word reveal? To begin with, the “midwife” peddlers delete the South Sudanese from their long, traumatic history of liberation struggle against the North, dating back at least to the Torit Mutiny of 1955, blithely skipping over the fact that the United States was actually on the side of the oppressors.
In fact, when the SPLM/A (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army) was founded in 1983, the Khartoum government was Africa’s biggest recipient of US aid and arms. The relationship only soured after the First Gulf War when Khartoum supported Saddam Hussein and, especially, after 9/11 when it was known that the regime had harbored Osama bin Laden.
There has been plenty of foreign interference in South Sudan, going at least as far back as the Egyptian slave raiders of the third millennium BCE, all the way through to 19th century Christian missionaries, the ineffectual regime of Governor General Charles George Gordon who, the British believed, as Deborah Scroggins writes, brought “peace and orderly government” to a territory as big as Western Europe before he ended up beheaded, and the toxic meddling of the British Lonrho mining tycoon Tiny Rowland, who bankrolled politicians all over the continent in the 1980s and supported both North and South Sudan in order to prolong the war because, that way he believed, he would get access to mineral-rich zones away from government control. The US, then, cannot claim all the glory but it certainly played its part in the birth pangs of the independent state of South Sudan. This “nationhood by whatever means necessary” was helped along by a bunch of, let’s say, forceps wielders, among them the powerful US Israeli lobby (after all, South Sudan is a good customer of Israel’s surveillance and weapons technology, and in 2013 it promised it would sell oil to Israeli companies) and, naturally, homegrown US oil interests, especially given the strong foothold of China in the country and, notably, of the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation.
The cozy relationship between Washington, UN and South Sudanese elites is an important background to Nick Turse’s new book, War and Survival in South Sudan, because it at least partly explains the awful silences he addresses.
The Centre for Public Integrity has shown that the government of South Sudan spent $2.1 million on Washington lobbying and public relations firms from 2014 to the end of 2015, trying to brush up its image while some five million of its people were in dire need of humanitarian assistance and about 20% had fled their homes. Unable to pay its civil servants., the “government” needed that image makeover that is intermittently headed, in a highly volatile partnership, by Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, (Dinka and Nuer respectively) with a long history of enmity which they both periodically whip up by manipulating tribal sentiments among their factions inside (more or less) the SPLA, which is purportedly the new country’s “regular army”.
They also got a bit of freebie air-brushing by the head of the much criticised, failing to protect UN mission, UNMISS, Hilde Johnson, who has a penchant for referring to her high-up friends as “cadres”, “freedom fighters” and “comrades”. There are other cover-up buddies such as a decades-old clique of US-based policy wonks who called each other names like “Emperor”, “Deputy Emperor” and “Spear Carrier”, at least two of whom are now special advisors to Salva Kiir.
In fact, in terms of what are usually thought of as government functions, the South Sudanese variety can hardly be called a “government”. For more than two decades, small empires in the day-to-day running of the country have been conquered by sundry humanitarian organisations (many run by American evangelical Christians) shaping a sort of “republic of NGOs”. The anti-governance repercussions are far-reaching because the NGOs may have taken over state powers but they do not have the capacity for dealing with nation-wide problems like emergency response in a catastrophic situation of actual or perpetually looming civil war and its attendant disasters of famine, hunger, refugees and the unburied dead.
In one of the most heavily armed countries of the world , stockpiling weapons with no policy for managing the excess has clear priority over health, education, public service, infrastructure and especially justice.
Turse’s book is essentially about justice. He gives a voice to today’s victims of the latest round in centuries of foreign interference which, since it must be concealed behind words like “midwife” or President Obama’s description of the new era ushered in by two rival warlords as a “time of hope”, also means that sufferers must be silenced or, equally horribly, never mentioned, even when dead.
So year after year, President Obama provided waivers to sidestep the 2008 Child Soldiers Prevention Act by which Congress prohibited the US from providing military assistance to governments filling their ranks with children, in order to keep up political and military backing for known war criminals.
It was a gamble of looking the other way or prettying up the unspeakable that would have dreadful results in the civil war which broke out in South Sudan in 2013.
The pain described by Turse’s informants is unbearable and it is even worse knowing that western governments knowingly loosed the “blood-dimmed tide” of a ghastly birth. No wonder Turse quotes from Macbeth, “Blood will have blood”.