Update from Dane Smith
I had a newsy message from newly consecrated Archbishop Joseph Garang Atem of Upper Nile. He reports that for the time being he will remain resident in Renk, because Malakal, normally the capital of the Upper Nile Internal Province, is still greatly damaged by the civil war. There is no place for him to stay, and security is not yet good enough. He is eager to move to Malakal, when the situation permits, “to encourage people on peace building and trauma healing.” Meanwhile, he says, the savings groups in Renk, where trauma healing instruction is carried on, are going well, and will hopefully become more numerous.
In his report to the Security Council June 22, UNMISS Chief Nicholas Haysom reported that there has been limited progress in implementing the 2018 Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R/ARCSS) — appointment of 550 members of the reconstituted national legislature and the official launching of the process for creating a constitution. However, no Speaker has been named for legislative assembly, and troops in cantonment and training sites have inadequate shelter, health care and food. He added that bad leadership, non-functioning state governments and the absence of the rule of law is responsible for perpetrators of violence going free and for entrenched insecurity. UNMISS reports that more than 400 people had been killed between February and the end of May this year, most of them civilians.
A new study by the African Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank associated with the US Department of Defense, blames much of the failure of statehood in South Sudan over the past decade on inability to contain the security sector: “The fragmentation of the armed forces, coupled with their loyalty to specific political leaders, a legacy of the independence struggle, allowed the new nation to be captured by a ‘gun class.’” (Luka Biong Deng Kuol, “Lessons from a Decade of South Sudanese Statehood” https://africacenter.org/
There has been considerable international media coverage of Sudan in the past two weeks. Following a visit to Khartoum by the outgoing Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the Cabinet pledged to hand over to the ICC Sudanese officials indicted for war crimes. Former President Bashir is included among that group, although his name was not mentioned in the pledge.
The New York Times reported last Sunday that family members of the more than 100 demonstrators killed in June 2019 by the security forces are increasingly unhappy that the bodies of the victims have not undergone autopsies and remain in a morgue outside Khartoum. The delay reportedly reflects a split between Sudan Armed Forces Chief General Al-Burhan and General Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), Commander of the Rapid Support Forces, which were allegedly responsible for most of the killings. Some protests occurred in June, and further demonstrations may take place on this issue.
Executive Director
Focus Area: The Diaspora
Diaspora Celebrates its 2020 and 2021 Graduates
by Kwathi Akol Ajawin, Sudanese African Fellowship at Cornerstone Free Evangelical Church, Annandale, Virginia
On June 26, the South Sudanese community in the region of Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia gathered online to celebrate the graduation of some thirty students, from kindergarten to post-graduates. The excellent commencement speaker was our friend, John Thon Majok, director of the Dinka Language Education Program at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Alexandria and a member of the board of directors for the South Sudanese community in DMV.
The graduates included about seven high school graduates, nine college graduates, one Master’s graduate, and one recipient of a professional certificate.
It was a great occasion, and it was good to see South Sudan ‘s true diversity represented in these graduates. God is good! I presented an opening prayer and a short encouragement based on the farewell speech of Moses, “Today I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live”, from chapter 30 in the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy.
Speaking on behalf of the high school graduates, my daughter Gloria Akol said, “You are all capable of doing great things. I’m excited to see where your qualities and skills take you in life. I’d like to thank the team for granting me the opportunity to represent the decorated high school graduates within our community, and the community’s parents who encourage us to do our best.”
“This graduating class,” Gloria recalled, “faced the struggle of pushing through a pandemic and a summer full of social unrest, all while trying to maintain our academic performance and relationships with friends. But don’t forget – at just five years old, our young and easily distracted selves took on the challenge of being separated daily from our parents for the first time in our lives. We learned about math, science, the humanities, and the arts, all of which served as a catalyst in determining who we are as individuals and what motivates us to succeed. We also learned about friendship, and through trial and error learned the importance of maintaining relationships with people who are well-intentioned and act with our best interest in mind. For many, unfortunately, this was also when we learned about peer pressure and the other external factors that attempt to pull us off our track to success.”
News and Notes
Daughter of South Sudanese refugees wins place on U.S. Olympic track team
From the New York Times and The Trentonian 06/28/2021
Runner’s World
Athing Mu wins the 2021 800m Olympic Trial to qualify for Olympics
(From Runners World)
Athing Mu, the daughter born to South Sudanese refugee parents in Trenton, New Jersey, 19 years ago, came in first in her 800-meter Olympic trial race in Eugene, Oregon on June 27. Despite being clipped on the heel and falling early in the race, she took the lead and finished in 1:56.07 minutes, the second fastest time in U.S. track history. She will join the U.S. track team for the July Olympic games in Tokyo. Mu became a runner by following her brothers to the track. She’s one of seven children in a family who would often go running for fun together. After the Sunday night race, postponed because of extreme heat, she hugged some of them in the stands. According to The Oregonian, for as long as she can remember, Athing Mu always gave the same two answers when asked about what she wanted to be when she grew up: a professional athlete and an Olympian. Entering the trials, Mu was still holding onto her college eligibility, although she was considering going pro. Then, a couple of days before she competed, Mu announced that she had turned pro and signed a multiyear deal with Nike.
The Ma’di community in South Sudan mourns supreme leader
Eye Radio 06292021
Communication from Larry Duffee, AFRECS Board Member
The late Lopirigo Ambassador Angelo Voga has been described as an instrumental leader who played a key role in uniting his people/Courtesy photo.
The Ma’di community in South Sudan are mourning the death of their paramount chief locally known as the Lopirigo who passed on in a Kampala hospital at the age of 87. Local officials say Chief Angelo Voga Morgan succumbed to coronavirus on June 21.
The late Ma’di supreme leader had been living in Uganda after the 2016 conflict forced thousands of people, mostly from the Greater Equatoria region into refugee camps in Uganda.
He had served previously as Sudan’s ambassador to Zimbabwe.
“The late chief has been described by those who know him as an instrumental leader who played a key role in uniting his people. He was a respectful leader and when they elected him as the Lopirigo, a leader of the community, he was on the top of the issues of the community addressing their issues,” Emilio Igga, the former commissioner of Magwi County and defunct Pageri County, eulogized.
“It is really very sad that we lost him while still in refuge and this is peace time, we expected that he would come home to reconstruct the home together and now he is gone.” Mr. Igga says the late Amb. Voga “taught people how to live together.”
The Ma’di leaders say they are in discussion with the Ugandan government to allow them to return the body of their late leader for burial in his ancestral home.
A daughter of the late paramount chief, Suzan Kide Angelo Voga, lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia and is married to the treasurer of AFRECS, Lawrence R. Duffee. Duffee said, “My wife’s father served for many years as the Paramount Chief. My father (I never thought of reducing that by adding “in-law”) was a wonderful, kind, and intelligent man, a real leader not only for the Ma’di but the nation. Our father was very involved in the Anaya-1 movement and was one of the last surviving signatories to the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement. He was also involved in the second war for independence.”
The AFRECS Board expresses its heartfelt condolences to the Duffees and the Voga family.
Observations on the 10th Anniversary of South Sudan’s Independence
by the Honorable Nicholas Coghlan, retired ambassador of Canada to South Sudan
This article first appeared in Open Canada; an online magazine published by the Canadian International Council (CIC)
July 1 is Canada Day, July 4 is U.S. Independence Day, and July 9 marks the birth of a sovereign South Sudan in 2011. A retired Canadian ambassador to Sudan and South Sudan reflects.
Independence Day celebrations will be muted this year, and they should be. South Sudan is by most criteria a failed state. In few constructive senses is the government present for its citizens.
Yet Canadians should care, because South Sudan, more than any country emerging on the world map since the decolonization wave of the 1950s and 1960s, is a western creation. The United States was the midwife, with Britain and Norway in close support. But Canada — our government, our church groups, our aid workers, Canadian pilots even — was never far behind. If South Sudan is a failure, it is one we partly own.
“The beginning – midwives to a new country”
The first time I saw what would become the new country — then a territory in revolt against the detested jihadists of Khartoum (Sudan), where I ran Canada’s tiny diplomatic office — was in 2000. I’d flown north from Nairobi to the United Nations’ logistics base at Lokichogio, just inside Kenya but on the edge of rebel territory in southern Sudan. This was the control center for Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), an innovative arrangement by which the UN negotiated with both Khartoum and the rebel factions for air access into opposition-held territory, while coordinating the aid activities of forty non-governmental organizations.
Planes and aid supplies on the ground at Lokichogio in Kenya at the edge of rebel territory in Sudan, control center for international aid operations before independence.
If you were an aid worker, Loki — as the cognoscenti called it — was the place to be in those years. At dawn, a flight of white C-130 Hercules would roar out for the first round of food drops over southern Sudan at locations painstakingly negotiated over months. In the interval before they returned for a second run, you’d hear smaller Twin Otters and Buffaloes buzzing in and out, the Dakota belonging to the Christian charity Samaritan’s Purse, and Cessnas with the logos of Save The Children or Médecins Sans Frontières stenciled on their sides.
At the bars and canteens within the UN compound there was serious talk among the young expats of malnutrition rates, the latest famine predictions, the upcoming measles campaign — as well as the usual comparing of per diems. There were Canadians everywhere: glamorous bush pilot Heather Stewart — “All-Weather Heather” — was a legend in her own time.
There was no doubt who were the Good Guys and who were the Bad. I eavesdropped on a neighboring table at Murphy’s bar where a visiting American Congressman told of his hopes for his upcoming slave-redemption mission. He’d brought with him a million dollars in cash, raised by church groups in the southern U.S. and, in an encounter to be arranged and mediated by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), he would meet with Arab slave traders from the North to purchase the freedom of young boys and girls they had seized. At another table, pilots working for a Nordic relief agency were dropping the names of the rebel generals they’d just lifted from one front to another. UN staffers who tried to maintain a façade of neutrality were mocked. This was almost literally a crusade. If you were in any doubt, you might peruse the NGO noticeboards: one organization openly sought “evangelists.”
Aloft in a Hercules over a swamp-encircled village called Nhial, 1,000 km north of Lokichogio, my sense of slight unease was temporarily displaced by adrenaline. An airdrop (this one was Canadian funded) is an exhilarating experience. You strap in at the rear door. You feel the hot wind, the ground rushes past 150 meters below, the aircraft screams into a climb, and twelve tons of food roll by you.
View from the cockpit of a C-130 Hercules after an airdrop; the white sacks of grain that have been dropped can be seen in the center.
What could be more inspiring? Food for the starving — you surely couldn’t spend dollars any better than this. But then I made my way back to the cockpit as we made a final pass to check for accuracy. The pilot pointed down and off to one side. The engines were too loud for speech. I could see men in rebel uniform barging their way in, pushing the civilians to one side.
“The problem — more easily visible in hindsight — was that we were effectively running the place.”
The diversion of international aid was deeply problematic in the 1983-2005 Sudanese civil war. It allowed one side a distinct advantage and may well have contributed to its outcome. But blatant behavior of the kind I saw at Nhial was only part of the story.
Wherever I went on the ground in rebel-held territory, there were well-intentioned internationals delivering western-funded health, sanitation, and education projects. These programs were, I was happy to report to Ottawa, conscientiously administered and effective. The problem — more easily visible in hindsight — was that we were effectively running the place. The rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army were freed up simply to fight. There was no need for them to provide any services for their people. The khawajas (white people) would do that; we’d been doing it since 1983.
What if we had called their bluff and said, “Look after your own people”? Wouldn’t that have shortened the war? Probably not. The rebels had little sense of responsibility; hundreds of thousands would have died, and within a few months CNN coverage of starving babies would have forced us back in.
Unloading relief supplies in Jonglei State
Peace finally came in 2005, thanks largely to a deeply committed U.S. administration, supported by allies. There was, however, a major flaw in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the fighting. The party to which power was handed on a plate — the SPLM — was dominated by the Dinka ethnic group and far from representative of the country-to-be. But the supposed pragmatists in Washington and other western capitals won out over carping academics and “experts.” A deal was signed, the fighting ceased, and independence was in due course euphorically celebrated.
For a (very) short time, all went well. The oil money — at US$100 a barrel — poured in. When I returned to South Sudan as a diplomat at our new office in Juba in 2012, it was painfully evident nobody in the new government had any significant experience of administration. The few from the diaspora who had returned to offer their services were brushed off with a scornful question: “Where were you when we were fighting?” All that money wasn’t going anywhere useful. “It’s our time to eat” was the cynical catchphrase, as funds disappeared in a morass of corruption and to maintain the rag-tag, bloated, and idle army. Donors still present in Juba were aghast when nothing constructive happened.
One day, I suggested to the minister of health that he should try to get more money from his treasury than the paltry 1.2 per cent allocated to his sector in the national budget. He shrugged as if in sympathy, then said: “But you see, Mr. Nicholas, when I go to the finance minister, he says ‘Don’t worry. The donors will pay. They always do.’” This was while the government was spending its own money buying helicopter gunships. We were being subjected to the same kind of blackmail as under Operation Lifeline Sudan, years before. As the president succinctly and without apparent irony put it to a top visiting U.S. diplomat, “Well of course you can suspend your assistance. But, you see, that won’t make any difference to me.”
There was one promising development. Donor governments labored with the Juba administration to develop a Compact: a mutually agreed, prioritized set of objectives and benchmarks that would tie aid dollars to matching input from the Government of South Sudan. Following a countrywide consultation, the first draft of the Compact listed internal reconciliation as the top objective, with disarmament/demobilization of the armed forces in second place. Canada was among the very few to consider funding reconciliation projects — too “touchy-feely” for most. Nobody seemed prepared to contemplate disarmament. The cost would run into the billions of dollars, and a large part of the program (the redevelopment of a small professional army) would in no way qualify as humanitarian aid — making funding it a tough sell for donor populations.
One more serious problem on Juba’s side: the government was unwilling to float the currency to allow donor dollars to attain real purchasing power. A well-connected few in cabinet were making a financial killing out of the artificial controls.
Soon all became moot. In December 2013 the massive, poorly integrated army split on largely ethnic lines, old rivalries were renewed, and civil war in South Sudan began. The international aid community briefly evacuated at the outbreak of conflict, then returned in greater force than ever. The Canadians came back, too, staffing NGOs and UN offices. Juba is now also home to Canada’s largest contingent anywhere of UN peacekeepers (a rather modest ten soldiers). In many ways we’re back to where we were when South Sudan first became a country, but with none of the optimism.
“Diplomats and aid workers are very bad at learning lessons.”
What’s to be done now? Diplomats and aid workers are very bad at learning lessons. We rotate in and out for laughably short periods. Two years after the 2013 civil war in South Sudan started, I was the only diplomat on the ground who had been there when it began. I spent a lot of time explaining things to new arrivals. So, the first, painfully obvious lesson: study the history, listen to the experts, don’t repeat the old and documented mistakes.
Ambassador Coghlan accompanying Lt Gen (r) Romeo Dallaire on a mission to expedite the release of child soldiers, Jonglei State, 2015
The second lesson is: as long as outside donors are pouring money into the country (Canada gave $98 million in 2019–2020), we have to hold the host government — which we are effectively propping up — to account. We need to know where South Sudan’s significant oil revenue is being spent and why more is not going to services. This is not an intrusive demand. Such transparency is stipulated in the agreement between the government and rebel factions that finally ended the South Sudan civil war in 2018.
More delicate, but equally necessary, is a reckoning for the atrocities committed by all sides in nearly sixty years of war in this land. The government has committed to a hybrid (i.e., part South Sudanese) court but drags its feet. The pressure point here should be the African Union.
The international community procrastinated fatally in not pushing reconciliation and demobilization, which were priorities identified in the Compact by South Sudan’s people and government. A progressive and fair means of moving ahead now would be a revised Compact: the Juba government matches our dollars, and we together implement programs we all agree are a priority, with verifiable benchmarks.
Ultimately there is only so much that we, as outsiders, can and should do here. If South Sudan is to succeed, it will not be as a neo-colonial project; it will depend above all on the South Sudanese demanding better things of their current feckless leadership. Today delivery of western aid needs to be not just for, but by, South Sudanese. As host to one of the larger South Sudanese diasporas, Canada perhaps holds a largely untapped reserve of expertise here.
Comments and questions in response to this article are welcome comment to my e-mail at bosun_bird@yahoo.ca. Twitter handle @NicholasCoghlan
THANK YOU FOR LENDING A HELPING HAND!
We are deeply that grateful that contributions from you, our supporters, continue to nurture AFRECS in expanding our impact. You make a difference in the essential peacebuilding work of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan. We hope you will consider extending the hand of friendship with another gift — of whatever you can afford in this time of COVID and increasing disruption. You can contribute online at https://afrecs.org or send a check made out to AFRECS to P.O. Box 3327, Alexandria, VA 22302
Please Note: AFRECS’ former address c/o Virginia Theological Seminary is no longer valid.
This issue of the AFRECS E-Blast was compiled by Board members Caroline Klam and Richard Jones.
AFRECS Editors encourage readers to submit their news for publication. The next deadline is July 6, 2021, please submit your news to Caroline Klam at klamcd21@gmail.com.