Sudan People's Liberation Army Research Articles

Lul Riek: helping to improve public health in South Sudan

Lul Riek: helping to improve public health in South Sudan

Victims of Discourse: Mobilizing Narratives of Fear and Insecurity in Post-Conflict South Sudan—The Case of Jonglei State

The sign along the border to South Sudan that reads—“Our peace, our land, our oil, our liberty”—is a testament to the struggles recently fought by the South's Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against the northern Khartoum Government. Such a seemingly apolitical expression of southern solidarity however obscures the often hostile relationships among the more than sixty ethnic groups in South Sudan and denies the SPLA's continuing role as occupiers and oppressors even within southern territory. This article raises the question of ‘whose peace, whose oil, whose land, and whose liberty’ is reflected in the making of a new South Sudan. Drawing on a case study from Jonglei State, this paper examines how the formation of a victim narrative has served to legitimize Dinka control over and access to non-Dinka territories and resources within a complex struggle over livelihood and material accumulation in South Sudan.

Fighting Pirates: The Pen and the Sword

The seizure by Somali pirates on September 25, 2008, of the Faina, a Ukrainian-flagged vessel transporting 33 Russian tanks and depleted uranium ammunition to Kenya for consignment delivery to the Sudan People's Liberation Army was startling in its audacity and haul. Even more alarming, however, was the November hijacking of the 1,000foot supertanker Sinus Star. The Liberianflagged vessel, owned by Saudi Arabia's Aramco, was carrying more than $100 million in oil to the United States when pirates seized the ship and its 25 crew members some 400 miles out to sea, then motored for the Somali coast and dropped anchor. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was stunned by the capture, which sent shocks through global energy markets. The seizure of a supertanker was unprecedented, and the daring attack so far from shore suggested the pirates were using the shipping industry's open-access automatic identification system (Ais) to intercept merchant ships. Merchant ships on international voyages are required to transmit AIS locational data, but criminal gangs at sea operating commercial equipment can receive these signals as easily as do naval forces and maritime law enforcement and use it to target ships. Since January, more than 97 ships have been hijacked in the dangerous waters off Somalia and Yemen, and the ransom for some vessels can fetch into the millions of dollars. Maritime piracy is experiencing a renaissance not seen since the period of the Barbary pirates. Instability from maritime piracy in the Gulf of Aden is sending ripples throughout the global supply chain, which is already reeling from the collapse of shipping rates brought on by the worldwide economic slowdown. The Baltic Dry Index, which measures the cost of shipping most commodities other than oil, has plummeted to its lowest level in six years and has fallen 93 percent from its peak in May 2008. Indeed, the surge in piracy is coming at the worst time for the shipping industry. More problematic, the resurgence is occurring along critical sea lanes: 20,000 ships pass through the Gulf of Aden adjacent to the Indian Ocean each year, transporting cargo that includes 12 percent of the worlds daily oil supply. While it is impossible to eradicate maritime piracy completely, the threat can be greatly reduced if we broaden efforts to work with international partners. Significantly reducing criminal acts at sea in an area that stretches the distance from Miami

Cross-border Dynamics of Violent Conflict

Violent conflicts in Africa are often presented as ethnic strife in a framework of weak states. This article takes a diachronical actor-oriented perspective to analyse the conflict in Sudan. It shows how apparently local conflicts have been interlinked with the aims and interests of governments and opposing groups, army factions and militant organizations in the larger sub-region that Sudan is part of. The focus is on the interrelationship between current conflicts in Sudan and Chad and their connection with the 2005 peace agreement between the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). In conclusion, a paradigm shift in conflict and peace research is proposed. Instead of using the state as the unit of analysis, it is suggested that the sub-regional arenas where conflicts break out be examined.

International Institutions and Individualized Decision-Making: An Example of UNHCR's Refugee Status Determination

In autumn 2005 a group of Sudanese asylum seekers and refugees discontented with the unbearable conditions in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refuges (UNHCR) office in Cairo started a sit-in protest near the office. The protesters were, besides venting their anger at the suspension of Refugee Status Determination procedures for Sudanese refugees due to the ceasefire between the Sudanese government and Sudan's People Liberation Army, also making their frustrations heard regarding UNHCR's lengthy procedures, its failure to provide them with proper assistance, the high numbers of rejected applications, improper interviews and their general treatment by UNHCR's personnel as well as their difficult social and health conditions which had been aggravated by the lack of proper assistance. They were demanding that this situation be remedied and calling for transparent and fair procedures. Shortly thereafter they were joined by many more protesters so that in the following three months a group of between 1,800 and 2,500 people stayed around UNHCR's premises. However, meetings and negotiations with UNCHR eventually failed. The crisis ended in a tragedy. On December 30, 2005 the Egyptian security forces proceeded with the forcible removal of the protesters from the venue in an action in which 28 refugees were killed, more than half of which were children and women, with several protesters missing after the events. The Cairo incident illustrates what the cited report on the events has rightly called “a tragedy of failures and false expectations” regarding international humanitarian and human rights institutions.

Invisible Children: Rough Cut

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 18 No. 1 (2008) ISSN: 1546-2250 Media Review Invisible Children: Rough Cut. George Awuor University of Colorado Citation: Awuor, George. (2008). "Media ReviewInvisible Children: Rough Cut.." Children, Youth and Environments 18 (1). Laren Poole and Jason Russell (2006). Invisible Children: Rough Cut. Invisible Children and People Like You Productions. English (1 hour) Invisible Children is a documentary based on the lives of children affected by the conflict in Northern Uganda. Bobby Bailey, Jason Russell and Laren Poole, three young Americans from California, originally went to Africa in 2003 to witness the devastating civil war in Southern Sudan. This civil war between the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) of the secular South and the predominantly Muslim and Arab Sudanese government in Khartoum was fought from 1983 to 2005 and is estimated to have claimed more than 2 million lives and displaced millions of people. When the three Americans reached their destination in Sudan, they found a desolate environment. There was evidence of war but the population had fled to neighboring countries, includingUganda, where many had relocated to refugee camps. The Americans decided to follow the Sudanese refugees to Northern Uganda. There they discovered another conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government that has lasted more than 17 years. This war is unknown to most of the international world but has resulted in thousands of deaths, and the displacement and abduction of thousands of children and their families. Much of the misery and death from conflicts in Africa such as this one are due to issues of sharing resources and power. 532 The Acholi people who reside in Northern Uganda resent the neglect they experience from the Ugandan government. Led by a self-styled “prophet,” Alice Lakwena, some Acholis formed the LRA and initiated a war with the government in 1986. After her death, the notorious Joseph Kony took over, but with less support from the local Acholi community. In order to build the LRA’s ranks, he resorted to terrorizing the local community and abducting children between the ages of 5 and 12 from schools and villages. Invisible Children: Rough Cut features a few of the boys who managed to escape from the rebels. The boys recount how child abductees were beaten, forced to beat and kill civilians, and abduct other children. The images of young children in combat are a disturbing reminder of the experiences of the “lost boys” of Sudan who were abducted by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) during its rebel movement. According to a 2003 Human Rights report, children in the LRA are given weapons training and are forced to fight against the Ugandan government army. The film portrays this harsh reality, as well as that of girls who are abducted and forced to become domestic servants for commanders or are taken as “wives.” They are exposed to sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. Afraid of abduction, large numbers of children lie together on the verandas at night throughout the city of Gulu. Cameras follow six boys as they prepare for a night in a corridor at the basement of Lacor hospital. The boys begin by mopping up water that has leaked into the corridor, and then work on their homework with a dim light from a tin lamp before they lay down on thin mats on the cold concrete floor for another “safe” night. In the film, an American aid worker, a Ugandan member of parliament, a local historian and two local journalists articulate the plight of the desperate Acholi children. They all passionately plead with the Ugandan government and the world community to come to the rescue of the children. Traces of trauma show up in the drawings and the aggressive games the children play. Amidst the fear, pain, hunger and sadness, the children try to make the best of their lives. The resilience exhibited by the children is well- 533 documented in the film. They attend school, play soccer in the open fields and remind the world that they are innocent children with the same instincts and needs as other children elsewhere. I encourage everyone to see Invisible Children: Rough...

Civil Wars in the Sudan

AbstractThis article spans the fifty years of the independent Sudan (1956–2006) during which the country was torn by five civil wars made manifest by the historic marginalization of the Sudanese on the periphery by the powerful riverine Sudanese living in the heartland along the Nile, the awlad al‐bahr (people of the river) and the deep cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences between those of the center and the periphery that have produced four of the five civil wars. The longest, most violent, and destructive were the two civil wars between the northern and southern Sudanese, the Anya‐Nya civil war, 1963–1972 and the second southern civil war, 1983–2006. Moreover, the second southern civil war experienced from 1991 to 1996 its own internal civil war between the Dinka and Nuer that caused enormous casualties and suffering before the Sudan People's Liberation Army could establish its supremacy. After the military coup détat (June 30, 1989) and the subsequent Islamist revolution, insurgencies erupted both in the East led by the Beja Congress in 1994 and in the West in Darfur by the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement in 2003. The Beja insurgency was settled in 2006 but the disaster in Darfur continues after great loss of life. This article summarizes each of these insurgencies, interprets their ideology, and analyzes the deep tensions which produced them.

Reconciling Nuers with Dinkas: A Girardian approach to conflict resolution

In the Sudan in the 1990s, violent conflict between the Nuers and the Dinkas, both African tribes in the South of Sudan, included rape, murder, the burning of homes and the abduction of children. This conflict ended through the Wunlit People-to-People Peace Conference, organised in 1999 by the New Sudan Council of Churches, with the support of the Sudan People's Liberation Army. In this essay the conflict and its resolution are interpreted through René Girard's theory of the scapegoat mechanism. The essay offers a series of guidelines for successful reconciliation. At the centre of the proceedings was the religious sacrifice of the white bull of Mabior. The resolution of the conflict confirms Girard's theory of sacrificial violence. In the author's view, Girard's theory offers a model for transforming debilitating, imitative and violent behaviours into beneficial and positive ones.

Training military medics as civilian prehospital care providers in Southern Sudan

Objective. To describe and evaluate a training program to teach civilian prehospital care to military medics in the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Methods. Forty-one SPLA military personnel with variable prior medical experience participated in the course. Pre- and postintervention tests were used to evaluate participant knowledge and skill level, and test results were compared using paired t-tests. Results. An intensive 40-hour course consisting of didactic teaching sessions, small-group discussions, and practical skill stations was completed during November 1997. Thirty-seven participants successfully completed the program. Four medics with significant prior experience were trained as teaching assistants. The pretest scores for the other 33 participants ranged from 25.0% to 75.0% (SD 12.4). The posttest scores ranged from 25.0% to 87.5% (SD 15.2), with a mean improvement in test scores of 35.0% (p < 0.0005). The most striking improvements were noted in the knowledge of subjects related to wound care, hemorrhage, and head trauma. Conclusions. A field medic training program in Southern Sudan was conducted utilizing an interactive training curriculum. This program may serve as an educational model to teach prehospital care principles in other areas of international conflict. PREHOSPITAL EMERGENCY CARE 2000;4:65-69

The Southern Funj of the Sudan as a Frontier Society, 1820–1980

The long civil war in the Sudan between the government and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) is usually simply described as a war between ‘the Arab North’ and ‘the African South.’ Equally simply, it is understood as a continuation, by new means and in new circumstances, of nineteenth-century and earlier inequalities between free people and unfree people, and of hostilities between slavers and those they preyed upon. In the twentieth century these asymmetries came to be represented by a religious distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. However, these apparent distinctions between free and unfree, and between Muslim and non-Muslim begin to blur when we ask who is making them. Likewise, at closer inspection, the division into “the Arab North” and “the African South” begins to fragment and reconstitute into a complexity of alliances and interest groups. These complexities become more evident as engagement moves from hostile encounters in the remote vastness of the Sudan to peace negotiations and press conferences in hotels and offices in capital cities. In the latter settings marginalized populations can be heard. Of special here interest are the three culturally ‘southern’ populations whose homelands are in the geo-political North: Abyei, the Nuba Mountains, and South Blue Nile. In January 2003, a public statement, headed “Let us not be denied the right to decide on our future,” was delivered to the North-South peace conference in Kenya by a local NGO, the Relief Organisation of Fazugli (ROOF), on behalf of “the people of South Blue Nile.” It demanded that their representatives, along with those of the Nuba Mountains and Abyei be included in the current peace negotiations.

Reformed Rebels? Democratization, Global Norms, and the Sudan People's Liberation Army

After years of using terror as a strategic tool against its ostensible supporters in southern Sudan, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) claims to be moving in a democratic direction. If true, this change would stand as a case of an insurgency responding to global political and normative pressures to democratize, and would signal acceptance of greater reciprocity in social relations in the insurgency—a pattern that fits with broader propositions of state-building scholars. Yet, as this article argues, the SPLA will not achieve its state-building objective because of the effects of international norms on the movement's intentions and pursuits of its interests.

Reformed Rebels? Democratization, Global Norms, and the Sudan People's Liberation Army

Reformed Rebels? Democratization, Global Norms, and the Sudan People's Liberation Army

Terrorism and guerrilla warfare theory and practice: Al‐Qaeda and Sudan's SPLA

A comparative study of how terrorist organisations differ from each other, looking at case studies of al‐Qaeda and the Sudan People's Liberation Army.

Creating Devastation and Calling it Islam: The War for the Nuba, Sudan

The war in Sudan is conventionally mis-described in terms of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) "fighting for more autonomy for the mainly Christian and animist South." This is wrong on several counts. First, the SPLA is fighting for a "new Sudan" in the whole country, and includes significant groups of non-Southerners among its forces. The Nuba people of southern Kordofan are prominent among these. Second, there are Muslims serving in the SPLA, including the late Yousif Kuwa Mekki, the charismatic Nuba leader who died in March 2001, and his successor, Abdel Aziz Adam al Hilu. Third, there are no animists in Sudan: followers of traditional religions are mostly theists--"noble spiritual believers" in the apt and sensitive terminology of the now-replaced 1973 Constitution. An even more egregiously wrong characterization of the conflict is "Christian rebels" against a "Muslim government." The war in Sudan is fundamentally about greed and identity. And religion has become an integral part of the contested identities of Sudanese, nowhere more so than in the Nuba Mountains.

A Curse from God? Religious and political dimensions of the post-1991 rise of ethnic violence in South Sudan

Southern Sudanese civilian populations have been trapped in a rising tide of ethnicised, South-on-South, military violence ever since leadership struggles within the main southern opposition movement – the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) – split into two warring factions in August 1991. This paper traces the devastating impact of this violence on a particularly volatile and fractured region of contemporary South Sudan: the oil rich heartlands of the Western Upper Nile Province. Foregrounding the historical experiences and grassroots perspectives of Nuer civilian populations in this region, the paper shows how elite competition within the southern military has combined with the political machinations of the national Islamic government in Khartoum to create a wave of inter- and intra-ethnic factional fighting so intense and intractable that many Nuer civilians have come to define it as ‘a curse from God’. Dividing Sudan's seventeen-year-long civil war (1983–present) into four distinct phases, the paper shows how successive forms and patterns of political violence in this region have provoked radical reassessments of the precipitating agents and ultimate meaning of this war on the part of an increasingly demoralised and impoverished Nuer civilian population.

T RAINING M ILITARY M EDICS AS C IVILIAN P REHOSPITAL C ARE P ROVIDERS IN S OUTHERN S UDAN

Objective. To describe and evaluate a training program to teach civilian prehospital care to military medics in the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Methods. Forty-one SPLA military personnel with variable prior medical experience participated in the course. Pre- and postintervention tests were used to evaluate participant knowledge and skill level, and test results were compared using paired t-tests. Results. An intensive 40-hour course consisting of didactic teaching sessions, small-group discussions, and practical skill stations was completed during November 1997. Thirty-seven participants successfully completed the program. Four medics with significant prior experience were trained as teaching assistants. The pretest scores for the other 33 participants ranged from 25.0% to 75.0% (SD 12.4). The posttest scores ranged from 25.0% to 87.5% (SD 15.2), with a mean improvement in test scores of 35.0% (p < 0.0005). The most striking improvements were noted in the knowledge of subjects related to wound care, hemorrhage, and head trauma. Conclusions. A field medic training program in Southern Sudan was conducted utilizing an interactive training curriculum. This program may serve as an educational model to teach prehospital care principles in other areas of international conflict.

Sudan's Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities

Ever since power struggles within the Sudan People's Liberation Army split the movement into two warring factions in August 1991, rural Nuer and Dinka communities of the South have been grappling with a deepening regional subculture of ethnicized violence. This article describes political factors that have prolonged this bitter conflict into the present and have contributed to the post-1991 polarization and militarization of Dinka and Nuer ethnic identities. Drawing on parallel field research conducted in Dinka and Nuer regions of South Sudan during 1998 and 1999, the authors show how ordinary civilians have been struggling to understand and cope with this new “war of the [southern] educated [elite].” Among the major themes addressed are: (1) the rapid unraveling of regional codes of warfare ethics since 1991; (2) the transformation of previous patterns of interethnic competition over scarce economic resources into politicized programs of ethnicized violence; (3) mounting public despair over the seeming unwillingness of John Garang and Riek Machar to compromise their personal ambitions for the greater unity of the South; and (4) recent peace initiatives made by Dinka and Nuer chiefs, which have succeeded in reducing interethnic violence, despite the continuing intransigence of some military leaders.

Commentary on "Sudan's Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic Identities" and "Africans, Arabs, and Islamists: From the Conference Tables to the Battlefields in the Sudan"

The Jok and Hutchinson essay is an extremely lucid and well-researched account of the polarization of Nuer and Dinka populations in the South of Sudan following the leadership split within the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 1991. Few features of the ongoing catastrophe that is war in Sudan are more complex than Dinka/Nuer rivalries and animosities of this period; and yet nothing is as important in understanding why this civil war, which has ground to a military stalemate, continues to be so enormously destructive of human life in Southern Sudan.

II Murahaleen Raids on the Dinka, 1985–89

Successive Sudanese governments have used proxy forces, so-called militias, as an integral part of their war with the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The Rizeiqat and Misseriya of South Darfur and South Kordofan created armed bands, known as Murahaleen, in order to raid cattle from the Dinka to their south. Massive raids have depopulated swathes of territory south of the Bahr al-Arab, killing tens of thousands of people and leading to the destruction and displacement of unknown numbers of others. Famine in western Sudan fuelled the early raids, but the scale of the devastation wrought from 1985 onwards was the result of government complicity and assistance. More recently, since the coming to power of the current military government in Khartoum in June 1989, the relationship between the army and the Murahleen has been formalized through the creation of Popular Defence Forces.

The Political Economy of Famine in Sudan and the Horn of Africa

Over 300,000 Sudanese perished primarily from hunger during 1988-89 in one of the most avoidable human tragedies in recent history. Mostly from the war-torn southern part of the country, these civilians were deliberately starved by central government, and to a lesser extent the insurgent Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which used the deprivation of food as a tactic of war. The threat of further genocidal actions by the Islamic fundamentalist junta in Khartoum and the private militias allied with the government continue to daily threaten the lives of millions of internally displaced people. Due to these man-made causes and nature’s lack of rain, up to ten million Sudanese are at risk of malnutrition, hunger and starvation in 1991.