Understanding our leaders are keys to peace or war

Understanding our leaders are keys to peace or war

By Opoka Christopher Arop

Genocides only happen where there is high propensity of dictatorship. The multitudes of innocent civilian killings during the entire liberation struggle and now during independence and relative peace and more so in Juba and other state capitals must be understood in context. And this context cannot be a stone throw away from the leaders of the various liberation struggles. Targeted killings in Juba and retaliatory killings of recent times have no doubt constituted what the international community have been reluctant to call genocide, crimes against humanity and a gross violation of the inalienable sanctity to human life.

How do good leaders start well and grow into brutal despots?Although many people know and have written on some Sudan People’s Liberation Movement’s senior leaders and Sudan People’s Liberation Army senior commanders, the rapidity of killings over the years and frequency of rebellions has led me to believe that time has come to visit this topic with vigor, because some of them may disappear soon, just as Dr. John Garang, Kerubino Kuanyin, Paulino Matiep, Dr. Joseph Oduho and others, vanished without explaining enough about their personal and collective decisions.What were their mindset and ulterior motives?

Many crucial witnesses like President Salva Kiir and Dr. Riek Machar may be near the end of their lives and or political-military careers. Thus it is important to speak to them because it is possible that the one-dimensional demonised character of the ‘untrusted and leadership hungry’ Riek and the ‘ruthless and fearless’ Salva are concealing significant secrets and lessons for history.

Humanising the monsters we live with, accepting the demons that take over them, finding the three-dimensional Salva and Riek instead of cartoon villains, are a process of understanding rather than exoneration.

According to British actor Sir Ian McKellen, who over a career spanning 40 years, bringing to life monsters of every epoch from Lago to Rasputin said “One of the few lessons I have learnt from studying people who do terrible things is that they are all too human. And that we are all capable of doing almost anything.”

Discovering that Salva and Riek are real persons making hideous decisions is not letting them off the hook, but is to observe how and why they have or seem to have lost their way. It might alert us to similarly dangerous propensities in other leaders in South Sudan.

What happened to Riek, the gifted scholar who utilised rebel-time scholarships to accumulate academic papers, returning to lead military adventures and scoring victories against the common enemy and Salva who was ever loyal to the liberation cause and throughout his bush career accommodative of intellectual surroundings? Riek’s frivolity was a passion for leadership and Salva’s was deathly defence of the liberation’s military ideals. Is their story a tragedy�"greatness brought low�"or is the tragedy entirely a South Sudanese affair?

How can Salva and Riek be framed in terms of other despots? They both are certainly not buffoons like Uganda’s Idi Amin. And they may be far detached to have blood on their hands like Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti or Mobutu SeseSeko of the then Zaire. Accumulating personal wealth, like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines are not Salva’s or Riek’s motive for likely tyranny either.

The story of Riek and Salva is a microcosm of what bedevils African democracy and economic recovery in the 21^st century. It is a classic case of two genuine heroes�"the guerrilla idols who scrambled for the spoils of the country’s former leadership and our Arab-north Sudanese dictatorial regimes�"turning into peevish autocrats whose standard responses to those suggesting they step down are to tell them to forget. It is also a story of political and civil society activists who try to make a better society but bear the indelible scars of the old system.

Salva’s political and military education came from the unionist Dr. John Garang, unionist in the sense of a United Sudan, but with an independent South Sudan this political education soon vanished, perhaps replaced by a sense of the will of the South Sudanese people. But what remained as politics for Salva was an appeasement system, often in the form of rewarding former army generals, literate or not, rebellious or otherwise with blank cheque government positions and army command posts.

For Dr. Riek, his political and military education is rather widespread. His political and military education isreminisce with old Southern Sudan secessionist demands. Riek’s polity was a carefully crafted statesmanship, a diversion for Southern interests at different political and military developments only for complete separatist demands to re-emerge. Riek’s politics is taught by a surge to lead, a politics of opposition; ultimately, it appears in his political moral standing, a stance against single ideologies, a benefit or dis-service for the greater good of all of South Sudan’s ethnicities, apolitical and governance ideologies.

Above all, it is a story of two men or many more, who have lost their moral compass, with dire consequences for the many other South Sudanese[living or dead, struggling to survive or given up and waiting to die, hopeful for a better future or resolute for an inevitable hour of doom, employed or unemployed, youth or elderly, and mothers above all with their children, children to whom mothers can hardly say with some confidence that tomorrow will be better than yesterday even if worse than today. Mothers, many of whom have been pushed to extremes, in and out of pregnancies, mothers who continue to take more bullets than armed military combatants. Mothers who toil to feed, but must also suffer in conscription for fear of tending to crops, or taking a sick child to a distant medical facility].

Dr. Riek and President Kiir had the world at their feet for an entire seven year interim period since 2005. They both delivered a successful independent nation-state despite a rugged and treacherous journey. They persevered each other’s demons all this while, why? Slowly but inexorably, they have squandered their lives’ work, betraying the people who trusted them, the people who believed and continue to believe with abundant unquestionable faith in a peaceful and prosperous South Sudanese state. Why? What drove their self-destruction?

In trying to understand the careers of persons like President Salva and Dr. Riek, I must be careful not to explain away the behaviours of murderers. By locating some of the causes of their tyranny in South Sudanese society, I am wary of making violence implicitly more acceptable. While some of my explanations will or may invite empathy for these soft tyrants, partly because I know that persons like Salva and Dr. Riek are human beings like us all, I remain acutely aware that recent efforts to understand Hitler, for example, have been described by French Philosopher and film-maker Claude Lanzmann as “the obscenity of understanding”. Can I not counter this argument as many others have done in other parts of the world, though, by asking how we will ever learn from the cruelest chapters of South Sudan’s history if attempts to understand tyrants, soft or hard, are not allowed?

This is my plea to those that will accept to help write this account of South Sudan’s history. I will write not in blood, but I will also not place flowers where women and children shed tears. I will write a detailed account. I will talk to those I approach and accept. I will also talk to others who may want to give their accounts in secrecy with the hope that all voices are heard. If not for journalism’s sake, I must attempt this because others have not. Above all because it will help us understand and preempt our next line of dictators.