http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/special-features/2014/10/141001-south-sudan-dinka-nuer-ethiopia-juba-khartoum/
How the World's Youngest Nation Descended Into Bloody Civil War
Fighting between its two main tribal groups threatens to tear South Sudan
apart.
A mother and daughter sit in their makeshift home in a camp at the UN base
in Bentiu, South Sudan, in June. Since then, famine has compounded the
effects of the young nation's bloody tribal conflict. PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE
OHANESIAN
James Verini
PUBLISHED OCTOBER 1, 2014
NASIR, South Sudan—When she was a girl, in the 1960s, Sarah Kier's parents
fled southern Sudan with her. The Sudanese civil war, in which
black-African inhabitants from the country's south were fighting for
autonomy against an oppressive Arab-dominated government in the north, had
been going on, without respite, for more than a decade. Kier's family moved
to the hills of western Ethiopia. When she grew older, Kier became aware of
the south's struggle. She joined the southern rebel militia, the Sudanese
People's Liberation Army (SPLA), and became a battlefield medic. She spent
much of her early life around violence and death.
NG Staff
On a hazy afternoon this past April, Kier was in the passenger seat of an
old Land Cruiser, moving through those same hills, thinking about what it
was like to not have a childhood. "You know, like for a young person
somewhere else, you go for disco," she told me. "We don't know that. We
[Sudanese] have ever lived with guns, from the word go."
The road emerged from a forest into a valley, and Kier gasped and smiled—as
a girl, she suddenly recalled, she had lived in a house near here. It
seemed a lifetime away. Then she noticed that trees had been cut down to
make way for farms. She shook her head and clucked her tongue. "I'm telling
you, this is sad," she said, looking out the window. "I mean, I am
connected to those trees."
That morning Kier had departed in the Land Cruiser from Addis Ababa, the
Ethiopian capital, where for weeks she'd been living in a small, bare room
in a guesthouse, along with South Sudanese friends. They were living in
exile, watching from afar as their country, less than three years old,
disintegrated.
The civil war that had driven her family out had continued, off and on,
until 2011, when the south finally gained independence. The creation of the
Republic of South Sudan, in July of that year, was the most jubilant scene
of African progress since the end of apartheid in South Africa. But in
December 2013, the violence returned. Pitted against each other were South
Sudan's two predominant and most populous tribes, the Dinka and Nuer.
Longtime rivals who had battled over land and resources since at least the
19th century, their fragile détente underlay the new republic. Without it,
there could be no South Sudan. And now, faster than would have seemed
possible—so fast it seemed somehow fated—they were once more at one
another's throats.
A Nation Unraveling
VIRGINIA W. MASON AND KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI, NGM STAFF; ANGELICA QUINTERO.
SOURCES: INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MIGRATION (DATA AS OF JULY 2014);
UNHCR (DATA AS OF SEPTEMBER 2014); ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION AND EVENT DATA
PROJECT (DATA AS OF MID-SEPTEMBER 2014)
As thousands died and hundreds of thousands were displaced, South Sudan's
president, Salva Kiir, who is Dinka, claimed the conflict had originated in
a coup attempt, and laid the blame for it at the feet of his former vice
president, Riek Machar. Machar, a Nuer, leveled damning accusations of his
own: Kiir had not only fabricated the coup plot in order to kill him,
Machar declared, but also had in mind a genocide of the Nuer. Machar fled
the capital, Juba, for his seat of power, in the country's northeast, and
arranged a rebellion (likewise with improbable speed), and battles and
atrocities followed.
This all came as a shock to the outside world, still gazing on its youngest
nation with pride. The shock was particularly keen in Washington, the main
foreign cheerleader for, and funder of, South Sudanese independence. In
May, Secretary of State John Kerry was dispatched to bring Kiir and Machar
to the negotiating table; the ceasefire he brokered lasted a matter of days.
The South Sudanese themselves were less surprised.
UN peacekeepers from Mongolia watch children at the edge of the camp in
Bentiu. PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE OHANESIAN
In June, a woman wades through the flooded camp at the UN base in Malakal.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE OHANESIAN
A Bad Thing Long Ago
Sarah Kier was on her way to the village of Nasir, in the Upper Nile
Province of South Sudan, the heart of Nuerland and Machar's headquarters,
with a soldier and a bodyguard. She was a veteran of the civil war, and
after independence had been appointed a minister in Kiir's government; but
when the fighting broke out in December, she was targeted by his
troops—because she's part Nuer, she believes. (Her father is Nuer, her
mother Dinka.) She joined Machar's insurgency, and went to Addis Ababa,
where members of his inner circle had gathered to lobby the Ethiopian
government and outside world for support.
Kier and her companions planned to sneak over the border at the White Nile
and had agreed to bring me with them to meet Machar. (Kiir's office had
declined my request to speak with him.) On top of the Land Cruiser were
jerricans of oil, sacks of rice, supplies, and messages destined for his
camp, where she was to take part in a meeting of his generals. Their forces
had been stopped outside Juba and pushed back. The war had stalemated. Kier
hoped to convince Machar to put her in charge of one of the theaters of
battle.
Even before the conflict began, Machar was the most controversial of South
Sudanese public figures, considered by some a selfless patriot, by others a
shameless traitor. He is in many ways the embodiment of South Sudan's war
within, the principal harbinger of what the historian Francis Deng has
called his country's culture of "ritualized rebellion." And Kier, who is
unmistakably South Sudanese in appearance—very tall, very dark—could not
have been prouder to be in his orbit. A phone at each ear, the mother of
seven talked excitedly of returning to the battlefield. "I'm going to war,
I'm going to war, my dear," she said to a friend on a phone. "I'm going to
shoot my own gun." She referred to Machar as Dr. Riek, or The Big Man. "We
will talk to The Big Man when we get there," she said, when I asked whether
he knew a National Geographic reporter was coming with her.
On December 16, 2013, SPLA soldiers from the Dinka tribe looted and burned
Nuer houses in a neighborhood in Juba, South Sudan's capital. PHOTOGRAPH BY
ADRIANE OHANESIAN
She recounted how she had gotten out of Juba when the fighting began. An
old friend and fellow soldier called. "He told me, 'Leave your house now,'"
she said in a rapid-fire patter. "I told him, 'Give me a gun. Me, I will
not die. Give me a gun. I will not die like this.'" Four months later, she
still couldn't believe what happened. "Could this be one of those bad
dreams, when you wake, you say, 'Oh, God, thank you, it was a dream'?
Because we thought we're just now coming to enjoy our country."
Riu, the soldier, a tall, rangy Nuer in his early 30s, was squeezed into
the cargo hold in the back of the truck, a green patrol cap pulled over his
forehead. He was more solemn than Kier. When the fighting began, he said,
he was in his barracks in a village outside Juba. "Everyone is just firing
his gun and shooting at each other." He escaped and made his way to the
capital, where he found a group of soldiers who were secreting Machar and
other officials out of the city. He joined them. "What took place on that
day was something planned."
As they talked, Kier grew agitated. How had their homeland descended with
such ease into suicide? she wanted to know. How had their country, whose
creation had given the world so much hope, turned so quickly on itself?
"Children have been killed. Innocent ones. Innocent blood," she said. "For
what? Because of the tribe? A tribe is not by choice." Riu calmly mused on
this. "I can just conclude," he offered, "that Dinkas are having some kind
of leadership style that easily leads people into chaos."
That afternoon the air grew thick, the landscape mountainous, and the
conversation turned to the supernatural. Kier and her companions considered
themselves to be good Christians, as many South Sudanese do. But they were
struggling to reconcile that with what they'd seen.
"What happened in South Sudan," Kier said, "I think even God wouldn't have
allowed it, because the sin is too much."
"God is punishing South Sudan," said Jacob, the bodyguard, who compared his
land to Israel. "I think they've done a bad thing long ago."
Kier nodded. "God can punish a whole nation because of one person," she
added, seeming to have Salva Kiir in mind. "Just like God also can save the
whole nation because of one person." She seemed to have Machar in mind.
Desperate ritual: A woman expresses her breast milk into the grave of her
child in the cemetery near the UN base in Bentiu. PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE
OHANESIAN
I asked Riu what he thought of this. "I think it is just some kind of
illusion, when you talk of South Sudan being punished by God," he said.
"All of these disasters, or political conflicts, they happen as a result of
many things."
In every town in which they stopped in Ethiopia, they met friends who'd
fled South Sudan. (Most were Nuer, as was clear from the horizontal gaar
scarring on their foreheads.) They hugged and laughed, happy to see each
other alive. Some were coming from Nasir, in South Sudan; others were on
their way there. But most, it seemed, were living in squalid roadside
hotels, waiting to see what would happen. How long they would have to live
in exile, none knew. If it was for the rest of their lives, it wouldn't be
the first time they had faced the prospect.
Ritualized Rebellion
There is a popular local proverb: "When God made Sudan, he laughed."
More than any other part of Africa, the Sudan is defined by civil war. It
was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, then ushered into the 20th century by an
invidious arrangement of Egyptian and British control. Colonial efforts at
modernization, such as they existed, were confined to the north; the south
was, in the words of one historian, "a mere field from which slaves were
harvested."
Though the British favored the Nuer, venerating their virile warrior
culture and relying on them to keep the Dinka and other tribes (roughly 60
in all) in check, the Arab ruling class left in place made no secret of its
scorn for the black southerners. The southerners, in turn, with their
mixture of traditional faiths and Christianity, did not hide their
unwillingness to be dictated to or converted to Islam, even if resistance
meant their death.
The conflict prevented people from planting their crops earlier this year,
contributing to the famine that has plagued South Sudan in recent months.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE OHANESIAN
In 1955, months before Sudan gained its independence, the southerners began
a war for liberation. It lasted 17 years. The Sudanese military bombed and
razed villages across the south and killed, raped, and enslaved civilians
en masse. Juba was put to the torch. A period of peace followed in the
1970s. But in 1983 the southern cause gelled into the Sudan People's
Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the SPLA. Soon after, an
Islamist military junta took over in Khartoum. Subjugation of the south was
foremost on its mind, even—in fact, especially—if it meant killing people.
The abuse was redoubled.
The Second Sudanese Civil War, as it is now known, lasted from 1983 to
2005—the longest war, anywhere, of the modern era. It's estimated that by
the end of these two wars, some 2.5 million people, the equivalent of more
than a fifth of the current population, had died in fighting or resulting
displacement, famine, or disease. Many thousands of others, like Kier and
her parents,fled to neighboring countries and the West.
Alongside the civil war raged southern fratricidal conflicts. The most
bitter fighting was between Dinka and Nuer factions. But in the push to
independence, their rivalry, like the rest of the south's internal
fissures, was ignored or played down. Once South Sudan existed, went the
thinking, all wrongs could be righted. Scholars pointed out that a similar
myopia had proved disastrous to the African independence movements of the
20th century, not least Sudan's. "The ground upon which the country landed
at the time of independence was already cracking underneath," as Jok Madut
Jok, a historian and former undersecretary for culture and heritage in
Kiir's government, put it to me. Amid the elation of 2011, however,
cautionary voices like his were drowned out.
Two months before the 2011 referendum that ushered in the new nation of
South Sudan, people in Juba demonstrated, some holding the flag of their
would-be country. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEFANO DE LUIGI, VII
Nothing Is Happening
At the White Nile, which forms part of the border between Ethiopia and
South Sudan, we loaded the sacks and boxes into a motorboat piloted by a
small boy. A minute later, we were in South Sudan. Once atop the steep
bank, we found a band of young men in jeans, shorts, and soccer jerseys,
Kalashnikovs slung on their backs. They were fighters with the White Army,
a Nuer militia allied with Machar. It is known for killing Dinkas, arming
minors, and looting anyone and anything with equal abandon.
After an hour, a muddied Chevy Suburban pulled up. From it stepped two men
who introduced themselves as colonels in the Sudan People's Liberation
Movement in Opposition, Machar's breakaway party. On the drive to Nasir to
meet Machar, we passed men walking with rifles and field blankets, their
gaits slow with fatigue. A colonel explained that they were coming from the
city of Malakal, two days' march, where Machar's troops and the White Army
were battling Kiir's government forces for control. "Malakal has changed
hands four times," he said.
In Nasir, which still had the steamy, forlorn atmosphere of the British
cattle outpost it once was, an easy transition to rebel life was being
effected. On the wall in the county commissioner's office hung portraits of
Machar and Kiir. Kiir's face had been scratched out with a black pen. In
the market square, community meetings and civil trials were being
conducted. In one trial, two White Army insurgents, an uncle and nephew,
were in dispute over a truck. They'd won the vehicle when they'd killed the
government soldier who was driving it. The nephew's claim to it was that
he, unlike the uncle, knew how to drive; the uncle's claim was that he had
fired the gun.
Machar's camp, on the edge of the town, was small and simple: several
tukuls, the traditional Sudanese circular huts, arranged around a dirt
clearing. Heat-shimmered scrub brush and sorghum fields stretched in every
direction. Between a large tree and a flagpole was a wood-paneled coffee
table covered with laptop computers, books, notepads, and satellite phones.
Sunday Mass is celebrated at a church in Ayod, in Jonglei state, on October
31, 2010. The church favored southern Sudan's separation from the north.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEFANO DE LUIGI, VII
A soldier with a spear stood at attention behind the table; another
crouched in front of it manning a .50-caliber field gun, discreetly picking
at his toes. At the table, between the sentries, in a black pleather desk
chair, was Machar. Even seated he was immense: six-and-a-half feet tall and
more than 300 pounds. He wore forest camouflage, eyeglasses, a gold watch,
and high-top black sneakers. A tuft of receding hair was flecked with gray,
as was his goatee. A soldier fumbled around him with a knot of power strips
and adapters, while Machar held a satellite phone to his ear, occasionally
talking softly, shifting among English, Nuer, and Arabic.
Finally he put the phone down and gazed up with small, squinting eyes and
the rumor of a smile. It was clear he hadn't known, or hadn't remembered,
or hadn't cared, that we were coming. He listened patiently and
uninterestedly as Kier told the story of her escape from Juba. Then he
asked if she knew about the fate of his home there. It had been ransacked
and destroyed by government forces, she had heard.
"The first thing they took was the cars," she said.
"The best loot to them was the cars?" Machar said. "What about my books?
And the archives?"
"I don't know," she said.
"That is better loot," he said, with a moan, as though to suggest that his
tormentors hadn't even sense enough to properly steal from him. "Salva Kiir
and his cronies. Well."
Machar welcomed me with the understated amiability for which he's well
known. "There was no coup. It was an assassination attempt. Eleven days I
was on the run, being hunted," he said. "Our fight is against a
dictatorship. Salva Kiir wants to create a dictatorship out of this new
country. And we're saying no."
As he spoke, he picked up one of the books from the coffee table and leafed
through it languidly. I noticed the cover: Why Nations Fail.
I asked about the state of his rebellion. "These are the three activities:
either fighting, or mobilization, or—"he motioned to indicate the
inactivity around us and chuckled, "nothing is happening."
"I Am Part of the Gods"
Riek Machar has been called the Bill Clinton of Sudan. The journalist
Deborah Scroggins describes him as a man of "bottomless ego" who "feels
your pain even as he plots your end." No one doubts his skills as a
political survivor, and not even his apologists deny his wish to be
president of South Sudan, a job he coveted long before it existed.
The son of a minor Nuer chief, as a child (the 26th of 32) he attended an
American missionary school. When he was suspended for leading his class in
a song advocating southern independence, the story goes, his mother didn't
punish him but bought him his first pair of trousers. A doctorate in
England later followed, and he lets no one forget it: If asked to describe
the Nuer, he recommends the books of ethnologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard. In
wielding power among his tribesmen, though, he mingles the foreign
credentials with local mysticism, reminding them that Nuer prophecy speaks
of a gap-toothed, left-handed savior, physical attributes of his. When, as
a SPLA commander in Upper Nile in the 1980s, he outlawed thegaar, the
traditional Nuer face-scarring, priests objected. The gods wouldn't like
it, they told him.
"I am part of the gods," he scolded them. "And that is my word!"
Scarification, a rite of passage for young Nuer boys, is still widely
practiced in villages. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEFANO DE LUIGI, VII
In early 2011, as independence approached, word spread that Machar was
maneuvering to dislodge Kiir, the acting president. Nonetheless, to keep a
lid on ethnic clashes, Kiir allowed him the vice presidency. Soon Machar
was publicly castigating his boss. Their rivalry came to define South
Sudanese politics. It was captured perfectly in the Othello vs. Iago
dynamic of their official state portraits, which hung everywhere: Gen.
Salva Kiir Mayardit, as his nameplate read, looking blunt and laconic; and
Dr. Riek Machar Teny Durghon, wearing a wily, bumptious almost-grin.
By the time those portraits were printed, the elation of independence had
evaporated, like a dream upon waking. As though overnight, the
long-pined-after utopia of South Sudan had revealed itself to be a
militarized one-party kleptocracy. The SPLM was accused of rigging
elections; its security forces harassed, detained, and tortured political
opponents, journalists, and human rights workers; its soldiers continued to
kill civilians as a matter of routine. The army "dominated every critical
aspect of life in South Sudan," according to a UN report, a fact that
"seriously undermined governance and state institutions, making it
difficult to establish the rule of law."
Corruption was already so bad by 2012 that Kiir admitted, in a letter
published in newspapers, that billions that should have gone into state
coffers had instead gone into pockets. He didn't need to add that those
pockets belonged to people he knew. "We fought for freedom, justice and
equality. Many of our friends died," he wrote. "Yet, once we got to power,
we forgot what we fought for."
This Dinka boy had been sold into slavery by Arab traders but was later
bought back by Christian Solidarity International. PHOTOGRAPH BY DIDIER
RUEF, LUZPHOTO
He was right, but that didn't win him much credit. (In a follow-up letter,
he asked the malefactors to return the funds in exchange for impunity.)
South Sudanese, so many of whom had lived in exile in functioning
democracies abroad, knew they were not in one now. By last year it was
widely assumed that, if there wasn't a coup, there would be a popular
uprising.
In July 2013 Kiir fired Machar. At a press conference Machar accused him of
"dictatorial tendencies." On the night of December 15, in a barracks in
Juba, Dinka soldiers in the presidential guard apparently attempted to
disarm their Nuer colleagues. A firefight ensued. Soon units of Dinka
soldiers were moving door-to-door through Nuer enclaves, according to
witnesses, executing people. According to some, the exteriors of Nuer homes
had been marked beforehand, suggesting a premeditated plan. Nuer in turn
retaliated against Dinka. The army split into Dinka and Nuer halves, and
within days the fighting had spread across the country.
Nuer civilians, their neighborhoods strewn with corpses, fled to the UN
compound in Juba. There, in June, I spoke with a group of village elders.
One had watched his brother shot dead and his sister-in-law shot in the
legs in front of their children. When he grabbed a soldier and pleaded with
him not to kill him in front of the children, the soldier beat him to the
ground with his rifle butt. He claims the soldier said, "Because you're
Nuer, because you're the people of Riek Machar, we can kill you." For some
reason, the soldier didn't kill him.
As we spoke, a young, shirtless man walked by the tent we were sitting in,
mumbling to himself and gesticulating wildly. "Do you see that boy?" he
asked. "He was forced to drink the blood of a man who was killed in front
of him. It made him mad."
Close to 50,000 people were living in the compound, which, along with other
camps around the country, was flooded by the seasonal rains. There were
outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, and typhus. In the camps in Malakal and
Bentiu, women waited their turn to bury their children. The war devastated
the harvest of sorghum and other food staples. Several counties are now
suffering famine. But even those refugees whose homes hadn't been destroyed
refused to return to them. They believed they'd be killed by the
government, or the White Army, as soon as they did. The UN estimates that a
million people remain displaced.
Presidential candidate Salva Kiir (left), of the Dinka tribe, waits to
address the final election rally in Juba, on April 9, 2010. Kiir won the
presidency. Opposition leader Riek Machar (right), a Nuer, takes a morning
walk with his bodyguards on April 4, 2014, near his headquarters compound
outside the town of Nasir. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEROME DELAY, AP AND ADRIANE
OHANESIAN
Fighting for a Symbol
Back at Machar's camp, boredom prevailed. Having risen from their earthen
beds at dawn, his troops put on their uniforms, listened attentively to the
BBC, then sat around on ammunition canisters. I spoke with soldiers who'd
escaped the violence in Juba in December. One, a Dinka, told me that he'd
been loyal to Kiir, but when he saw that Dinka troops were killing their
Nuer colleagues indiscriminately (on Kiir's orders, he believed), he felt
compelled to join Machar.
After emerging from a camping tent next to the weapons cache, Machar was
served tea. An attendant slowly rolled on his socks. That afternoon, as the
brass played cards in their pajamas and gym shorts, Machar settled into his
desk chair. "I did not think of fighting another war," he told me, as the
sentries took up their positions. "I spent my best time, my productive
years, prosecuting a war of liberation. I don't want to spend the rest of
my life in another war." He sighed. "So they talk about peace. I tell them
I want peace. But provided this republic is a democratic nation, there are
freedoms in it, there's dignity of the people, there's justice.
"It's not only the Nuer," he went on. "It's the South Sudanese. The Dinka
need to be protected also from [Kiir], you know. They're being coerced to
go and fight a war which they really have nothing to benefit from." He
added, "So maybe very soon we'll take them all and march to Juba."
Soldiers mark time in front of Riek Machar's compound outside Nasir.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE OHANESIAN
This is not the first time Machar has made that threat. In 1991 he broke
from the SPLA leadership, decrying its "dictatorial tendencies." The
allegation was fair, and Machar was hardly the only southerner tired of the
SPLA, but what he did next was inexplicable, or perfectly explicable,
depending on your opinion of him: He got on the radio to say that he,
Machar, was taking over the liberation movement. The claim wasn't vaguely
true, and Machar fled to Nasir, where he fomented a rebellion, just as he
would 22 years later. In the ensuing ethnic conflict, he and the SPLA were
both responsible for mass killings of civilians. Machar managed to bill
himself as the natural leader of the Nuer. Eventually he and the SPLA
reconciled. But many southerners have never forgiven Machar.
I brought this up, noting that his critics said he was isolating himself
now just as he had then. His eyes narrowed. "I didn't isolate myself in
1991. I did very well," he said. Before his break with the SPLA, "people
were afraid to talk of right of self-determination for South Sudan, or of
independence. Today we're independent. I'm proven right.
Self-determination, independence of South Sudan, is us," he said. "And, in
particular, it's me."
As he talked, he picked up Why Nations Fail again and brought it to his
face, as though intending to channel some historical wisdom. He held the
book upside down. "You know, people who fight for freedom, who defend their
dignity, to bring about justice," he said, "they don't wait for the
international community to accept them, to give them sanction to fight. Or
else they would never fight."
I told him about a White Army insurgent I'd met in a hospital who'd been
shot while fighting for Malakal. Thousands had been killed in the battles
there. I pointed out that the city was not worth it: It was the heart of
Nuerland, true, but held little strategic value. Why expend so many lives?
"Why fight over Atlanta?" he said, referring to the American Civil War.
"It's a symbol."
Government soldiers take a break at the market in Rubkona. PHOTOGRAPH BY
ADRIANE OHANESIAN
Why Nations Fail
It is often said—it has been said countless times in South Sudan—that
nothing brings a nation together like grievance. That may be true. But if
it is, it is no less true that nothing strangles a nation like grievance.
South Sudan's failure to live up to its noblest aspirations for itself,
however, cannot be blamed entirely on Machar, or Kiir, or on any one person
or group. The problems go far deeper. The extent to which a half century of
near-continuous conflict have brutalized and hollowed out southern Sudanese
society cannot be overstated. War, all-encompassing, all-infecting, has
robbed the southern Sudanese of their traditions, their livelihoods, their
very identities. Two generations of people who might have been farmers,
teachers, doctors, lawyers, priests, mothers, fathers have instead become
soldiers in a war that never ends. And the violence has left life cheap,
unbearable, contemptible even. Independence only brought the violence to an
official end, it turns out, not a psychological one. Though independent,
many southerners had, by 2011, come to believe, unconsciously or otherwise,
the north's scornful conception of them—that they were too combative and
selfish to handle liberation.
"The war left behind gaping wounds in the hearts and minds of people about
the value of liberation. They asked, liberation to what end?" historian Jok
Madut Jok said. The idea that South Sudan could "march home from a war in
the bush, and [take] the helms of power, thinking that things can just go
on without anybody working to heal these wounds—that was where it all began
to fall apart."
On the way back into Ethiopia, one of Machar's generals traveled with Sarah
Kier. As they sat in a teahouse awaiting a ride, she told him she wanted to
become a field commander. He asked why. Because, she said, he and the other
men around Machar were running the rebellion into the ground. They had no
plan aside from killing. "If I was in charge of this war, I'd do things
differently than you men are, I can tell you that," she told him. "You
know, the strategy should not be on the number of lives [taken]."
As though to bear her out, the next week Machar's troops and the White Army
retook the city of Bentiu. They drove out government soldiers and, in the
process, slaughtered hundreds of civilians. It was the worst atrocity of
the war. Images of piled, burnt bodies were broadcast around the world. The
U.S. put sanctions on Machar and his allies. Not long after that,
government forces overran Nasir. Machar fled. He is now in and out of Addis
Ababa, awaiting peace talks that keep getting postponed.
The cracked windshield of one of Riek Machar's vehicles can be said to
symbolize the fracturing of hopes for the world's youngest nation.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADRIANE OHANESIAN
Received on Wed Oct 01 2014 - 10:41:55 EDT