For too long, South Sudan’s army has not performed its primary function, safeguarding its citizens. Spirals of defections and divisions that pre-date its birth have intensified the 14-month civil war in the world’s youngest nation. 

 

In December, at the time of writing, more than 600,000 refugees had fled into neighbouring Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan and Uganda, with 100 refugees entering Ethiopia every day, according to UN estimates. A few months before, in September, a new rebel movement was born, the so-called “National Democratic Front” (NDF). It aims to “unite all the fighting groups in South Sudan” and overthrow the regime of the country’s president, Salva Kiir, according to its manifesto. 

 

The NDF may not be a serious threat to Mr Kiir and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). But its gripes—rampant corruption, insecurity, tribalism and nepotism—most certainly are. 

 

How did a nation that held such high hopes at its birth sink into this mess? The clues lie in a split that had been tearing apart the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the ruling party that was always bound to the SPLA.     

 

“When a president has been in power for a long time, it becomes inevitable that a new generation arises,” said Riek Machar, then Mr Kiir’s vice-president, in a now-infamous interview with the UK’s Guardian newspaper on July 4th 2013. “It is a natural process, it is best to move that way. It is not that the incumbent is at all bad.”

 

Mr Kiir may not have been “at all bad”, but he knew an impending palace coup when he saw one. On July 8th 2013 he removed Taban Deng, Mr Machar’s long-time ally, from his post as governor of South Sudan’s oil-rich Unity State. On July 24th he sacked Mr Machar and the rest of the cabinet. South Sudan, which had only just celebrated its second birthday, appeared to be back in the quagmire that from 1983 to 2005 had served as the battleground for post-colonial Africa’s longest civil war.

 

For foreign diplomats and aid workers stationed in Juba, the capital, the most urgent question was this: who controlled the army? There were no signs of an increased military presence on Juba’s streets immediately after the July 24th announcement. But it did not augur well that Mr Kiir had also fired 17 police brigadiers. The UN—aware that the army was an unholy mélange of former civil war militias, yet still the country’s ultimate power broker—advised its staff to remain indoors. 

 

In the months preceding the split, Juba’s army was spread thin, fighting a rebel group in north-eastern Jonglei State and combating a nationwide increase in intertribal violence. Meanwhile in May 2013, Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, warned that he would shut off the cross-border oil pipelines (the only route out for landlocked South Sudan’s oil, which represented 98% of its export revenues) unless Juba stopped supporting rebels hostile to Khartoum. What was going on? Were these threads linked?

 

Trying to unravel this complex web, my sources in Juba turned to history, specifically how the key characters in the July 2013 SPLM split behaved in the aftermath of a 1991 rupture. They started with Mr Machar, the chief dissenting figure in both.

 

The son of a Nuer chief from Leer, Western Upper Nile (modern-day Unity State), Mr Machar joined the SPLM/SPLA in 1984, within a year of the movement’s founding. Under the command of John Garang, who was also the political head of the SPLM, the SPLA had the backing of Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam. The Ethiopian despot saw this as an opportunity to hit back at Khartoum for Sudan’s support of Eritrean rebels.

 

The alliance proved fruitful. Thanks to Mr Mengistu, Mr Garang won out against his rivals. His dream of a reformed and united Sudan held sway as the driving vision of the SPLA. He would remain unchallenged until 1991, when Meles Zenawi rode into Addis Ababa on a tank and unseated Mr Mengistu. 

 

Taking courage from Mr Meles, and no doubt grateful to the Ethiopian for weakening his boss’s position, Mr Machar led a coup against Mr Garang in August 1991—a mainly Nuer insurrection against the Dinka leader. The coup attempt failed. But Mr Machar would break away to form a splinter group called SPLA-Nasir, named after the town close to the Ethiopian border where it was based. These pretenders to the throne would also rally behind the political cause of southern independence.

 

For all his bluster about “independence”, it came to light in a 2003 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report that Mr Machar had been covertly relying on the funding and materiel of the National Islamic Front (NIF), Khartoum’s ruling party, from the month of SPLA-Nasir’s inception. 

 

Whereas Mr Garang’s SPLA had attempted to disrupt the oil industry, Mr Machar had offered the NIF exactly what it wanted: control of the oil-rich regions of Western Upper Nile, according to the HRW report. 

 

In 1997, after acting as the key southern signatory to the Khartoum Peace Agreement, Mr Machar was rewarded with a string of new titles: president of the Southern States Coordinating Council, assistant to Mr al-Bashir, head of the new political party, United Democratic Salvation Front, and commander-in-chief of Khartoum’s brand-new military arm, the South Sudan Defence Force. 

 

“His failure to stem the government’s forced displacement of civilians from Western Upper Nile/Unity State,” noted the abovementioned report, “ended up turning the Nuer against his leadership and eventually led to his belated resignation from government and attempt to recreate his army in the south in 2000 as the Sudan People’s Democratic Forces (2000-2002).”

 

Messrs Machar and Garang signed an agreement in January 2002 and merged their forces, with Mr Machar “receiving a leadership position in the SPLA”, according to the HRW report.

 

Twelve years later, in October 2014 alleged top-secret Sudanese state documents (leaked to South Sudanese and foreign journalists) appeared to confirm suspicions that Mr Machar’s subsequent stance of reconciliation had never been anything more than posturing. 

 

The minutes of a meeting purportedly held on August 31st 2014 in Khartoum made a damning case. As signed off by the security and military officials present, the “South Sudan” item on the agenda was dealt with as follows: “Assistance to Riek’s rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition will increase and include tanks, artillery, intelligence and logistical training, as requested, said the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” The “explicit aim [of the National Congress Party, the former NIF] is a federal state of Greater Upper Nile—a bid to regain the oilfields and to block the SPLM-North’s route southwards.” 

 

Khartoum denied that the document was real, but London-based journal Africa Confidential disagreed and deemed it probably authentic, based on the testimony of Sudanese politicians and bureaucrats. Despite his active participation in the all-important 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and his display of grief following Mr Garang’s untimely death, Mr Machar appeared as two-faced as ever.  

 

It was all there in summary: the acronyms that had spun like slots to define Mr Machar’s various rebel armies had now landed on “Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in Opposition”; Mr Deng had remained Mr Machar’s most loyal henchman; Khartoum had remained steadfast in its love for the oilfields of old Western Upper Nile; and the southern Sudanese rebels that had found themselves north of the border after the July 2011 declaration of independence were now called “SPLM-North”.   

 

As for Mr Kiir, my sources in Juba were quick to recall that even if his history was not as colourful as Mr Machar’s, he was not beyond reproach. Mr Garang’s long-time deputy, Mr Kiir is today the commander-in-chief of a national army accused by HRW of grave human rights abuses. The second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005) claimed a death toll, when accounting for famine and disease, of 2m people, a number neither Western NGOs nor the SPLM dispute. The current war, if sanity does not prevail, may well go the same way. 

 

Or it could be even worse. The difference between the SPLA then and the SPLA now is that it is no longer a liberation movement but an official national army. “Forces loyal to Kiir” is simply a euphemism for Dinka soldiers. US Secretary of State John Kerry used the phrase “possible genocide” as late as May 2014. While that has not come to pass, it may yet if Khartoum’s hawks have their way. 

 

“This year the Sudan People’s Army…managed to cultivate large areas in South Kordofan State,” said General Siddiig Aamir, Sudan’s director of military intelligence and security, suggest the minutes from the abovementioned August 2014 meeting. “We must not allow them to harvest these crops…Good harvest means supplies to the war effort. We must starve them, so that commanders and civilians desert them and we recruit the deserters to use them in the war to defeat the rebels.”

 

Eric Reeves, a researcher and advocate with deep expertise on the region, says: “It will be civilians—primarily children, women, and the elderly—who will suffer most from this destruction of food supplies.” Therein lies the SPLA’s most tragic mistake: they have laid themselves open to agendas beyond their control.