The Martyrs’ Day: Kerubino Kuanyin Bol (Mang’ook)’s Obituary–1999
13 min readSlain Sudanese Warlord Mourned by His 10 Wives
EAST AFRICAN
September 22 – September 28, 1999
A JOINT REPORT
TO SOME, Sudanese warlord Major-General Kerubino Kuanyin Bol was a psychotic killer. But to his 10 wives and dozens of children, he was a loving husband and father who provided for their every need.
Bol, 51, thought to have fired the first shot in Sudans 16-year civil war, was killed last week in a mutiny by a disaffected commander of the Sudan People’s Liberation Front.
His death was greeted with delight by aid workers who said he was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in his home province of Bahr el Ghazal in a brutal three-year terror campaign.
They also blame him for last years famine in which at least 60,000 people who had fled his militia died of starvation and disease.
But at his large home in an exclusive Nairobi estate last week, his wives wept and embraced as they prepared goat, chicken and vats of rice for his funeral service.
A group of some of his four dozen children sat and watched satellite television, while the older ones helped unload crates of beer from the back of a truck.
“My father was a brave man. He fought a lot but he taught us how to respect other people and to love other people,” said Bols eldest son, 24-year-old Malang Kerubino, who was educated in Cuba alongside the sons of rebel leaders from all over the world.
“Some people said they hated him but politics is a very dirty game.
His family and supporters said they were convinced that Bol was assassinated but by whom they had yet to determine.
Bol swapped sides several times in Sudans civil war — which in its broadest terms pits the Islamist government against Christian and animist rebels in the south.
When he died he was on poor terms with both the government and the main rebel group the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA).
“We are sure he was assassinated,” said Commander Amon Wantuk. “But we have yet to determine the facts. He could be a victim of various conspiracies.”
The privately-owned Al-Sahafa newspaper quoted Mr Mohamed al-Amin, secretary of the political affairs department in the ruling National Islamic Salvation Front, as saying Bol, 51, had been killed by the forces of renegade commander Peter Gadiet.
Mr Amin said neither the Sudanese Islam-based government nor Matip had any hand in Bols death.
Bol was one of the founders of the SPLA, which has been fighting the government since 1983 for political and religious freedom for the mainly Christian and animist people of the south.
But, like other rebel commanders, he changed sides several times. For three years he held sway over his home region of northern Bahr el-Ghazal. .
After a long stint on the government side, Bol switched allegiance again in January 1998, briefly seizing Wau, the main town in Bahr el-Ghazal, from government forces.
Bol never regained the trust of SPLA leader John Garang and last year was accused of plotting to assassinate him in Nairobi.
The chubby, bespectacled Bol never far from his silver-topped shooting stick had kept a low profile in recent months and sought refuge in the home of Matip, in the neighbouring southern province of Western Upper Nile.
Maj-Gen Bol’s death brings to an end the life of a man who was an important factor, both positive and negative, in the liberation struggle of the people of south Sudan against the oppression and domination of the regime in Khartoum.
The name of the then Major in the Sudanese army, Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, first came to prominence in southern Sudan when he fired and shot the first bullet against the regime of Gaafar Mohammed Nimeri in Bor town on May 16,1983.
The circumstance of Maj-Gen Bol’s death are reflective of the intricacies of the politics of liberation in south Sudan and the power struggle that has marred it since the inception of the Movement. It may not be possible at this stage to count him among the fallen heroes of the struggle for freedom and independence in south Sudan. This is because, apart from the fact that he fell on the wrong side, more often than not he had been responsible for many disruptions which cumulatively retarded the cause of liberation.
Maj-Gen Bol was the deputy of Col Dr John Garang de Mabior until July 1987, when he was arrested and detained for insubordination and administrative indiscipline. He remained in detention until his escape from jail in late 1992.
In March 1993, Maj-Gen Bol and his group of ex-political detainees, the late William Nyuon Bany and his splinter group known as SPLM/A Forces of Unity and Democracy and Riek Machar’s SPLM/A Nasir faction (named after Nasir town where the failed coup to oust Garang was staged in August 1991), coalesced to form what was then known as SPLM/A-United.
Maj-Gen Bol was not only a very controversial personality; he precipitated a political crisis at the level of the Movement’s leadership resulting in his re-defection back to the NIF regime engineered by the regime’s agents in Nairobi.
In October 1998, the Muthangari Police Station in Nairobi witnessed a shootout between supporters of Maj-Gen Bol and Dr Garang resulting in the death of one person
When the dust of the Nairobi episode settled and things started to move again, Maj-Gen Bol had relocated to Mankien, where he was hosted by Maj-General Paulino Matip and where he met his death last week.
http://www.mail-archive.com/ugandanet@kym.net/msg21048.html
Obituary: Kerubino Kuanyin Bol
KERUBINO KUANYIN BOL was a flamboyant, trigger-happy southern Sudanese soldier best remembered for supposedly firing the first rebellious shot when the imposition of Islamic Sharia law in September 1983 triggered a second round of civil warfare in the undeveloped, largely animist and Christian southern regions of the Republic of Sudan.
Kerubino was born into a simple Dinka family of mixed farmers in Twic county in Bahr al Ghazal province in 1948 – along with many Africans of those times, his exact date of birth is not recalled – during the uncertain closing years of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium.
Especially in the south, that political arrangement was largely symbolic and real influence was wielded by expatriate colonial commissioners and missionaries. They disliked and often despised the northern political movements and leaders and, instead of actively promoting internal self-government, as often as not maintained an introverted paternal authoritarianism which did nothing to help prepare the population for independence.
Kerubino attended a Roman Catholic mission primary school and passed on to the intermediate level. Those were anxious days for bright young men such as him who worried what the future might bring. That Sudan was to be the first of the new independent nations of Africa meant less to him than the imminent reimposition of “Arab” and Islamic influence – even dominance – in his region which he had been conditioned to dread.
Despite talk of federation, in 1955, the year preceding national independence, a battalion of southern soldiery mutinied and the era of civil conflict was born. Along with many of his age, Kerubino at once abandoned formal education to enlist with the rebel southerners – the Anya Nya – and fight for the independence of southern Sudan.
In Khartoum, the capital in the north, governments both civil and military came and went, but civil war dragged on until the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 granted regional autonomy to the south. Kerubino opted to stay on in the reconstituted armed forces. Sadly, in 1983, revisions of the Sudanese state framework and patterns of government, coupled with the rising influence of the Islamic factor in national politics, caused the fragile peace to break down.
Ensuing troubles were by no means confined to the south, but on 4 June 1983 an army officer, Col Dr John Garang de Mabior, a Dinka like Kerubino, led the garrison at Bor in another mutiny and, on 16 October at Itang, formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement and Army (SPLM/SPLA).
Kerubino, as a lieutenant-colonel, complete with a shooting stick with a silver handle, was soon prominent as an SPLA field commander. By this time he had transferred several of his wives and many of his children to a compound in Nairobi, in Kenya, where he would on occasion meet the foreign press.
In 1986, after the overthrow of President Gaafer Mohamed Nimieri, another attempt to bring peace took place, this time at one of the former emperor Haile Selassie’s old residences at Koka Dam, Ethiopia. Along with Awad El Karim Mohamed, Secretary-General of the National Alliance of the Sudan, Kerubino countersigned the declaration as “deputy commander-in-chief SPLA and deputy chairman SPLM provisional executive committee”.
A lasting settlement proved elusive and, in 1987, Kerubino led SPLA forces north and succeeded in capturing a string of towns in Blue Nile Province. Deceived by the ease by which he had defeated government forces, he aspired, it is believed, to seize the SPLM leadership by ousting Garang, but his conspiracy was betrayed: he was arrested and spent six uncomfortable years in a necessarily itinerant guerrilla prison.
By 1992, when he managed to escape, serious divisions had developed within the SPLA and Kerubino decided to throw in his lot with a group of so-called “renegades” who co-operated with a “Peace from Within” initiative sponsored by the Sudanese government. Eventually a “peace agreement” was signed and a co-ordinating council for the south was set up only for Kerubino to disagree with the composition of the proposed regional government.
The regime sought to establish him as a leader in his – and Garang’s – home province, but the Dinka largely rejected him and even Dinka youth, recruited from displaced persons encamped around Khartoum, abandoned his militia and left for their own villages. Meantime the turmoil and mayhem this caused greatly exacerbated famine in the region and subsequent deaths were estimated to have exceeded 60,000. Kerubino’s responsibility was heavy.
In January 1998, forces under Kerubino’s command briefly seized Wau, the main town in Bahr al Ghazal, on the strength of which, ever impulsive and governed by whims, he promptly applied to rejoin the SPLA. His decision was welcomed by Garang, but he was attached to headquarters rather than being given a top field appointment.
Angered, in no time at all he once again offered his services and sword to the ruling National Congress in Khartoum, where the regime’s intelligence chiefs pride themselves on their undoubted ability to harness divisive ethnic tensions in support of their political masters.
In 1998, Kerubino came to be accused by some of plotting to assassinate Garang on one of the latter’s visits to Nairobi for IGAD (Intergovernmental Agency for Development) peace talks. Earlier this year, back in Sudan, he attached himself to the South Sudan United Army, a pro-government militia led by one Paulino Matip. However the latter fell out with Peter Gadiet, yet another renegade commander, and in ensuing internecine struggles, Kerubino Kuanyin Bol was shot.
The exact circumstances of his death are murky and unlikely to affect any eventual outcome of the ongoing civil strife in Sudan. Kerubino’s impetuous opportunism had long since discredited him even as a Dinka warrior. His own vanity apart, few ever ranked him as a national leader in Sudan. Yet he was undoubtedly a sad and wasted product of the unresolved cultural, historic and religious divisions that continue to deny a decent life to the troubled citizens of one of this world’s most hospitable nations.
He took several wives and had more than 20 children.
Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, soldier: born Twic, Sudan 1948; died Mankin, Sudan 10 September 1999.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-kerubino-kuanyin-bol-1121378.html
Kerubino’s Background Leading up to Wau
Kerubino, a founder of the SPLA, was held by SPLA Commander-in-Chief John Garang in prolonged arbitrary detention from 1987 to 1992, for allegedly having plotted a coup against Garang.3 He, his deputy Faustino Atem Gualdit, Arok Thon Arok,4 and other former SPLA commanders escaped south to Uganda in late 1992, where they eventually were recognized as refugees. They made their way to Kenya where they joined an SPLA breakaway faction formed in 1991 and headed by former SPLA Commander Riek Machar, a movement later called the South Sudan Independence Movement/Army (SSIM/A).5
Kerubino proceeded to recruit followers from among his own Dinka of Bahr El Ghazal (he was born in Paywayi in Bahr El Ghazal and went to school in nearby Gogrial6) and formed a separate fighting force based close to the government garrison town, Gogrial. His alliance with the government of Sudan dated from 1994; he was expelled by Riek Machar from his rebel force (then SSIM/A) in January 1995 for that reason.7 From 1994-97, he fought the SPLA, but mainly inflicted substantial damage on his own people in Twic, Abyei, and Gogrial counties, parts of Aweil East, and south into Wau County, all in Bahr El Ghazal. While the SPLA had support from local Dinka chiefs and people in Bahr El Ghazal, Kerubino, allied with the AArabs,@ did not.
Riek and Kerubino were reunited in the SSIM/A upon signing the Political Charter with the government in April 1996. They were the only ones to sign for the rebels.8 In this charter the parties pledged to end the civil war, and to conduct a referendum, Aafter full establishment of peace@ and at the end of an interim period, Ato determine the political aspirations@ of the people of southern Sudan.9 On April 21, 1997, that charter was incorporated into a Peace Agreement with the government, which Kerubino signed as Commander-in-Chief of SPLM/A (Bahr El Ghazal). Among the former SPLA commanders who signed the Peace Agreement, Riek and Kerubino were the ones who actually headed fighting forces. In 1997, Kerubino relocated his forces close to Wau.
Wau in 1997
Wau, the second largest town in the south, with an estimated population of 120,000 at the end of 1997,10 was tense from the time that the SPLA, in a surprise move in May-June 1997, captured three towns on the road leading northwest to Wau: Tonj (only sixty miles to the southeast of Wau), Rumbek, and Yirol.11 This campaign rolled on from a major March 1997 SPLA offensive from the Ugandan border in which Yei was captured and thousands of Sudan government troops (and their Ugandan rebel protégés, the West Nile Bank Front based in government-controlled southern Sudan) were killed or captured.12
One high-ranking Wau civil servant described the panic in Wau at the fall of Tonj:
When the government forces went to Tonj [to fight the SPLA in April 1997] the people in Wau thought that the government forces were so huge that none could defeat them. They were defeated by the SPLA and there was panic in Wau. We found out about the defeat when the soldiers ran back to Wau.
First to run back was the BM [multiple rocket launcher firing 122 mm rockets singly or in a salvo], mounted on a truck. Other soldiers came on swollen feet, wounded. The northerners wanted to run away. If the SPLA forces in Tonj had gone to Wau then, Wau would have fallen. The northerners took their families by air to Khartoum, even the senior officers.13
In May 1997 Kerubino fought the SPLA in and around Gogrial (one hundred kilometers northeast of Wau), and succeeded in preventing the SPLA from capturing this garrison town. One Wau resident said this fighting came close enough to Wau so that those in Wau could hear the sound of heavy guns. They also heard rumors of hundreds of people killed, Dinka on both sides. In one opinion, “Kerubino certainly did a favor for the government by stopping the SPLA from taking Wau at that time. Kerubino defended the Arabs by killing his own people.”14 However, the SPLA succeeded in May 1997 in capturing Wunrok to the northeast of Gogrial;15 Wunrok had been a Kerubino stronghold until then, and was the place where he held an ICRC plane and crew hostage in late 1996.16
After Tonj fell in May 1997, the governor of Western Bahr El Ghazal state, Ali Tamim Fartak, said, “All in the state are currently in a state of maximum alert. . . . The government, the national peace forces in the state and forces of Kerubino Kwanyin [sic] are (gathered) in one bunker for the defense of the nation.”17 The government made it very difficult for men to leave Wau for outlying rural areas; women were permitted to leave and return after a thorough search.18 The SPLA also detained some people leaving Wau; there are reports that displaced in the camps on the outskirts of Wau limited their movement due to SPLA attacks on the more venturesome.19 All these factors made it hard to cultivate beyond the perimeter of Wau. The same appeared to be true in other government villages; in the small village of Ariath on the railway north of Aweil residents feared venturing out of the narrow secure radius to cultivate because of the SPLA, limiting their economic recovery.20
After May 1997, some educated Dinka who held positions as government officials defected to the SPLA from Wau, disappearing to the other side. These included two of the very few medical doctors in Wau,21 and Dr. Martin Marial, dean of the college of education and vice chancellor of the University of Bahr El Ghazal.22
The security situation in Wau, tense since the SPLA victories in April and May 1997, worsened in October, when there was an SPLA mortar attack on Wau. Starting in November 1997 there was shooting nightly in Wau, either by nervous government forces or in exchanges of fire with the SPLA. The military supply train, so notorious and so vital to the garrison town of Wau, reached Wau in October 1997, stayed a few weeks, and moved north from Wau in late October, with six closed cars.23
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