A new nation, cracking apart
South Sudan’s conflict started as power struggle between political leaders before slipping into feud between two biggest ethnic groups
Simon Burete was weeding his peanut field a few weeks ago when he saw smoke coming from his house. He ran as fast as he could. He and his wife, Angelina, had enjoyed years of peace, he farming the fields, she selling the produce in the market. They were poor but welded to each other. Just that morning, they had talked about walking into town to buy their first mobile phones.
But as Simon Burete made it back to the house, out of breath, red dirt still stuck to his knees, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His wife was lying on the floor, burned to death in a rampage by government forces. “I used to call her akara-ngba,” he said, which means in the Zande language “the last word on beauty.” He could barely choke out the words. South Sudan’s war and its ugliness are engulfing previously peaceful areas of the nation, spelling horror for the victims and signifying something deeper: This country is cracking apart.
Yambio, a midsize town of wide dirt roads and lofty kapok trees that seem to breathe tranquillity, used to be part of what was called a green state. This place was considered safe. It was not a red zone.
But now charred buildings and crushed huts line the roads leaving town. Bountiful fields — in a part of the country known as South Sudan’s breadbasket — lie untended during a desperate national food crisis. The names of dead loved ones circulate through hastily built displaced persons camps all around Yambio, just as they do in cities and towns hundreds of miles away.
South Sudan’s conflict started as a power struggle between the country’s political leaders before slipping into a broader feud between the two biggest ethnic groups, the Nuer and the Dinka.
But as it enters its fourth year, this war, Africa’s worst, is rapidly sucking in many of the nation’s other ethnic groups, including the Azande, the Shilluk, the Moru, the Kakwa and the Kuku. Unity, which seemed so proudly on display six years ago when South Sudan was born in a halo of jubilation, now seems Pollyannish.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and every major cease-fire that has been painstakingly negotiated by African and Western officials has been violated. Dangerous fissures are opening up within the South Sudanese military, and the burst of bloodshed in the Equatoria region is both cause and effect. An Equatorian general and a colonel recently quit, criticizing the government on their way out.
On top of all this comes another calamity: famine.
The United States helped birth this nation, building ministries, training soldiers, pumping in more than $11 billion since 2005. Americans, especially powerful Christian groups, cheered on the South Sudanese rebels during their decadeslong liberation battle to split off from the Arab-dominated government of Sudan, which southerners simply called “The North.” But South Sudan is going down the North’s same bloody road. Analysts say South Sudan has become shockingly similar to Darfur, the vast, western region of Sudan that plunged into conflict in the mid-2000s and became a global byword for atrocities against civilians.
What happened there is happening in South Sudan: government-backed militias, and sometimes uniformed soldiers, sweeping into towns, burning down huts, massacring civilians, gangraping women and driving millions from their homes, leaving many to crowd into disease-ridden camps protected by U.N. peacekeepers.
Human rights groups say the evidence of war crimes grows by the day. And just as in Darfur, U.N. officials in South Sudan are worried about genocide.
The South Sudanese government says it is putting down a rebellion — the same rationale used in Darfur. And it is true that armed groups rose up in 2013, led by ambitious Nuer politicians challenging Dinka hegemony just two years after South Sudan won its independence from Sudan.
But the broader narrative of the two countries is beginning to blur. A commonly uttered line on Sudan is that it has been at war with itself since independence.
A few years ago, the government struck a questionable revenue-sharing plan with Sudan. Instead of insulating themselves from oil shocks, the South Sudanese cut a deal to make as much money as possible when oil prices were high.
But once oil prices collapsed, the costs of production were nearly as much as the market price, leading to almost no government revenue or foreign exchange and causing enormous inflation. For many South Sudanese, food prices have spiraled out of reach. And now that the war has disabled many pumps, oil production is a trickle.
Some analysts, both African and Western, feel the situation is so hopeless that they have proposed a radical solution: an international takeover. The argument says that South Sudan’s government is not a legitimate state, and that it should be nudged aside to let the United Nations and the African Union run a transitional administration for 10 to 15 years. South Sudanese officials say they would violently resist this.