South Sudan's Genocidaires Cloaked as Revolutionaries - Jok Madut Jok

What the South Sudanese rebels led by Riek Machar Teny have done since the beginning of the conflict a little more than four months ago has the hallmarks of genocide written all over it. They are the acts of a desperate man in quest of power by all means, including murder. He is the leader of the most violent group of young people from the Nuer ethnic group whom he claims as his fighting force when they score victories against the nation's army but deny any control over them when they commit such ghastly atrocities as they have done in Akobo, Bor, Malakal, Pariang, and Bentiu in which large numbers of civilians from Dinka and other non-Nuer ethnic nationalities were targeted and murdered. Riek Machar is also taking advantage of an earlier incident in which Nuer were killed in Juba by government forces. So while his mission is to gain power in the country, he is telling these young men that their mission is to avenge the killing of their relatives Juba.

The latest incident occurred in Bentiu on April 15 and 16 in which over 500 civilians were murdered when the rebels took control of the capital of Unity State, including people who had sought refuge in mosques, churches and hospitals. They were asked to verify their ethnicity, nationality and political loyalty and they were shot when they were found to be Dinka, Sudanese from Darfur, Ugandans, Kenyans. There were some survivors who witnessed these murders and have escaped to Abiemnhom to the west of Bentiu. They have reported these heartbreaking horrors that befell the non-Nuer people in Bentiu.

The rebels have naturally either denied responsibility for these horrific killings or claimed that their victims were combatants defending the government, allegations that are very unlikely to hold water. There are eyewitnesses who can even identify the murderers and can testify that the dead were in fact civilians, who begged for their lives, who covered their heads in desperate gestures but were still shot. Future credible investigations into these incidents will surely find war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. It will be hard for the perpetrators to deny them. Their leaders, the likes of James Koang who commanded the assault on Bentiu or Riek Machar himself who is leading the rebellion, for it is their responsibility to control their forces. That is the responsibility Mr. Machar is trying preemptively to escape by oscillating about his relationship with the White Army, the militia that he has used in this war.

Equally criminal and evidence that a genocide is underway in South Sudan is the use of the state radio station in Bentiu to broadcast hate messages against the Dinka. Calls were made on radio following the rebels occupation of Bentiu for rape of Dinka women, for extermination of government supporters and of any Nuer who is unwilling to support the rebellion or anyone who assists the Dinka to escape. If the undisciplined nature of the rebel forces, the hate messages, the massacres, the actions that the rebels have engaged in every time they occupy a town, if all these are not indicative of something more ominous, something reminiscent of how genocides have historically been planned and organized, then I'm not sure the world is awake. We should all be warned that something even more horrific is in the works and the longer we wait to call it by its name the more likely we will wake up to another case of mass murder in Africa.

While it is important to recognize the anger among these young Nuer, both for the Juba incident and the general exclusion from the gains of independence, they should seek justice and accountability through the laws of South Sudan and international law, not take revenge on other citizens who were not involved in the incidents that sparked the conflict. They are also not the only ones who have been excluded from services, the rest of rural population suffer the same, and a collective citizen action towards their state would have been the more logical way to seek fairness in the distribution of the country's national pie. Committing mass murder in the name of justice is a very strange approach on the side of Riek Machar and his comrades.

There are now limited scenarios of what happens in the days and weeks ahead. Either the White Army gets their way and kill massive numbers of Dinka, the government manages to rebuff their advance or the Dinka will begin to see this war as a tribal war and respond to the Nuer advance in like manner, indeed, a disaster in the making. As Riek Machar is leading a tribal army, what prospects does he have to actually impose himself as president of the whole country?

The only way to avert the imminent danger that threatens to plunge South Sudan into chaotic killing and counter killing is the enforcement of the ceasefire agreement signed in January of this year between the government and the rebels under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Agency on Development (IGAD). This would inject life into the slow-pace peace talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that are scheduled to resume on April 27th, after being halted for a month. But time is of the essence. The recent successes against the government forces might cause the rebel movement to think that a military solution is possible and drag its feed at the negotiations.

South Sudan Killings, Who to Hold Responsible

South Sudan is made of several dozen ethnic groups. In South Africa, such diversity is a source of pride and celebration, but in Sudan and South Sudan, some wants to kill you for walking while Nuer, Dinka, Chollo, Anyuak, Murle, Zande, Bari, Nyanguara. Can we murder our way to unity? Has our diversity become a liability? At the very base, our communities are humane and good to each other, but the killings of the past four months have been an aberration, a result of manipulation by leaders vying for public office or trying to stay in it. We all seem to know this fact, but why can't South Sudanese act together against the evil of politicalization of ethnic identity? We can't because we are so badly divided that few Dinka would trust a peace call from a Nuer and the reverse is true. So which way South Sudan? Are we condemned to that cycle? Surely that cannot be. Can we restore ethnic cohesion so that we are once again able to relate to one another on the basis of belonging to a single tribe called South Sudan? Without it, we would not be able to engage in a collective citizen action to challenge the leaders into thinking about the country. What would it take for such cohesion to be restored?

It begins with you, the individual. If you can overcome your emotion, revengefulness, avoid the myopic ethnic lens through which you look at national politics, think for a minute before you call for death of your "enemies," stop blaming an entire tribe for the mistakes of leaders who happen to be from that ethnic group, for the poor rural and marginalized ordinary citizens whose death you are calling for are just as victims of bad governance as the members of your own ethnic nation. If you do this, you will quickly notice that your family will follow suit, your friends on the other side will do likewise and forgiveness will catch fire. What would result from this is a realization that the majority poor and excluded lot who are now hacking at each other, at the behest of selfish leaders, have far more in common than they have with these ethnic-minded leaders. 

You will also discover that the usual blaming of rural fighters as ignorant and uneducated is actually a description more fitting for the educated folks. Our people had many indigenous ways to wage a responsible war, reconcile with one another when the time is right, spare the lives of women and children, the death ratios were far higher among the fighters and far less among the civilians, the latter of whom were often accidental and not targeted the way it is being done today. Our people had democracy and openness, where a chief could be criticized right to his face by an ordinary person and there was nothing the chief can do, other than actually take this criticism as a way to improve his rule. Women used to challenge the men in the village council, in court and in other ceremonial occasions. It is the "educated" who have now invented ways to exclude the women from decision-making. It is the educated who invented the slaying of women in conflict.

The bottom line, quoting Ayom Wol Dhal, take a few minutes to think about how the victims of this war die, what it must be like for a mere ordinary civilian to beg for his/her life before the bullet goes his/her head. Think about that before you make that call on the internet for his or her death. Think about his or her loved ones and the agony of loss such death would bring upon them. Above all, think about how it could be yourself or your close relatives who might be confronted with that in the course of this war.

Jok Madut Jok is an educator, a heartbroken South Sudanese