Being South Sudanese: A view on the situation in Juba

Hundreds, if not thousands, of foreigners in South Sudan have been fleeing that country this past week. President Salva Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar had their loyalists fighting this week in what Kiir termed as an attempted coup.

To foreigners, running back to their home countries means safety. But what does it mean to the South Sudanese when they watch all those planeloads of people flee?

The Nation had a chat with Tongun Lo Loyuong, a South Sudanese living in Frankfurt and a blogger who was among the many in the diaspora that celebrated the birth of a new nation but who never lifted his eye of the problems ahead.

Mr Loyuong fled with his family at the height of the second Sudan war in 1983. At the time, John Garang, who had just authored a PhD thesis on the Jonglei swamp in which he warned of war if Khartoum tried to drain it, was leading a rebellion against Khartoum. Loyuong was six then.

Now he holds several post-graduate degrees in peace and conflict studies. Several things have changed too. Garang died in 2005 in a plane crash several months after signing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), and South Sudan eventually seceded from Sudan in 2011.

DEJA VU

It was a new nation and every South Sudanese was happy. But in 2013, Loyuong sees the events in Juba this past week as déjà vu.

“SPLM (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, now Army) strategy then is much like what we are witnessing now, which seems to be the strategy favoured by Machar’s forces, and which is to isolate Juba by capturing the surrounding states and strangling the economic veins of the country,” he argued.

“Back in the late 80s, for example, we suffered from hunger as a result of Juba being isolated, and air embargo which was the only means for the delivery of the supply of basic food and non-items to the city was being enforced by Khartoum, who saw South Sudanese as collectively rebels or as supportive of the SPLM.

“Khartoum therefore used our starvation as a weapon of mass-destruction. This was also compounded by drought that together resulted in the death of many innocent people from famine and starvation.

“The SPLM then launched a sustained siege of Juba for months, which was accompanied by daily shelling of the city in what was mostly indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between civilian areas and military barracks akin to what is happening now. Many civilians likewise lost their lives or limbs as a result, including some of my childhood friends.”

Exact figures of casualties from this chaos have not come forth and regional leaders have been trying to prevent further damages by having the parties talk.

On the face of it, it looks like a political contest. Further than that, a South Sudanese sees deeper divisions in tribe, class, religion, corruption, nepotism and lack of social and economic service delivery given much of South Sudan is still remote. (READ: 2 Kenyans killed in South Sudan fighting, says govt)

“It’s heartbreaking that our people are being subjected to re-live the bitter experiences of the war all over again, mostly because our leaders have lacked vision and have lost the sense of patriotism and South Sudan nationalism that drove them to the bush to fight for our freedom in the first place.

“Instead those ideals are overtaken by greed and political power hunger. We (those in the diaspora) were often even branded as cowards, and were asked 'Where were you when we were in the bush? We liberated you'…and so forth.”

Loyuong thinks the initial solution now if for mediators to help prevent violence from escalating into all out civil war, but they should keep an eye on the underlying issues. “It is prudent for our regional and international friends to remain impartial and not be drawn into taking sides in the conflict,” he says.

“What the outside world needs to know is that in addition to it being a political power struggle on the leadership level of the ruling SPLM, the conflict is essentially a battle between democracy and dictatorship in South Sudan, but that is also heavily influenced by ethnicities.”