Henry Lugale has spent the week since he got to Nairobi thinking about the
nightmare that life has become back in Juba.
"There were people suffering. South Sudan is not good," he told South Sudan
in Focus.
Before the conflict started in December, Lugale was a businessman, running a
popular store in Juba's Tomping neighborhood. When violence erupted on Dec.
15, things got so bad that Lugale practically lost the roof over his head.
"Because our home was near the home of the president - these people come and
they ruin all the things in the store," he said.
"And I have some solar (panels) on the top. They removed the solars and even
they took my car. Soldiers. Tiger soldiers," he said.
Tiger soldiers
By "tiger soldiers" Lugale meant members of President Salva Kiir's
presidential guard, also called the Tiger Division. Lugale said the same
soldiers man some of the checkpoints that are dotted around Juba. They used
to stop him several times a day, asking him each time to get out of his car
and often confiscating his belongings or demanding money, he said.
South Sudan Information Minister Michael Makuei said checkpoints are normal
in times of trouble, and speculated that Lugale had resisted security
officials who were merely doing their job.
"Anybody who decides to be intransigent, anybody who wants to go against the
law, anybody who wants to take the law into his own hands, these are the
people who must be handled. And if he happened to be one of those
intransigent ones, then, definitely, he could have an encounter with the
checkpoint," Makuei said.
Ethnic differences
Lugale insisted he was doing nothing wrong. He said the soldiers at the
checkpoints harass people like him - because he is not from the same ethnic
group as they are.
One time, he says, when he was on his way to pick up some items on a list
for his shop, he was stopped at a checkpoint.
"'Where are you going to?'" he recalled the soldiers asking him.
"I say, 'I'm going to Torit.' 'Where are you from?' I say, 'I'm from town.'
'So which tribe are you?' I say,'I'm Baria.' 'So why are you going to Torit
if you're Baria?'"
Then, Lugale said the soldiers told him they were going to arrest him. When
he asked them why, he said they told him it was because of his shopping
list, which they said was a list of people's names. They also said they were
taking his iPhone, which had pictures on it of the January 2011 referendum,
in which South Sudanese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Sudan.
Makuei expressed surprise when he was told the story of the referendum
pictures, but said Lugale probably had something else on his phone.
"How can you be prevented from carrying pictures of people who are
celebrating the referendum?" he asked.
"This cannot be accepted by a sober mind. He must have been carrying other
pictures which he knows. Otherwise, nobody will ever stop me from carrying
pictures of my celebration," the minister said.
Tired of being harassed
Lugale insisted that his version of the story was true. He said he
eventually fled Juba because he got tired of being stopped, harassed, and
having to pay kickbacks or hand over his belongings to soldiers at
checkpoints.
"Ah - you cannot be free, because there are so many checkpoints in the town.
There are soldiers there -- operations soldiers. They are there, they are
checking the cars," he said.
Karin Zeitvogel contributed to this report from Washington