Ordeals Confronting Innocent Nuer/Dinka Civilians Caught up in the Crossfire
5 min readFrom Biel Boutros – Human rights champion and Lawyer
“Dear all friends and relatives,
I would like to thank you all for the care and support that you have all offered me and my colleagues in our ordeal in Juba. The incident occurred just two hours after my arrival from New York. I am glad I survived and grateful to God for reaching Juba to be one of the primary eye witnesses to the Juba massacres.
I had left Juba yesterday evening after an 8 day ordeal, sleeping in the car at UNMISS compound while spending the afternoon hours hearing tales from the survivors of Presidential guards’ massacres , witnessing the tears of kids who have remained without parents, parents without kids, wives without husbands and husbands without wives plus those families which will never be the same anymore. As I write this note, I just can’t imagine where the bodies of uncles Martin Kueth, Dak Riek, and my missing maternal cousins Peter Gai Jiel and Gatluok Tot could be!
Some of my human rights colleagues are with me and also safe, others are still within Juba, trapped. We have lost relatives and friends, some confirmed murdered while others are still missing and I don’t believe they are alive knowing what had happened and how I survived narrowly the same. We the survivors of Khartoum regimes, have again become the survivors of our own government—–who will wipe tears off on our face!
Dear friends, though I left Juba, I know the dangers I left my people in particularly the Nuer being the primary target of Kiir’s security agents and some few members of Dinka from Lakes and Bor’s Twi East. How sad to see them languishing in pains imposed on them by their own government and by the President whom they had elected to power!
Friends, I feel guilty leaving them, for it is like a moment of greatest betrayal to my people while leaving them in blood—-I had no option as whether being with them or not doesn’t subtract any hitch of their sufferings yet the more I am in safe place, the more I am traumatized and reflecting much on what happened; crying kids plus the accounts of the survivors and how I escaped the fate in my house, all can’t leave my thinking!.
Those especially the international community who don’t know what happened would continue accusing Riek Machar of the attempted coup and assuming the allegations prematurely but the issue is, President Kiir’s General Marial, the leader of the Presidential guards, engineered the fight to get rid of Riek and his group and to kill the Nuer whom they regard archenemy to turn the country into war between Nuer and Dinka so that those leaders and majority of supporters from Dinka community at Riek’s side may turn to Kiir’s side if he succeeds to make his plan successful on tribal ground. This is the whole matter of why President Kiir has been looking for war against Riek Machar and his group which they implemented in the evening of Sunday December 15, 2013.
My tears, heart and prayers for those whom the Juba dictatorship has finally killed, so sad that a war that sane South Sudanese had tried to avoid since March 2013 has finally succeeded. Though independent, we have not attained our liberties and it is what all South Sudanese must stand up for now not the foolery of some caged media and international figures!
President Kiir must be vicariously directly held responsible. He and his security agents have no better argument to dismiss the evidence of killings witnessed in Juba. It was well calculated to turn the Nuer against Dinka.
As I hope for a tribalism-free, just, equal and democratic South Sudan, it will be a cause for future instability in South Sudan if the massacres plotters headed by Kiir are not held to account just because in the name of peace. There can never be peace without justice and the international community that has been watching what was surely looming to happen in South Sudan, must stop pretending when they knew the road South Sudan was going through11 months down the line and never acted to tell President Kiir point blank when he has been looking for any opportunity to cause a war which he finally did as that!.
God will show the way to South Sudan to true freedom not mere independence and we will continue to call things by their very names not the rhetorics of the international Community and Juba Ministers with their President, Salva Kiir.
Thank you all for saving us and the only way to pay you back and overcome the pains as well as to pay tributes to the deceased relatives and friends, is to reveal what truly is happening in South Sudan!
Goodness will triumph over evils of Juba government.
Biel Boutros Biel
bboutrosb@yahoo.com
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