Our wars are elite, but the fighters can’t tell

Elite wars, same uninformed fighters

Our wars are elite, but the fighters can’t tell

By Opoka Christopher Arop

It is almost five years since I read a piece by Amal Hassan Fadlalla that inspired me to start writing for a certain specific audience. At the time, I held great admiration for East African writers, little did I realize back home talent was brewing and simmering.

More recently however I came across a quotation by yet another great South Sudanese writer, Taban Lo Liyong: “Don’t make your book so simple that everybody will easily understand it. Let them labor to understand it as you labored in writing it.”

I have started with this prelude, because many people have written asking that I make my writing simpler. I have taken their concerns on the chin, however, my gut feeling is that there are some people out there who embrace my writing and are ever thirsty for more.

Here I start: Whenever we hear about war and conflict in Africa, the perplexing response often begins with polarized conclusions, salient among them ethnicity and tribalism.

This simplistic explanation allows for a reductionist interpretation of African conflicts and their root causes, and often leads to inaccurate responses from the international community. This was the case for Rwanda, Congo, Darfur, and currently in the Central African Republic, Mali, and South Sudan.

It must be understood that ethnicity is not a bad word and it is not an African predisposition: We are all ethnic at heart. Need I add; ethnicity should not be synonymous with Dinka and Nuer as has been the case with some simplistic approaches to our theatre of tribalism.

Ethnicity refers to social identification with a larger community (or with a tribe, the word that anthropologists are reluctant to employ). In many African societies, these communities are organized according to kinship ties or other affinities, belonging to ancestral lands. This parallels our intellectual understanding of nationalism, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Our government made the same mistake made by colonialists when at independence other communities were lumped together randomly under the national rubric in a bid to nationalize their nationalist agenda, a false message that all South Sudanese belong anywhere in South Sudan.

The type of governance that invests in all members of the nation, regardless of any social differentiation, failed to manifest during this period, has failed during the Comprehensive Peace Agreement’s transitional period and still fails today three years into our independence.

There are many infrastructural, economic, and political reasons for this inability to realize such national vision, but poignant among them is elite despotism and adherence to narrow ideological projects. With more exclusion than inclusion in the imagined national project, the result is, unsurprisingly, ‘elite wars.’

Instead of crying ethnicity, we need to shift focus to the mobilization and militarization of ethnicities at both the national and state levels. Conflicts in Africa are not solely tribal matters; rather, they involve complex political questions.

I beg to skip our history with the Sudan, avoid the CPA as a whole and look at our post-independence scenario. If we had failed to address reasons for the war with our northern brothers and opted for secession, why were we naïve to think that things would be all roses and smiles when we became independent, when had we made no significant attempts to address our own disunity?

Indeed, today people will quickly rejoice at the signing of an agreement between President Salva and his former Vice President Dr. Riek Machar. But it will not be a celebration far too soon? Our current Vice President James Wani Igga has found the position sweet, and his backers are not ready to relinquish it any time soon. President Kiir too found the position sweet; otherwise, being the military commander of class he is, I assumed he was temporarily nominated due to the tragic death of Dr. John Garang and would sooner vacate the post for a more experienced statesman.

So why are we still having wars three years into our independence? Note the choice of my words: these are WARS, not simply “genocides” or “ethnic cleansings” committed by villains against victims, or Nuer against Dinka. Because ‘wars of visions,’ Francis Deng taught his students - like famines - are genocidal.

In the context of war, there is no nation; there is death, rape, and chaos. The outcome of galvanizing ethnicities is horrific for the South Sudanese nation after December 2013: first in Juba, then in Bor, Malakal and Bentui.

What we managed to achieve through a long, tedious, and costly process of independence is a ‘fragment-nation.’ A ‘fragment-nation’ emerges when we stop thinking nation, and begin sinking deeper into the pitfalls of ethnic and racial divisions.

However, we must confront the ‘fragment-nation’ of South Sudan with a better strategy, a better language, and empowering, pro-nation narratives in all the ten states that reconcile ethnic and political divisions.

To reconstruct the nation and heal incurred grievances, we must first learn the A-B-C’s of avoiding the fragmentation of the national project. Here are top three recommendations proposed by Amal Hassan Fadlalla: Abide by the political process, Be impartial and allow for meaningful Civil society participation.