From: The Australian
IT’S been a year since the last commercial passenger flight left Malakal; a year since the colourful logos of Kenya Airways and low-cost carrier Fly540 were last seen taxiing towards the control tower of this city in the Republic of South Sudan. Today, you can only fly here by securing a seat on a UN craft or by hitching a ride, somehow, on one of the vast unmarked cargo carriers that are met by flatbed trucks loaded with young soldiers, singing battle songs and waving automatic weapons in celebration at the delivery of reels of razor wire, sacks of dry food and piles of flat-screen TVs. Because the terminal is infested with Army, waiting passengers — NGO staff, mostly — sit along a low wall by the runway, chatting quietly, careful not to show too much interest in what’s happening around them. On the road that leads out of the airport, a UN peacekeeper sits inside an armoured vehicle, his 42mm gun aimed at the boundless and roasting pastel-blue sky.
I meet my contact, Kon Dimo — once a soldier, now a regional program manager with the NGO World Vision. He’s a slim, thoughtful man of middle age in a beige bucket sunhat, an atheist until a few months ago, when he read a book about near-death experiences. Kon has an eye for timekeeping and professional protocol — when he was in the army he trained officers. He tells me Malakal has changed hands six times since last December. Locals have been forced to cheer the conquering forces and, if judged insufficiently jubilant, executed.
We drive out of the airport, turning left. The wet season is coming to an end and, either side of the road, the grasses are waist-high. There are silent buildings with empty window frames, husks of structures marooned in seas of unruly vegetation. I watch it all pass and decide to admit I’m still confused about exactly what’s happening here. It’s the usual mess … names of politicians with histories of violence … abbreviations of political parties and armies and semi-official militias … which tribe is which … who is fighting who? I ask Kon, “Who’s in control of Malakal at the moment?” He turns from the front passenger seat. “There are two forces in control,” he says. “Greed and fear.”
They had such hopes for this place. When the largely Christian south of Sudan finally won cessation from the Muslim north in 2011 — becoming the Republic of South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation — the people were jubilant. “I was very happy,” says Kon, who fought in the independence wars as a member of the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army [SPLA] in the late 1980s. “I didn’t expect it to come when I was still alive.” The people were free and, also, they were rich: most of Sudan’s flow of 480,000 barrels of oil a day originated from the south. The housing ministry announced a 20-year, $13 billion plan to rebuild the new nation’s cities in the shape of fruits and animals. In the capital, Juba, one million citizens would live in the shape of a rhinoceros; its horn would be a park, its eyeball a five-star hotel. The city of Yambio would be a pineapple. Wau would be a giraffe, its neck a super-modern industrial estate and, in the shadow of its tail, a sewage plant. The highest seats in government were taken by warlords from the two major rival tribes, the Dinka and the Nuer. There would be peace at last.
The crescendo of violence that would kill tens of thousands and displace 1.5 million began as a single fistfight. In the middle of December last year, a fresh political dispute had broken out between the president, Salva Kiir, and his former deputy, Riek Machar. Claiming concern about an imminent military coup, Kiir ordered the commander of his Presidential Guard to rush to the barracks in Juba and disarm all the troops. This the commander did. But, shortly afterwards, he rearmed the soldiers who belonged to the president’s tribe. So now the Dinka, traditionally loyal to President Kiir, had guns — and the people of the former vice president’s tribe, the Nuer, did not. Outraged and fearful, the commander’s Nuer deputy began arguing with him. The upset spread. The spark came that night when punches were thrown between the weapons storekeeper and a Nuer soldier. Others pitched in and the Nuer broke into the store.
And so it all began. The fighting spread quickly through the streets of Juba. Eyewitnesses spoke of government soldiers conducting house-to-house searches for Nuer men. Dawn saw corpses being trucked away to unknown places. Violence soon consumed much of the country. Mobiles, money and vehicles were stolen. Terrified civilians, targeted for death because of their tribal identities, fled to UN encampments and begged to be let in. Today, more than 100,000 still live in fear and dirt in what have come to be known as UN “Protection of Civilians” sites [POCs]. “When the UN opened their doors, they helped prevent a genocide,” Kon tells me, as our LandCruiser approaches Malakal’s POC, which houses around 20,000. A genocide? Really? “Oh yes,” he says. “There is so much hatred between the Dinka and the Nuer.”
Jammed up by the POC’s gates, we find cars that panicked residents drove here when the fighting began; they’re smashed, filthy and tyreless, in a crush three or four deep. It’s still mid-afternoon, a few hours before the drop of curfew’s curtain, and the market that’s formed here since the Christmas violence is busy. Through the open car window, the smells are ever-changing: sweet incense, a meaty broth, raw sewage. Hunks of wine-red goat leg hang from hooks; dull-eyed Nile perch crawl with flies on dank hessian cloths; a man sells phone cards and cigarettes. The slogan on his bright pink awning almost seems planted, an ironic aside from a mordant God: “A Wonderful World.”
I’ve asked Kon to introduce me to some of the displaced citizens. I want to hear their stories; to understand how they came to be here. They live in large blocks of tents constructed from bamboo poles and plastic sheeting. Stinking trenches of green-brown slurry run between the blocks. Children leap from one bank to another as UN guards in distant watchtowers scan the beyond for attackers.
Kon walks me to the place where 50-year-old Nyabac Nyakok lives. Nyabac and her husband James are of a tribe that’s currently allied to the Dinka, the president’s people. They decided it would be safer in Malakal, where their eight children were, so before dawn one February morning, they and a group of six male companions began the long journey.
Three hours into the trip, they walked into trouble — rebels who’d been repulsed from Malakal retreating along the road. They rounded on Nyabac’s group and ordered them to sit down. Then they started shooting. “All of the men were killed,” she says. “All of them! They shot me in the leg. They thought I’d died.” Nyabac lay there in pain, unable to move, seeing only the corpses of her husband and the others bleeding into the dust around her, until around 5pm. “A young boy, a rebel, came. He saw that I was still breathing.” The boy quickly left and returned with a donkey and cart. “He put me on it and pulled me into town. As I went, I saw lots of dead bodies. They were killing all along the road. On the way, the young soldier’s colleagues were saying, ‘She’s allied to the Dinka, why are you taking her? We need to kill her’.” But for reasons unknown, the rebel lied to save Nyabac’s life. “He said to them, ‘No. This is my mother’.”
Malakal was deserted. After 10 days hiding out in the Catholic Church, where she lay untreated with two bullet-shattered bones, she was taken to the POC for medical help. There, she was reunited with her children. I ask if she has trouble sleeping. “Why not? Why not?” she cries. “The situation is getting worse. I’m losing hope that there will be [a political] agreement. All these things I’m thinking at night.” She raises a thin hand to her cheek. “I keep all these bad things in my head. What haunts me is the people who died in the town were not buried. People were eaten by birds, by dogs! It’s a very bad thing that a human being can be eaten by animals. This will bring a curse on South Sudan!”
Even here, Nyabac’s not entirely safe. In February, intertribal violence in the camp killed 10. On many nights, youth gangs in the blocks fight with sticks and machetes. Recently, the gangs have been scaring Shubeth Tut, who’s been here for a year. She’s 12 years old and comes from a middle-class family. Her father’s a policeman, her mother works for the fire service. “I lived in a nice house,” she says. “I had a nice life.”
On the night of December 15 last year they heard the fighting as it tore up the city streets. There was a knock on their door. “It was soldiers from the government. They asked if we were Nuer or Dinka. We’re Nuer. They said, ‘We’re warning you. When we come back, we’ll kill you.’” Not knowing what else to do, they ran to the UN base. “On the way, soldiers were shooting people randomly. They stopped us. Some of them said, ‘Let’s kill these people.’ But others said, ‘No, these are civilians.’ I wanted to cry but I squeezed my hand to stop myself.” When they reached the UN they were, as policy dictated, forbidden from entering. “But some soldiers came, trying to kill people. That’s when they opened the gates.”
For six days, Shubeth’s family lived under a bedsheet. There was no food. The available water was filthy. “Now things are better. There’s not enough food, sometimes, but there are water points. Before, you had to find your way to the river. You could be killed.” She tells me about missing TV, and her sadness that her toys were looted. I almost don’t want to ask, but I’m curious to know how all this affects a child’s sense of tribal identity. What does this Nuer youngster think of the Dinka? “I feel very angry towards them,” she says. “They’re not good people.”
I spend the night in guilty splendour. Most who inhabit the staff area of the UN compound sleep in dormitory tents with around 40 others, but my hosts have lent me the keys to someone’s office. I have solid walls and the luxury of solitude as I lie in a put-up bed, a kernel of safety in the centre of this living mass of worry. This is the first time I’ve reported on city dwellers from a troubled place in Africa. Usually, I’m talking to poor farmers. Although it’s never easy, unfamiliar language and foreign customs usually create a kind of distance. Small differences soak into the whole. Perhaps what’s brought me closer, today, are the recognisable details of the lives of these urban people: the expensive cars driven to the POC’s edge, the thugs after mobile phones; the little girl, the middle-class daughter of a policeman, who’s sad because she can’t watch TV and all her toys are gone. As I drop away to the sound of a leaking fridge and a single circling mosquito I am, and I feel, not too far from them.
After a breakfast of hard-boiled white-yolked eggs and instant coffee, next to a clutch of Ukrainian helicopter pilots, I meet Kon. We have been granted permission by a UN security chief to travel into Malakal itself. It’s 20 minutes away, past the airport. Outside the gates, we pass flatbed trucks carrying troops. The UN men sit on benches, facing the sides, their lines of guns arrayed like porcupine spikes; the government soldiers bunch up at the front, crowding the cabs, moving peacocks of automatic weaponry.
Our first stop is the Upper Nile University, on Malakal’s outskirts. “The rebels and the army looted this place in shifts,” says Kon as we enter. I wander off alone, past the once proud flagpoles, and step through a doorless doorway into one of the blocks. The computer department contains nothing but a dozen abandoned desks, a single monitor cable and a rotted dog surrounded by an aura of dead worms and its own dried juices. Vines crawl through the smashed windows of the office of the Dean of Medicine. On the corridor floor passport photos from student files are scattered, a fan of clever and ambitious young faces staring blankly into the ruin. As I go, God leaves another wry joke, a colourful university brochure on the floor, titled “Upper Nile State — The Place to Be.”
We go to the church in which Nyabac had found refuge. The priest shows us around. “Thousands took shelter here,” he tells us, as we move through an unlit corridor to a small room, near his office. It was in here that dozens of civilians were locked, then shot through the windows. Despite it having been scrubbed repeatedly, the piercing odour of death is still present. “Some dogs got in to eat the bodies and then the dogs died,” he says, by way of partial explanation. How did the dogs die? “The door was somehow closed, and then there was nothing for them to eat. We’ve cleaned it six times but still it’s smelling.” On a wooden shelf, I see a schoolbook printed with the slogan, “Choose Life”.
We drive back through the streets, once busy with life and business, now puddled, cracked and ridden with men from other places, heavy with loaded guns and searching gazes. Kon brings me to the complex from which he once worked as the manager responsible for World Vision programs in the three regions that are now the most affected by this civil war: Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile. Someone’s tried to kick Kon’s door in and finally managed to gain entry by smashing a window. We hoist ourselves in, over the shattered glass, and sit on his desk, a carpet of trashed paperwork under our feet. “I was managing an average of $US13 million a year from this room,” he tells me. “I had 13 projects — water, sanitation and health. When Malakal was captured by opposition forces on December 24, they didn’t come here. They thought it was a church.” Government forces had first run on the loot.
We talk about how the problem in South Sudan is the problem in so much of Africa. Democracy exists only in its rituals — the campaigning, the voting, the victory speeches. In truth, the policies of one party or another, the left and the right of things, barely matter. The loyalty of almost everyone adheres to ancient tribal lines, the winners sharing the bounties of victory with only their people and shutting the others out. “The government put the people of their tribe in the senior positions — and all the government contracts go to them,” says Kon. “Even in business, the ground is not level. It perpetuates fear. If you lose the government, all your resources are at risk. It sets up a vicious cycle. For the tribe’s survival, a person has to be aggressive, ruthless.
“Some tribes don’t become like this. But some, as soon as you start fighting one individual, all the other members of that tribe are coming. The Dinka and the Nuer are like this. They’re ready to let go of their personal convenience for the convenience of the group. It’s completely unconscious. When you tell them this, they’ll deny it. They’ll say, ‘That’s not the case, it’s just this person was offending me.’ But the same thing that’s coming out of the other person is also coming out of him.” I tell Kon that the boardroom savage in our radically individualistic society can also be pretty vicious. “That is true,” he says. “But I wish we could have that.”
Today, World Vision, like everyone else, has run to the POC. Since the night of the fists, they’ve helped more than 400,000 people in South Sudan with water, food, blankets, sanitation, mosquito nets and child protection. As we drive back, Kon turns to me from the front seat. He’s been quiet up there; thinking to himself as our LandCruiser bumps along. “Which do you think is stronger?” he says. “Good or evil?”
“What do you think?” I say.
There’s a silence. He turns back.
“I think evil is stronger.”
The next day, we return to Malakal. The feeling of something being wrong is as obvious and stunning as if we’d driven into a wall. There’s a churn out here in the streets; an invisible mist of dread and activity. The soldiers aren’t lounging anymore; they’re bombing up and down in their vehicles, marching in small columns, gathering in clots on corners. A young teenager in T-shirt and jeans mans a 12.5mm gun mounted on a ute; its hanging ribbon of bullets glints in the sun. The university which we toured freely yesterday is now guarded by teenage gunmen. For some mad reason, our driver slows to a stop right outside it. “Go! Go!” I hiss. Two days from now I’ll read in The Juba Telegraph that, in a few hours, the rebels will attack just 24km south of here.
The end of the rainy season has everyone scared. The killing only paused because of the impossibly deep and sticky mud. But now it’s drying and the armies of the two tribes are back on the move. At the airport I fall into a conversation with a local driver. We talk, naturally enough, about the weather. “We’re expecting four days of fierce wind that brings the end of summer,” he says. “It brings the destruction of tents, satellite dishes, even buildings.” I reach for my notepad. “And does it have a particular name, this wind?” I ask. “I don’t know how to translate it into English,” he says. “But we say it’s the wind from the north fighting the wind from the south, and when they both fight, we all suffer.” I pause and blink back at the stranger with rising suspicion. It feels too perfect a moment and I wonder, briefly, if it could be God, once more, trying desperately to find his sense of humour.