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| Gen. Paul Malong in Military Uniform. Photo: Anthony Chimir |
President Kiir has made
another shake-up, this time in the military. The army’s chief of general staff, James Hoth Mai, and the head of military intelligence, Major General Mac Paul
Kuol, were relieved and respectively replaced by Gen. Paul Malong Awan (former governor of
Northern Bahr el Ghazal) and Gen. Marial Nuor Jok, who previously served in a
different capacity as Major General of the Police force.
The appearance of these
military men at the war front in South Sudan, per the unending presidential
decrees, has frozen the marrows for some people. To some, they will be the
dreaded exterminators or genocideurs; to others, they come to instill discipline
as well as manage army operations with less frustration in areas where
skirmishes are still ongoing with the rebels. Yet, those who are not satisfied with
blood-spill are looking and unearthing the geographies of births of these men,
geographies that were unquestionable throughout their careers as army
commanders. This is a note of proof to those who see the war in South Sudan as being driven by ethnic undertone because the appointment of leaders is not evaluated on their capabilities, experiences, or qualifications, but where people come from in terms of ethnic origin.
Treading fairly, the
two generals are not the monsters that people should fear, at least in my view.
On this note, and in situations where the mind stands conditioned to terror and
fear, I love reading from the book by Wafa Sultan: A God Who Hates: The
Courageous Woman Who Inflamed the Muslim World Speaks Out Against the Evils of
Islam. Wafa cautions that the object of our fear can be huge or minutiae depending on our mental abstracted constructions. A prominent American tele-evangelist, Joel Osteen, preaches too that fear blows out of proportional circumstances that are otherwise manageable. Like Wafa, he denounces giving in to fear for in doing so, we are imploring the greatest power in the universe to make the subject matter of our fears come to pass.
In Malong and Marial
Nuor, I think people have the 'ogres' they know little about. One might be
wrong. However, if the witticism of 'highly decorated military general,' often
used by ethnic followers of these generals, has any meaning in the history of the
SPLA/M, then the two newly appointed leaders as Chief of Staff and Military Intelligence, respectively, have never passed with distinctions in the army's popularization
of titles in South Sudan.
To assume, therefore,
that they will be likely bloodier than the rebel general who captured Bentiu and shocked the world with grisly bodies of massacred civilians
in cold blood; or the leader of the youth who attacked the UN Compound in Bor killing several unarmed people; or the dreaded Peter Gadet Yak, the man whose opportunism is solidified in blood-letting, is to christen them into
bad boys; a stance they would humanely opt-out of in their new leadership
assignments. It will be wise not to sing death into the ears of these appointed leaders before reading their true books of deeds unless the flow
of blood 'opiumises' the spirits for those who do so.
If anyone has traveled
in the zones of operations of the two army strongmen, Marial and Malong, one would agree to the
fact that even David Yau Yau (who recently signed peace with the government and
winning a special administrative consideration for his people in the troubled state
of Jonglei) and Ismael Konyi (a notorious Sudanese government
counter-insurgency militia leader of the 1990s) was more brutish than the two
were. Now is the time for history to record their deeds one by one.
Finally, as the violence had become a commitment of killing each other in order to become one strong country, and not to split up into nations of ethnic identities, the game of
innocence must therefore end. Both the rebels and the government must not freeze
themselves in the corners of 'playing the good diplomat,' as expected of the government
and 'becoming aggressive in order to be pleased,' as always hoped by the rebels. If the objective
in the overall differences in the war is to make a prosperous and peaceful
country, then it is time for each party to own up to the atrocities so that a solution for ending the killing in the country is found.
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