Rose Jamba, a 52-year-old maize farmer, has lost count of the “many” family members killed since South Sudan gained independence from Sudan a decade ago. In May, she fled violence in her village in the southern state of Central Equatoria to settle in a holding camp in Yei, some 30km from home.
“The fighting,” is what made her leave, she says, her voice trailing off, recalling clashes between soldiers from the South Sudan People’s Defence Forces — the army of Africa’s youngest country — and rebels loyal to the National Salvation Front of commander Thomas Cirillo, a former army general who broke away four years ago and declared his own Equatorian insurgency.
“There was shooting from both sides. They fought, then some looted,” says Jamba. Local authorities estimate that more than 7,000 people displaced by the fighting in Central Equatoria have sheltered in Yei this year. “I have seen this many times since I was a teenager — fighting, looting, raping,” Jamba says. “I am not happy. What’s the point of having an independent country if we have no food, we are poorer and have no peace?”
Her words resonate across South Sudan, which in July marked its 10th anniversary amid little hope of securing a political agreement to pacify the country. Clashes continue between splinter groups, government factions and rebels, leading to policy paralysis and vanishing hopes for a peaceful approach to the country’s first general election scheduled to take place in 2023.
South Sudan broke away from Sudan in 2011, but rapidly descended into fighting two years later when forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his first vice-president, Riek Machar, clashed. The brutal violence left 400,000 people dead and derailed the nascent state-building process.
Groups largely cleaving along ethnic lines — pitting Kiir from the Dinka group against Machar from the Nuer — fought for control of the new country, fuelling Africa’s biggest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Local analysts say the violence over the past 10 years has fundamentally been a fight for patronage, where powerful groups are competing over resources from oil to grazing land, which has left some two-thirds of the almost 12m population in need of humanitarian aid, according to the UN.
The South Sudan Council of Churches has labelled the past 10 years “a wasted decade”. Even Kiir, with his trademark cowboy hat, called on the South Sudanese “to recover the lost decade”. And Nicholas Haysom, head of the UN mission to the country, spoke last month of “unprecedented levels” of internal conflict, like the one which displaced Jamba.
In recent months, “the security situation has worsened”, says Paul Yugusuk, the Episcopal Archbishop of Central Equatoria. “As a result, a lot of atrocities have been committed. Our people have been killed, have been abused, as well as displaced . . . We had a very bad start as a country.”
The 2013 and 2016 bouts of civil war formally ended in 2018 with a peace deal that is still to be fully implemented. In 2020, after much quarrelling, Machar entered a fresh unity government as deputy to Kiir — who originally built his reputation after taking over the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in 2005 — and who was then elected president of the autonomous region of Southern Sudan in 2010.
The “revitalised” unity government of Kiir and Machar is racked with factionalism. In August, there were clashes between forces loyal to Machar and a splinter group that wants to oust him as leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition.
“We had big dreams of a beautiful country, a peaceful country, a prosperous country,” says defence minister Angelina Teny, who is married to Machar. “And now 10 years later, we’re still very happy we have this nation. It is a big, big achievement. We don’t regret it. No one can take it away. We have had a very difficult time since independence. And this difficult time started with the fact that we failed to form a consensus.”
‘American nation-building’
South Sudan was born out of tumult. Clashes between groups in the north and south began before Sudan even gained independence from Britain in 1956. Sparked initially by a mutiny in the south, the subsequent violence left up to 2m people dead, many from starvation, during two civil wars, from 1955 to 1972 and from 1983 to 2005. The creation of South Sudan grew out of a 2005 peace deal to end one of Africa’s longest conflicts between the pro-Arab Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south of Sudan.
In a referendum six years later, voters overwhelmingly chose separation and South Sudan became an independent country. “A proud flag flies over Juba and the map of the world has been redrawn,” read a declaration by the then US president Barack Obama, whose country was heavily involved in the independence process.
The US involvement was partly due to its enmity with Sudan’s former strongman leader Omar al-Bashir, say analysts. But officials now grumble that the powerful constituency for supporting South Sudan’s independence was a “strange alliance” between Hollywood celebrities, including George Clooney, evangelical Christians and a bipartisan effort in Capitol Hill that overlooked the internal rivalries in the liberation movement, leaving many with a “bitter taste in their mouths” in Washington today.
The US, among other powers, is calling for a de-escalation of internal conflicts, including demobilisation and disarmament, and to establish a permanent constitution-making process. But, as with the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, analysts say South Sudan is yet another example of US foreign policy over-reach. “US efforts in South Sudan seemed like a final spasm of naive American nation-building, which has all collapsed in epic fashion,” says Alan Boswell, the South Sudan expert at Crisis Group, a think-tank.
“The South Sudanese themselves oversimplified what it takes to build a state,” says Jok Madut Jok, author of Breaking Sudan. “There is definitely no belittling the dedication, the resilience and the determination to get independent statehood . . . But there is also no question that it has failed miserably to live up to the expectations and the euphoria with which the country was received.
“Most of that is born out of failure of leadership, failing to become the nation state that people aspired to — a state where institutions, not individuals, rule,” he adds.
The political infighting in the capital Juba mirrors the tension elsewhere in the country and partly explains the government’s focus on creating one of Africa’s largest armed forces rather than building strong institutions, a civil service, and delivering on basic needs, say local analysts.
“Everyone is tired of war and all the crises going on,” says Shama Peace Elia, a 22-year-old member of an activist group of artists in Juba called Anataban, or “I am tired.” She was born in a refugee camp in neighbouring Uganda, but her mother brought the family “home” after the 2005 peace deal.
“We were celebrating, I couldn’t sleep that night because people were all over the street, we were crying,” she said of independence day in 2011, a stark contrast to today. “They really wasted 10 years . . . We could have been in a good situation by now — the country would be built, would be somewhere.”
Instead, according to the UN, 8.3m people need humanitarian assistance — an increase of 800,000 from last year. Some 1.4m children are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition this year with 60 per cent of the population being “severely food insecure” — due to the “compounded effects of conflict, displacement, massive flooding, the economic impact of Covid-19 and rising poverty”.
The International Committee of the Red Cross says nine out of the 10 South Sudanese states harvested on average 50 per cent less cereal and vegetables in 2020 than the year before, and that only an estimated 40 per cent of healthcare centres remain operational. According to the International Organization for Migration, conflict and instability have pushed more than 4m people out of their homes in internal and cross-border displacement in the past eight years. Many also…
