Our stone wall-of-liberation harder than most

Comparing suffering of South Sudanese liberators with those of other countries

Our stone wall-of-liberation harder than most

With Opoka Christopher Arop

I have often wondered what has made us a very proud people as South Sudanese when we were on our journey to independence. The whole world appeared on our side, and we seemed a blessed and noble people deserving of a nation-state. Was it out of pity for our suffering, was it a collective hope for a better life for South Sudanese, and was it an orchestrated design to reap from the spoils of our independence? These are just some of the questions swirling in my mind as I watch my country crumble with every rising and setting sun!

In other countries, when life becomes very hard, citizens often look at the suffering of gone and living liberators for consolation. They look at the suffering of the liberators, they remember the stories of how the liberators endured the most inhumane tortures, imprisonment, beating, religious, political, racial, economic and social injustices of all magnitudes; and the people say to themselves in consolation, that if they [freedom fighters] could do it when they were bound with chains and in a country where they were second class citizens, “we surely can survive our turmoil, because above everything else, we have our own country and we are a free people”.

I have been reading about the conflict in my country, much of which is a deliberately and neatly hidden history in which the purported liberators’ hands are awash in blood and money. South Sudan’s civil wars have been characterized by conflicts within conflicts, assaults on civilians, violent ethnic, religious and factional fighting, and serious problems of identity and cultural survival. The systematic abuse of human rights by both warring parties was the most devastating effect across the country. Arbitrary assassinations and arrests, torture, forced relocation, dispossession, particularly of land and cattle, enslavement of human beings, forced conversion, rape, and forced recruitment into the government and rebel armies are prevalent.

[The above paragraph has simply been edited by replacing the words Sudan with South Sudan, and everything is befitting. Yet the paragraph in its entirety is a direct quotation from a book “After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan” written by Regassa Bayissa Sima and edited by Elke Grawert, ‘the Impact of the Southern Sudan refugee movements on the society of Gambella Region’.]

Many people I have met and discussed the future of our country with have simply resigned to the indignant discomfort of “there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel other than an all out violence” because they say, there are no exemplary liberators who can comfort the people of South Sudan. My peculiar interest has been with a search for many of the so-called liberation fighters of South Sudan. I have decided to restrict my definition of liberators specifically to those that endured severe torture at South Sudan’s enemies, real or imagined, and especially those that were tortured, abused, and finally killed at the hands of the [again] real or imagined enemy.

By this criterion, I have all of a sudden eliminated most of the loud-mouthed “comrades” who claim to have delivered South Sudanese from all evil. By this rule, I seem to have also deleted late Dr. John Garang, who died [or may have been killed by other designs] in the tragic helicopter crash in New Kush, along the border with North Eastern Uganda. I have also all but eliminated the likes of the ‘Three Martins”, whom I here propose as the likely proponents of real suffering toward which South Sudanese may lean.

Deliberately and arbitrarily killed by the SPLA-Mainstream: Martin Majier Gai was born in 1941 and was married with nine children. He led a distinguished career as a prominent judge and leading Dinka politician in southern Sudan. Martin Majier Gai was a founding member of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), an armed opposition group which has been fighting a bitter civil war in the south of Sudan against the government since 1983.

 

However, Martin Majier Gai is reported to have been critical of the SPLA's policies under the leadership of John Garang de Mabior. Martin Majier Gai's home area was southern Bor, one of the heartlands of the SPLA. His popularity in that area meant that his disagreements over policy represented a threat to the SPLA leadership.

 

As a result, in 1985 he was arrested in Ethiopia where at that time the SPLA, supported by the Ethiopian government of Mengistu Haile Mariam had its main base. He remained in various SPLA detention camps, first in Ethiopia until the fall of the Mengistu government in 1991, and then in southern Sudan, for seven years.

 

During his years in SPLA custody, Martin Majier Gai was never charged or tried. Although married with nine children, his family was not allowed to visit him. He was also denied access to medical treatment.

 

In September 1992, Martin Majier Gai was released from detention, but his freedom of movement was restricted to the town of Kaya. In December 1992 or January 1993, he was again taken into custody by the SPLA-Mainstream faction, reportedly because he was suspected of leading a plot against the SPLA-Mainstream leadership. Shortly afterwards he was killed.

 

The SPLA-Mainstream has claimed that he and two other detainees were shot while trying to escape. Other reports suggest that they were deliberately and arbitrarily killed by the SPLA-Mainstream, either in January or April 1993.

I have looked among the so called warring parties to find somebody that comes close to Justice Martin Majier Gai, and found none. I have studied the history of the so called liberators enjoying the spoils of our divorce from Sudan and only found greedy, self-loathing egomaniacs hell-bent on destroying the country, because they in their narrow-minded thinking, assume that the loot and subsequent investments in real-estates, banking, industry etc in East Africa and beyond will save them and their sons, daughters, wives, brothers, uncles and aunts alike; from the wrath of a people claiming their country [destroyed and battered as it may be].

It is easy to make some conclusions by reading about the suffering of persons such as Martin Majier Gai and others such as Joseph Oduho who were killed in the hands and by the orders of our very own brands of liberators.

The casual approach to the peace talks and our country’s predicament was summed up by commentator Charles Onyango-Obbo who pointed out that the luxury hotels in which the talks were hosted regularly ran out of whisky and the delegates were claiming a daily per diem of $250 [a very low figure by South Sudanese standards, and is said to be far higher, with many of the security detail for senior delegates earning as little as $650 a day] to attend talks aimed at bringing peace to their own country.

It has been my thinking that our stone wall of liberation couldn’t have been harder than those of most in the region. So I looked up the history of liberation in Eritrea, a country that was once like us, the youngest nation in the world. The official birth of Eritrea on 24 May, 1993 followed a vote by 99.81 percent of the 3.3 million population for independence from Ethiopia in a referendum, and the early years went well.

The economy grew steadily and the Marxist liberation fighters turned into politicians who appeared to a have a genuine commitment to forming a constitution and introducing democracy. Private newspapers flourished and with corruption almost non-existent President Issayas Afewerki was lauded as one of a new generation of African leaders alongside Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi.

In 1998, a two-year border conflict, again with Ethiopia, shattered the heady optimism. A dispute over the dusty village of Badme left 70,000 dead and transformed Eritrea's political landscape. Plans for a constitution were frozen and democracy postponed.

Eleven senior politicians who signed a critical letter to the President were detained in September 2001 with 10 senior journalists who ran the now-banned private press. The President says these detainees are “traitors”, “spies” and agents of Ethiopia. None of them have faced trial.

With the tightening of political control came restrictions on personal freedom. The 18-month national service has for many become open-ended, with exit visas needed for a young Eritrean to leave the country.

I now conclude that South Sudan is fast becoming a worse replica of Eritrea. We have a constitution review process whose architects had all the good intentions, but the country was already dead. We have an army of hearty liberators, whose enthusiasm was soon swallowed by greed that was fuelled a presidential loyalty reward system that was punctuated by unabated tribalism, corruption and abuse of citizen’s human rights and ownership of property.

This disillusion juncture in our quest for lasting peace is a reality far more resolute in its ferocity than the jailed, tortured and killed Eritrean nationalists. Our nationalists are the ones jailing, torturing and killing us in South Sudan. A hard-wall indeed!