In Honor of Late brother, Comrade, Maj. Diing Chan Awuol (aka Isaiah Abraham)!.

Thursday, December 06, 2012

By Lwal Baguoot Kiir:

From an onset, my heartfelt condolences to the bereaved family and my sincere apology in advance for writing about the deceased without seeking your consent. As he was a beloved son to you, he was equally a dear public servant to thousands of South Sudanese he had inspired with powerful words he penned on paper. I fully understand the excruciating pain and paralyzing despair that comes with losing a loved one; especially of brother Diing’s quality, who was senselessly and defenselessly killed by cruel and callous cowards, but I also doubt not your strength that, you will overcome this sad day by treasuring and honoring the ever shinning legacy of brother, Maj. Diing Chan Awuol. Your beloved son, Maj. Diing was a true patriot by the sense of word, and so, I’m writing these words with a heavy heart, not that they will assuage the pains you are suffering from in any meaningful way, but just expressing and sharing with you my sadness in a smallest possible.

On Wednesday, December 05, 2012, people inside South Sudan and South Sudanese all around the world, woke up to a shockingly devastating news that an enigmatic (at least to those who did not know his family given names as Diing Chan Awuol) popular writer, commentator, blogger, and a shrewd political analyst, whose pen names were Isaiah Abraham, has been gunned down at dawn in Juba, South Sudan, by unknown assailant(s) or killer(s). Those of us, who have come to learn of your family given names as Diing Chan Awuol just hours after you’ve passed away and, now writing posthumous words of praise about your unmatched patriotic and selfless work, knew you simply as Isaiah Abraham of Sudan Tribune and other media publications; a gentleman whose daily cutting edge analysis and commentary on the most important national issues of the our time made you a household living room’s name.  I doubt you knew the magnitude of thinking and mental impacts your writings have had on thousands of South Sudanese who silently logged onto computers daily wherever they are, sifting through garbage of articles in search of a stimulating and thoughts provoking opinion piece or analysis Isaiah Abraham might have written last night. Unfortunately, that was never to be true again yesterday when our hearts were sunken by the bitter news about your horrific killing in Juba, by none other than the very same people you proudly called my fellow countrymen.

Admittedly, there were times I suspected you might have been one of those well connected oiled fellows in Juba doing double advocacy and, I started asking myself questions like; who is this fellow, what does he thinks he is doing, and where does he find the time to write always in defiance of the madness which has engulfed and consumed Juba? Yet, I would find the answers to my questions next day in the next articles you’ve written that you were just a harmless fellow fulfilling a national call or duty. It was then that I realized and became convinced that you were not one of those post-CPA petro-dollars built and empowered gentlemen mooching aimlessly in Juba. I genuinely believe you were a self-made gentleman who has worked tirelessly and diligently hard—at least for the few years I have been a passionate admirer and consumer of your writings laying down the groundwork for a better tomorrow.

The great Frantz Fanon once said “each generation must out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it”. This quote is ever more meaningful today when the nation you wholeheartedly loved mourns you while also commending in your long sleep; the passion, confidence, self-belief, compassion, and dedication to public service, which is a mission and purpose that you discovered out of the rubbles of Civil War, but, a mission that which you never betrayed, but fulfilled, despite that it sadly betrayed you by taking away your dear life. As someone who had fallen in love with your writings, I assure you that ideas advocated by self-empowered individuals like you will always live on beyond the days of those who ended your life, for one of the Africa’s beloved sons, Steve Biko, spoke these ever refreshing words that a man should better die for an idea that will always live, than to live for an idea that will die. And as he correctly foretold, Steve Biko surely died for an idea which has lived on far beyond the glorious days of his killers, and so will the indelible memories you have left with us.

Your writings truly embodied and epitomized the greatness we all aspire to as we chart a national identity that’s strictly and firmly exceptional to South Sudan. One that which transcends our ethnic divide, gender, age, educational and economic statuses, and all barriers inhibiting our collective progress as people whose bonds should be cemented together by the precious bloods of patriots like you, among millions of others. Perhaps, like thousands of South Sudanese you’ve inspired, I never knew the ethnic community you were a member of, however, your intellectual acumen was so inspiring and futuristic to the extent that I cared less inquiring if the Biblically double sounding names: Isaiah Abraham, were real or just pen names like so many young South Sudanese intellectuals are doing nowadays to void meeting the same fate as yours. Now, this illustrates how much your writings were deeply cutting into the minds of those who cherish the importance of being a member or citizen of a country that respects, values, accepts, and celebrates the power of knowledge and transformative ideas, not parochialism and petty wrangling over allocation of political shares.  And even though we today remain a bitterly and dangerously divided and polarized society on the spectrum of ethnic politics and dit e piou (a Jieng word for greediness), the presence of few sensible and rational voices like you in public domain provided at least a daily dose of relief that our best days are yet ahead.  Therefore, tearing ourselves apart at a time of petro-dollars is doing disservices to millions of men and women watching upon us in their unmarked graves, which are inhumanly scattered across the vast plains, on top of mountains, and in the ever hungry belly of our beloved mother: River Nile.

Whether someone bitterly disagreed with your political views, daily commentary, and analysis of the real issues affecting South Sudan, it was never a sufficient reason to take away the life of such a shrewdly intellectually gifted brother like you! Nevertheless,it was neither your knack, sharp intellectual prose, and the pace with which you wrote nor the credibility and veracity of the materials you always fed us with that made you an intellectual darling to South Sudanese from all walks of life, but the passionate for what you did, confidence and belief in how you did it, and compassion and dedication to make a little difference by using the only small, yet an effective tool you had: Sharing and spreading knowledge through media publications about the real issues of our time and that of the posterity.

Thus, like all the comrades who have gone before you, you took an assassin bullet for being a voice of the voiceless, and speaking up bravely so that the posterity will inherit a peaceful, successful, and harmonious South Sudan whose everlasting foundation has been cemented by the precious bloods of selfless innocent patriots like you. Thus, remember always in your long silence that you, like those who have fallen before you in defense of our beloved land, we are mourning and praising you today as somebody in whose death we have found an abiding strength and determination to keep peddling because you were just like us; average persons who passionately believe they could contribute in shaping a destiny of a nation we dearly love, by offering and applying every small tool we are privileged with.

Your killers may be unknown and perhaps now laughing happily in hiding for having succeeded in a mission they foolishly and wrongly calculated as a permanently binding solution to your moving writings, but they have only succeeded in one thing: taking away your life so that we do not wake up next day glued to our computers while reading your master class piece. However, will they really succeed in dampening our spirits and extirpating the deeply lasting legacy you have planted in the minds and hearts of your fellow countrywomen and men like me, among others? And do they really believe that, by silencing harmless and locally grown ideas penned on paper, not the deadly sounds of their foreign made guns, is an immediate panacea for all the ills plaguing this nation? I doubt not, so the most important question that has been lingering in my mind (and perhaps many people’s minds) since yesterday is not, who killed you, whether justice will be served in your case, but rather, what will next become the future of our beloved nation and the cause to which you laid down your life?  You have fallen short in the line of a national duty, so RIP comrade Isaiah Abraham (Diing Chan Awuol)!