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THE NASTY WAR: ORGANISED VIOLENCE DURING THE ANYA-NYA INSURGENCY IN SOUTH SUDAN, 1963–72
- ØYSTEIN H. ROLANDSEN, NICKI KINDERSLEY
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- The Journal of African History / Volume 60 / Issue 1 / March 2019
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- 20 May 2019, pp. 87-107
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- March 2019
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In 1963, unrest in Sudan's three southern provinces (today's South Sudan) escalated into a civil war between the government and the Anya-Nya rebellion. The subsequent eight years of violence has hitherto largely escaped scrutiny from academic researchers and has remained a subject of popular imagination and politicised narratives. This article demonstrates how this history can be explored with greater nuance, thereby establishing a local history of a postcolonial civil war. Focusing on the garrison town of Torit, our research reveals a localised and personalised rebellion, made up of a constellation of parochial armed groups. This new history also demonstrates how these parties built upon experiences from imperial conquest and colonial rule when entrenching violent wartime practices such as mass displacement and encampment, the raising of local militias and intelligence networks, and the deliberate starvation of civilians — all common methods in subsequent wars.
5 - The first civil war, 1963–1972
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 79-92
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Summary
The period 1963–72 has received inadequate attention in accounts of South Sudan's contemporary history. As a consequence, the personalities, events, and processes that plunged South Sudan into civil war, and contributed to its continuing for almost ten years, have been pushed into relative obscurity. In general overviews, some themes tend to be mentioned in passing: Southern involvement in the ousting of the Abboud regime in November 1964; the Round Table peace talks of March 1965; the endless fragmentation of political parties and rebel movements in exile in the period 1965–9; the military coup in 1969; the consolidation of the Anya-Nya rebel groups under Joseph Lagu; and, finally, the negotiations that culminated in the March 1972 Addis Ababa Peace Agreement. But a more coherent account of the period would explain the impact of civil war on South Sudan and the narrowing of the range of possible future relations between the region and the rest of the Sudanese polity.
1963–1964: the beginning of civil war
The beginning of organized diaspora politics, foremost in Uganda but also in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Congo, dates from 1962. We have seen that a growing stream of refugees to neighboring countries in the early 1960s included politicians, former government employees, and other “intellectuals.” Among them, the trio of Fr. Saturnino Lahure, Joseph Oduho, and William Deng stand out as leaders of the militant diaspora. In February 1962, they formed the Sudan African Closed District National Union (SACDNU), which in early 1963 changed its name to the less unwieldy Sudan African National Union (SANU). SANU was evidently forged in the same mold as contemporary anticolonial movements in other African countries – for example, the Kenya African National Union and Tanganyika African National Union – and its leaders sought to portray the Southern situation as one in which one colonial master had been exchanged for another. A demand for an independent South Sudan had already replaced the call for autonomy and federation within a united Sudan. Many former supporters of federalism had been radicalized by recent developments and become separatists in the process. Without any way of wielding political influence peacefully, they viewed armed rebellion against an increasingly repressive regime as their only option.
3 - The second Turkiyya, 1898–1953
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 32-64
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Summary
Like much of Europe's nineteenth-century global empire-building, the Anglo-Egyptian conquest in 1896–8 resulted from momentum. The fall of Khartoum to the Mahdi in 1885 had not brought about abandonment of the Sudan: Gordon had been sent to conduct its evacuation. During the decade that followed, officers of the British occupation in Egypt, collaborating with publishers in England, pressed to reconquer the Sudan. But when the British government finally sanctioned an advance, in 1896, it was not to “avenge Gordon” but to deflect the Mahdists from the beleaguered Italians in Eritrea. Thereafter, the campaign continued methodically until the decisive battle of Omdurman in September 1898, not in order to rescue the Sudanese from the fanatical “dervishes” but to stymie a French advance to the upper Nile. While Sudan, north and south, should, therefore, not be considered an “accidental” acquisition, it was almost incidental, in that what mattered to imperial strategists was the Nile rather than the territory – still less the people – of its watershed. The south of Sudan was but a necessary inconvenience.
The European colonial era was comparatively brief in Sudan: it was one of the last African territories taken under European rule and one of the first to shed it (in 1956). In the case of South Sudan, effective rule was even briefer, since the first two decades were spent gaining control of the territory. Nonetheless, the colonial regime, for all its shortcomings, fashioned governance structures and practices that have largely survived up to today. There is also little doubt that it was during the latter days of colonial rule that the notion of South Sudan as a nation gained a foothold there.
Sources for the study of the period are relatively copious but remain inadequate and skewed. Written material from the first quarter of the twentieth century is mostly “official,” uninformed, and concerned with discrete administrative problems of an apparently transient military occupation. Accounts by independent travelers, who anyway tended to follow established routes, are as always impressionistic; rarely did observer and observed (or governor and governed) speak the same language.
6 - Regional government: from one civil war to another, 1972–1983
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 93-104
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The Addis Ababa Agreement embodied the unprecedented decision that South Sudan was to have a parliament, a president, a cabinet, and an administration of Southerners. The politics surrounding the establishment and administration of the Southern Regional Government became the dominant theme of the ensuing period. The period 1972–83 later tended to be seen as a hiatus of calm during which the parties caught their breath before the next bout of warfare. Yet this was not a period of tranquility but one of “no peace no war.” The regional government was an elite project of a small class of politicians and administrators in Juba, and political tension, uncertainty, insecurity, repression, and violence continued to mar the everyday life of many South Sudanese.
Within five years of the Agreement, optimism had given way to fatalistic expectation of renewed war. It had soon become evident that autonomy was an illusion, that only a minimal amount of actual power would be vested in the regional government, and that a mere fraction of the promised economic transfers would ever reach Juba. Even more problematic was the anomaly of Southern democracy within a one-party state under military dictatorship – a system echoed later in the vexed relations between Beijing and Hong Kong. In essence, the success of the Addis Ababa Agreement depended almost entirely on the ability and willingness of President Nimeiri to execute it. The period 1980–3 witnessed a crash in slow motion: southerners saw impending disaster but were unable to prevent it.
It would later become clear, however, that this era of regional government was crucial in the making of independent South Sudan. Despite all that came after, it gave proof that autonomy of the type proffered at Addis Ababa was unworkable and thus prepared the ground for the CPA in 2005. Although the flimsiness of the Addis Ababa arrangements and the disappointments related to its implementation – “too many agreements dishonored” – have been presented as instructive, at a more fundamental level we may discern in this period of institutional politics the shaping of South Sudan as a polity.
Index
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 168-171
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9 - Making unity impossible, 2002–2011
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 133-150
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Summary
The Sudanese civil war was arguably over by the end of 2002. Two more years of intense negotiations ensued before the signing of the CPA in January 2005. But the difficult compromises and commitment to peace were made in 2002, first in the Machakos Protocol and later with a Memorandum of Understanding on the cessation of hostilities.
Retrospective accounts evoke a sense of inevitability in South Sudan's independence. But the decade after 2002 was a period of transition, of temporality and intermittent negotiation, first over the conditions for peace and then to avoid a new war. It was difficult later to appreciate the frailty of the peace process, which depended on favorable alignment of ever-shifting factors and strategies, most of which were beyond the control of South Sudanese politicians. It was a decade of uncertainty, distrust, and unpredictability, when the parties seemed ready at any time to turn the tables if chance allowed or their own political or physical survival was threatened. And it was a period when the shadow of war in Darfur demonstrated both the limits of the peace process and the depth of the quagmire in which the Sudanese polity was stuck.
Mustering the will to compromise
In 2000–1, the SPLM/A consolidated its position by absorbing or eliminating other armed groups and negotiating treaties with military and political opponents of the regime in the North. New offensives in Raga, Gogrial, Kapoeta, and southern Blue Nile demonstrated the Movement's ability and willingness to continue fighting. Meanwhile, Khartoum focused both its military and political efforts on areas where oil production had begun. By keeping Paulino Matip, the warlord of western upper Nile, in the fold, the regime maintained control over the Unity oil fields; Lam Akol and Gabriel Tangynia continued to operate around Malakal and Melut, and Khartoum retained the support of Baggara Arabs north of the border. The NIF – soon to be retitled the National Congress Party (NCP) – narrowed its base by parting with Hasan al-Turabi and his radical Islamist rhetoric but made the regime more palatable internationally. Relations with neighboring countries also improved, and President Bashir become an active player on the regional scene.
Bibliographical essay
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 160-167
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4 - The curse of colonial continuity, 1953–1963
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 65-78
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Summary
The years from 1953 to 1963 witnessed the transition from colonial rule to independence and escalating tension and violence in South Sudan. This was also a period of significant social and economic change. Despite the shift to Sudanese leadership, the new rulers perpetuated the colonial system of governance, which proved inflexible when operated by a national elite originating from the central Nile valley. In the early 1950s, a larger segment of South Sudanese entered the domain of modern politics in earnest. Southern politics itself was affected by the upsurge in nationalism and anticolonialism spreading across the African continent, and by the Cold War competition between the USA and the USSR. Within this context, South Sudanese nationalism became a narrative of marginalization, repression, resistance, broken promises and of South Sudan's distinctiveness and need for special constitutional arrangements.
The beginning of modern politics and the emergence of South Sudanese nationalism
The process of dismantling the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was accelerated by the combined impact of the Free Officers’ coup in Egypt in 1952, an increasingly articulate and impatient Sudanese educated elite, and a growing British realization that European imperialism in Africa was on the wane. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed “the second colonization,” whereby the British pursued state-led social and economic development while preparing national elites for self-government. Motivated by the lack of revenue from the three southern Sudanese provinces and concern over the political legacy of its care-and-maintenance regime there, the Condominium government's policy of economic and social development would prove too little and too late. The very unevenness of that policy however, made more notable such innovations as the Rumbek Secondary School, which incubated a political elite. Very little of the plan for economic development had been implemented by the time of Sudanisation, as we have seen, for example, in the fate of the Zande Scheme. In this the colonial regime set the unfortunate tone for postindependence development efforts in the South.
The conclusion that “the South” had, at the Juba Conference of 1947, “cast their lot” to remain part of a united Sudan would have a prominent position in historical narratives of South Sudan.
Chronology
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 04 July 2016, pp ix-xv
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Contents
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp v-vi
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7 - Eclipsed by war, 1983–1991
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 105-119
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The second civil war dominated South Sudan's history during the period 1983–91. Since the late 1970s, groups of insurgents calling themselves Anya-Nya2 had already been operating in some parts of Bahr al-Ghazal and Upper Nile provinces. By the early 1980s, the political order instituted by the Addis Ababa Agreement had all but collapsed. Unrest and protests reached unprecedented levels and large swaths of the south were simmering with insecurity and violence. The new war, which started in 1983, was radically different from the first. Instead of southern secession, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) advocated a reformed, secular and democratic Sudan. Compared to the Anya-Nya of the first war, the SPLM/A was also bigger, better coordinated, and more politically savvy. It found allies elsewhere in Sudan and managed to take the fight to the north. The new war was also more intense and resulted in large-scale destruction and displacement. The ensuing humanitarian crises and developments in international politics resulted in unprecedented foreign involvement.
Return to civil war in South Sudan
Violence in and around the town of Bor on May 16, 1983, marked the beginning of the second civil war. On that day the government decided to use force to end a mutiny which had already been under way since March because the soldiers there, all former Anya-Nya, had gone unpaid owing to allegations of corruption. This crisis was accompanied by renewed rumors that all former Anya-Nya were to be transferred north. A force sent from Juba clashed with the Bor garrison. The mutineers fled to Ethiopia and established themselves in bases at Itang, Bonga, and Dimma. The garrisons of Ayod, Waat, Boma, and Pochalla went with them. The future leader of the SPLM/A, John Garang de Mabior, was already in Bor – allegedly on leave. He was part of an underground network already planning a new uprising on August 18, the anniversary of the 1955 Torit Mutiny. Among other leaders were Kerubino Kwanjin Bol, William Nyoun, Arok Thon Arok, Joseph Oduho, Salva Kiir, Martin Manyiel, and Nyachigak Ng'achiluk (who was killed in 1984). All except Oduho were military officers.
10 - Independent South Sudan
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 151-159
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Summary
South Sudan became independent on July 9, 2011, six-and-a-half years after the signing of the CPA and almost ten years after the Machakos Protocol. The event was celebrated with a remarkable assembly of statesmen, politicians, and celebrities. Footage of ecstatic Southerners traveled across the globe. But while secession was symbolically important, independence proved to be a process rather than a single event, one that had started decades earlier and has continued since 2011. Upon independence, the government of South Sudan was embroiled in a multitude of crises. Sudan and South Sudan almost went to war during negotiations over the terms of secession; oil production stopped and battles were fought. Negotiations continued until early 2013, and central issues were unresolved when a power struggle within the SPLM/A became the focus of attention. Following a government crisis in the summer, political tension escalated and, after an ultimatum from the internal opposition, exploded into large-scale violence in mid December. Civil war had returned to South Sudan. The familiar pattern of fighting, destruction, displacement, and negotiations ensued. Foreign observers were not alone in wondering whether independence had been a mistake and if the new state would ever function.
From referendum to independence: a slow and painful divorce
Although the Peace Agreement had opened the way for autonomous governance structures, in July 2011, much remained to be done to establish a sovereign state. During the summer of 2010, the parties agreed to a High Level Panel of the African Union, led by Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president, to facilitate post-Agreement arrangements; IGAD was sidelined. The policy of “making unity attractive,” vigorously policed by the NCP, had meant that even discussing terms of secession awaited the referendum in January 2011. This gave the leaders of South Sudan less than six months to prepare for sovereignty and to negotiate terms with Khartoum. Developments along the border added to the burden.
Abyei was tense. If the referendum over its future had taken place as intended, there is no doubt that the permanent residents, the Ngok Dinka, would have voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining South Sudan, and the nomadic Misseriya – who seasonally used the land and demanded a vote – would have opted for Sudan.
Map
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp xviii-xx
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List of abbreviations and Arabic terms
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 04 July 2016, pp xvi-xvii
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2 - Ivory and slaves: the nineteenth century
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp 10-31
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Summary
The history of nineteenth-century South Sudan remains one of foreign encounters with indigenous peoples. This is the period of the great explorers, when the African continent was first traversed and then conquered. Starting decades earlier than the European powers’ colonial race, Egypt's imperial ambitions in South Sudan were, in this initial phase, primarily focused on the slave trade and other kinds of commerce. Later, the feverish hunt for the source of the White Nile even spurred the rulers of Egypt, and eventually Egypt's designs were geared toward territorial dominance and global prestige. When Egypt was evicted by the Mahdi in the early 1880s, the ramshackle government systems around its zaribas (Arabic: “enclosures”), slave-and-ivory trading posts, also collapsed. Mahdist rule in the South was weak, and when the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was established in 1899, it faced the task of reconquering South Sudan.
Early contact
Although the slave trade of the nineteenth century is often seen as the beginning of the South's vexed contacts with the “outside world,” the origins of that trade, and an untold history of peaceful trade and migration, are much older. Trade in African slaves dates from ancient times. That the Sharia forbids enslavement of Muslims was subsequently an important factor in the African trade (as it was elsewhere on the frontiers of Islam). Demand locally, in northern Sudan, and in the Ottoman Empire, stimulated slave-raiding southward, from Kordofan and Darfur and the Blue Nile. Egyptian expansion up the White Nile was unattractive owing to its remoteness, the climate, the natural barrier of the sudd, and hostile relations with people living along the river.
The Sudan's other historic exports included gold, basketry and mats, ostrich feathers, gum, animals, and animal products, of which by far the most important was ivory. Estimates vary, but in the late eighteenth century, the number of slaves sent to Egypt could reach several thousand a year; routes were insecure. As elsewhere in Africa, non-Muslim people of the borderlands were themselves subject to slave-raiding from the north or became middlemen through raiding or trading with peoples to their south.
Preface
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016, pp vii-viii
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A History of South Sudan addresses several audiences and a wide variety of issues. We have chosen a conventional chronological approach, but a number of themes recur. Above all, we aim to illuminate two questions in the history of this new country: How did South Sudan become a political and administrative entity? And why did it separate from Sudan?
Answering these questions requires a new look at standard versions, for the historiography of South Sudan reflects entrenched and often diametrically opposed political views. Some nationalists’ mission to create a South Sudanese national identity has led to the invention of a “natural” and timeless political and cultural unit. But we know remarkably little about what most people even today think it means to be South Sudanese. Although this book is not a “history of an idea,” we examine some processes and events that contributed to shaping one. When South Sudanese voted, in January 2011, the proffered alternative to separation from Sudan was confederation and considerable autonomy: South Sudan would be recognized as a political and administrative unit within Sudan. Yet the vote went overwhelmingly for independence. How deep, and with what particular ramifications, was the sentiment for separation?
After all, the history of South Sudan over the past two centuries is of steadily increasing interaction between its peoples and the outside world. And since the mid-twentieth century, South Sudanese have migrated (or fled) in millions to Sudan, to neighboring countries, and beyond. Today, there are South Sudanese communities in most corners of the world. Some have impacted the places to which they have moved; many have returned to South Sudan with new allies and ideas. Thus, patterns of interaction have varied considerably over time and from place to place. So also have South Sudanese responses, their motives, and the opportunities for exchange and transformation that interaction opened up. This book aims to present at least broad outlines of how these opportunities came about and to what uses South Sudanese put them in pursuit of their own goals.
The term “South Sudan” has also become associated with war and human suffering.
1 - Introduction: the land and peoples of the upper Nile
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 05 June 2016
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The name
“Sudan” abbreviates Bilad al-Sudan or “Land of the Blacks,” the Arabic term that medieval geographers applied to the whole sub-Saharan belt. In the nineteenth century, “the Sudan” (or “Soudan”) became shorthand for the Nilotic and adjacent lands of that broad belt. The term was adopted by successive colonial regimes and the Khartoum-centered nationalist movement that engineered the country's independence in 1956. During the civil wars that followed, various names were mooted for an imagined Southern Sudanese state; by the turn of the twenty-first century, the cacophonous but historically defensible name of “South Sudan” had won wide acceptance and is used officially in the Republic of South Sudan.
The geographic setting
Geography is destiny. Before the advent of modern transport, the lands of South Sudan were among the most remote on the planet. Like Amazonia, the basin of the upper Nile and its main tributary, the Bahr al-Ghazal, would seem from a first glance at a map to provide at least seasonal highways into the interior. But between those regions and the African coasts lay many hundreds of miles of difficult terrain. Until the modern era, moreover, the known resources of South Sudan, like those of the American Great Plains or the Australian outback, were insufficiently portable to excite outsiders. Deserts to the north, mountains to the east, and the vast forests of the Congo Basin to the west reciprocally limited the products and effects of long-distance trade. Horses, donkeys, and camels did not flourish there, and food was not easily stored beyond a season. Even today, when air travel and mobile phones mock distance, South Sudan hardly seems “on the way” to anywhere else and remains a geographical dead end.
The climate of South Sudan is tropical. The rainy season is between April/May and November. The dominant geographical feature is the White Nile and its tributaries, the most important of which are the Bahr al-Ghazal (“River of the Gazelle”) and the Sobat, each with many tributaries of its own. Seen as a whole, South Sudan resembles a titanic soup plate, tilted slightly northward; much of the interior is an enormous floodplain.
Frontmatter
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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8 - Factional politics, 1991–2001
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, Peace Research Institute Oslo, M. W. Daly
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- A History of South Sudan
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- 04 July 2016, pp 120-132
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Summary
The factionalism of Southern politics had continued during the 1980s, but an internal split of the SPLM/A in August 1991 proved militarily and politically disastrous, and it gave the Islamist regime in Khartoum new breathing room. Rather than exploiting this opportunity, however, the government estranged Sudan's neighbors, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. This in turn gave John Garang the opportunity to establish links with those states, to regroup and to regain the military initiative. Toward the end of the decade, the military status quo ante had apparently been restored. But the political impact of violent factionalism was fundamental and has continued to this day, with disastrous results. The split forced the SPLM/A onto a new political course whereby self-determination for South Sudan became a prominent part of the Movement's platform. Meanwhile, the split itself and the end of the SPLM's Cold War attachments ensured the continuation and institutionalization of humanitarian aid to rebel-controlled areas, and in many ways this shaped South Sudan's current constellation of foreign relations.
Their darkest hour: internal factionalism in the South
On August 28, 1991, Riek Machar, Lam Akol, and Gordon Kong radioed from the small town of Nasir, in upper Nile, to all SPLM/A units: “Why John Garang must go now.” In addition to demanding a leadership change, the trio called for reform of the SPLM/A. They faulted Garang for violations of human rights and stifling internal democracy. Perhaps most controversially, they wanted the SPLM/A to fight for an independent South Sudan rather than a reformed Sudan. The dissenters came to be known as the “Nasir-faction” or “SPLM/A Nasir,” but their initial goal was to take control of the entire Movement, not to set up a rival. They needed allies from the Bahr al-Ghazal and Equatoria, where they hoped that resentment of the “Bor Dinka” would sway rebel commanders to support their coup. Although they later gained some ground in these provinces, the core area of the Nasir faction was today's Greater upper Nile region (the states of Jonglei, Upper Nile, and Unity).
The background and motivation for the “Nasir Declaration” have been hotly debated.
A History of South Sudan
- From Slavery to Independence
- Øystein H. Rolandsen, M. W. Daly
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- 05 June 2016
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- 04 July 2016
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South Sudan is the world's youngest independent country. Established in 2011 after two wars, South Sudan has since reverted to a state of devastating civil strife. This book provides a general history of the new country, from the arrival of Turco-Egyptian explorers in Upper Nile, the turbulence of the Mahdist revolutionary period, the chaos of the 'Scramble for Africa', during which the South was prey to European and African adventurers and empire builders, to the Anglo-Egyptian colonial era. Special attention is paid to the period since Sudanese independence in 1956, when Southern disaffection grew into outright war, from the 1960s to 1972, and from 1983 until the Comprehensive Peace of 2005, and to the transition to South Sudan's independence. The book concludes with coverage of events since then, which since December 2013 have assumed the character of civil war, and with insights into what the future might hold.