Why is there a crisis in South Sudan now?

You might well wonder how likely it was that a country which had been wracked by civil war for some 40 years, with the death (millions), the destruction, and the disorder this implies, would suddenly turn into a stable, happy place with the signing of a peace deal. In the event, this troubled past, combined with ethnic conflict, led to continuing difficulties post-independence.

In South Sudan’s initial government, the post of President was held by Salva Kiir, a member of the Dinka, the country’s largest ethnic group (36%), while First Vice President fell to Reik Machar, a member of the second-largest group (16%), the Nuer. Anyone who can remember back to Zimbabwe’s independence, or to the Rwanda crisis (or, hey, even to the US-installed Iraqi government) might have wondered if this arrangement would last. It did not. In mid-2013, Kiir dismissed Machar from the government, and in December of that year, fighting broke out in the SPLA barracks in the capital, Juba. (For one journalist’s very well written account of this conflict and of the civil war that followed, see Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, https://smile.amazon.com/Next-Time-They%C2%92ll-Come-Count/dp/1608466485/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1466602319&sr=8-3&keywords=south+sudan+books.)

The initial fighting among army factions almost immediately spilled out of the barracks and onto the streets . Over the next days, weeks, and months, ethnic Dinka combatants in Juba and other locations slaughtered ethnic Nuers – soldiers, civilians, men, women, children, the elderly; it seems not to have mattered. Meanwhile, in predominantly Nuer regions, including the city of Bor, ethnic Nuer did the same to ethnic Dinka. Streets were periodically lined with bodies; bands of fighters with shifting allegiances took and lost and re-took towns; atrocities of every kind were committed; and terrorized civilians tried, often unsuccessfully, to stay out of harm’s way, eventually turning various UN compounds in the country into vast refugee encampments of 100,000 or more. Estimates of deaths during the conflict range from 50,000 to 300,000, and upwards of 2,300,000 people – perhaps 20% of the country’s population – are refugees or internally displaced. Although peace talks in Kenya were ongoing almost from the beginning of the conflict, they remained fruitless for a long time. A series of ceasefires were signed and then broken, sometimes only hours later. Finally, however, in August of 2015, an agreement was signed that, up till now at least, has held.

The end result? In the new unity government, Kiir is President, Machar is First Vice President. One might well ask what all that fighting was for….

(I should note that other intra-community tensions, often described in ethnic terms, have been common at many times in South Sudanese history – for example, Nuer/Merle conflict in Jonglei State (see https://smile.amazon.com/South-Sudan-Liberation-Edward-Thomas-ebook/dp/B00RVXT62W/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1467318680&sr=8-2&keywords=south+sudan#nav-subnav). These conflicts didn’t all begin in 2013, and not all of them have been ended by the peace agreement.)

What problems has all this left South Sudan with today? I’ll try to summarize some of them in my next post.