Dealing with Border Aggressions

War of Survival

South Sudan will continue to fight wars of survival with Khartoum as long as they share the borders. This must be taken in cognizance with the actuality of the current war at the borders and with all the seriousness for what our history of wars with Sudan indicates. There are indications as to why this is not just a whimsical fantasia but also a reality to be given considerable weight in order to guarantee survival.

Khartoum's goal will always be to drag South Sudan down into wars of attrition, as Sudan’s President recently expressed, or real wars of annihilation as we have always seen in the Sudan government’s strategy of targeting civilians rather than the military or armed rebels in events of armed conflicts. History must teach us what to do when you have an enemy that wants to do away with your existence. 

During the Second World War, the Jews were the victims of hate for reasons that were not ordinary but illusory. Their survival was either in their hands and that of their God or in the hands of anti-Semitic. As history proved, the Nazis were literally annihilating the Jewish nation. Nazi ideology was based on illusionary Nazi imagination, which purported an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world as opposed to the quest of the Aryan race. Even before the Devine could intervene, the Jewish race has, for all times to be remembered, suffered the most horrific tragedy in history in the hands of those who thought they were the right race to rule and inhabit the world.

When God, so be it, finally abetted their sudden extinction, and helped them achieved their independence and reclamation of their homeland, the loss of life among the Jewish people was in millions. In fact, evidence shows that about 6 million Jews of the nine million that lived in Europe prior to the holocaust perished by means of brutality.

Today, the world lives in the bad memories of the holocaust that befell the Israeli people. Israel as a nation went on to battle all the neighboring countries, including Egypt and Sudan for her survival in the Holy Land. It is a common fact that all countries surrounding Israel are her enemies. They have proven this in 1948, 1967, and 1974 Arab-Israeli wars. In all cases, Israel, with the determination from the learned experience, has emerged victorious.

Presently, the tiniest geography of what is Israel is one of the strongest among the nations of the world. However, its survival is still in their hands. And they have never failed to be vigilant on this potential and imposed end time on them. As a matter of survival, Israel remains the world’s number one vigilant nation. It has developed her capability and aligned it with the possibility of being targeted by their enemies anytime. They have even acquired nuclear weapons for this reason. Can South Sudan learn from this?

Destruction of human life

South Sudan has a lot to learn from the Israeli defensive mindset. To begin with, the Sudanese civil war had taken almost half a century ending in the time of South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Unlike Jews who have spent hundreds of years in exile, South Sudanese have realistic misfortunes to share with the Jewish nation. Many South Sudanese have been forced away from their homes just like the Jewish people. The difference is in the lengths of time, but equally, exile and suffering are our shared identity.

The convoluted wars in Sudan were in the frequency of two periods, much to the detriment of South Sudan and in which many southerners lost millions of souls. Livelihood was destroyed beyond any comparison in human history in South Sudan than in the North. The Any Anya I war, known as the First Sudanese Civil War, took seventeen torturous years and claimed 500 000 lives. Of these deaths, 400 000 were civilians and 100 000 were men and women comrades in arms. In the War of New Sudan, mostly referred to as the Second Sudanese Civil War, twenty million South Sudanese were killed. Analysts believe many of these were innocent women and children. Effectively, South Sudan had lost 2.5million people of its population of approximately ten million people. This could be more.

In the Nuba Mountain in the 1990s, the government sealed off the area to the outside world and began an indiscriminate bombing of the area in order to annihilate the Nuba people. The death toll was immeasurably high, and so were the displaced people. The government ensured there was no rest for the people to embark on farming drudgery, and farms remained fallow all year round. The government of the people intentionally imposed food shortages, death, and malnutrition on its own people. Had it not been for the international humanitarian intervention, Nuba would look different today.

Just recently in 2012, the governor of Southern Kordufan State was very well captured on video left behind by a fleeing Sudanese army commander in which he was advising his soldiers to kill, eat clean and take no prisoners because they did not have room for them. The people he was referring to were both rebel soldiers and civilians alike. Such was the command, cold-bloodedly aimed at annihilating the people and leaving behind only the land. The Sudanese government, when it comes to the non-Arab population, is always not interested in the people but the land. As seen in the events over the years, the Sudan government would rather resettle foreigners of Arab origin in Sudan than improving the situation of the African owners of the land.

Recurringly, in the 1990s, the government of Sudan was fortunate to have its national budget boosted by oil revenue. The sudden financial geyser enabled it to purchase very sophisticated weapons and embarked on the mission of annihilation of the people opposed to its values. Firstly, the SPLA soldiers were the first to be bombed with chemical bombs. There are people in South Sudan today who have been maimed and their health affected on a long-term basis by these weapons. Unlucky ones have died as a result of such unmerciful use of such lethal weapons. As usual, with government imposition of no-fly zones, such atrocities have not been witnessed internationally.

Equally appalling in the 1980s, 1990s, and early in the first quarter of this decade, the same principle of annihilation was applied in South Sudan when the government used the Rezeigat and the Baggara to carry out a scorched-earth policy that left the entire regions of what are today the states of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Warrap and Abyei in complete devastation and with high cost in human lives. The aim was to kill all the people in these areas and if some escape death by the bullet, then they are denied all means of survivability through destruction of property.

So, the wars that the government of Sudan fight with the areas that are marginalized are to the marginalized: wars to change the injustices and demanding the change of government in Khartoum so that they usher in a responsible government that would take care and treat all people of the Sudan equally and humanely; and to the government of Sudan, the are wars to terminate and annihilate the dissenting and unwanted peoples.

Such is the paradox that international peacemakers often found it hard to bring the government of Sudan to the negotiations with the disenfranchised and disgruntled groups. The visions for peace are often parallel – the people that want to live and the government that wants to summarily annihilate them.  Circumstances of this nature could only mean - to Sudan government - that peace with anyone is a serious delay in accomplishing its mission.

With the agendum of annihilation of the African people in mind, it would be erroneous to think that war had ended in Sudan in 2005. Failure to recognize this anomaly calls attention to the failure to see and find out the motives that are responsible for the sporadic continuation of violence in Darfur, Blue Nile, Eastern Sudan, and along the borders with South Sudan. Sudan will never be in peace in the long term. The Sudanese government war adventure is a known element. Even where the justifications for war are not clear, the Sudan government will, in the eleventh hour, find a reason to fight with the country’s periphery. It is through violence that Sudan’s governments had been able to maintain power since independence; without which the populace would overthrow them over gross misrule.

In the ongoing skirmishes in Panthou, questioned why the army has not been able to dislodge the South Sudanese armed forces in the area, the Sudanese army spokesman said they were simply annihilating the S. Sudan army after which they will enter the town. It is all about finishing the people off. In the wake of the capture of Panthou by South Sudan armed forces, several voices in Khartoum, including that of the president, lamented and pre-empted the destruction of South Sudan. Top army generals and even president Bashir himself echoed and voiced annihilation rhetoric, saying that there would be destruction in the South. The aim here is not to solve the problem for which the South Sudanese army attacked the area, or the willingness to retake it; the annihilation strategy kicked in and the matter is thus, sealed in the destruction scorn. It beats logic why Sudan underrated South Sudan as a country capable of causing equal destruction to its enemies.

If we look at the fundamental reason behind the arrogance, reckless destruction of lives, continuous defiance to international peacemakers, it would be easy to understand that there is a surreptitious agendum that cannot be simply ascribed to resources, religion, or any kind of national layback on the political dispensation involving the periphery in Sudan. It is much more. It is an annihilation scheme. Sudan’s Arab descendants want to rid Sudan of the black African identity. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the subsequent independence of South Sudan in 2011 helped thwarted the tempo of the agendum of annihilation for Khartoum’s jihadist zealots. They have however got what they wanted today. The international community in the name of the UN, EU, AU have given Khartoum the ticket of annihilation by blaming South Sudan for taking measures of self-defense and reclaimed its territory.

There has been a wrong attribution to the Sudanese state all along. Conflicts in Sudan have been perceived rather incorrectly hence giving dictatorial regimes in Khartoum leverage to having a heavy hand on the people of the peripheries. Such perceptions had failed to correctly construe the theme of the Sudanese conflicts often orchestrated by North Sudan. North Sudan simply sees the vast swath of land south of its borders as the potential resources hub, and the people there have to be annihilated and the resources taken away. Therefore, South Sudanese should not ignore this potential for war. Many scholars such as Francis Mading Deng, Amir H. Idris, Ali Mazrui, and others have written about war syndrome in Sudan in a more subtle academic leniency. They denote it as the conflict of identity, religion, resources, and other attestations.

This misnomer stands in the way of providing the public and international community with the correct casus belli for the unending wars between the north and South Sudan. The status of the Sudanese state and the long-term ambition it has set itself to achieve is clearly wrapped in the attitude to annihilate the people with African ancestry from the country. The Sudan government, in continuing to be irksome and ruthless with the population is an indication of a clandestine operation aimed at denying others an existence.