Madam Rebecca Nyandeng on the Politico-Military Crisis in South Sudan
18 min readMrs Rebecca Garang reveals how the current South Sudan war started.
Henry Gombya: Thank you very much for agreeing to have an interview with us. My first question is, we would like you to tell our readers what you know is going on between President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Dr Riek Machar.
Rebecca Garang: Thank you for having me. You know what happened in South Sudan is something that is really bad and taking back the peoples of southern Sudan to war. This was something that happened on the 15th of last monthbut it had started earlier with some issues which were not being talked about in the party; democracy was not in the party. So some of our members were saying that we needed to reform the party documents and in the party too because there was no freedom of speech, and no freedom ofpress; a lot of things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgocqAsEgb4
On the 6th of December we said OK then if the President is not calling for a dialogue, let’s call a press conference so that our people know what has been happening. So we gave a press conference on the 6th, all of us together – Riek, the vice secretary of the chairman, Salva Kiir and at the same time we were the ones who wanted the reforms together with the groups who are arrested now.
HG: When you say ‘We’, who are the ‘we’? Is it the SPLM as a party?
RG: Yes it is us the members, including Dr Riek, who wanted reforms and those who were arrested, . [In] the SPLM we were saying that there were things that were not going well. When you use the tools of democracy like a press conference or a rally to prevent it, there are a lot of intimidations. So we said this needed to be corrected because when we started the war, we were a democratic movement even though there were some external problems here and there. But we can say that we were better because we were fighting for the freedom of our people.
Now when it came to the government of South Sudan, it didn’t like thatand that’s why we spoke out. We conducted a press conference raising some issues which were very important. Then then Chairman [of the SPLM] and President, Salva Kiir did not like two of those issues. One was when we asked about the debt of US$4.5billion that needed to be repaid. We as leaders of the party and some of us government officials, we wanted to know what happened, where we got this US$4.5 billion debt. What did we do with it? And there were no national projects which had been carried out so that we could know about the national projects ongoing and the salaries. This is the questions we raised. The second question he did not like also was [about] the army. He [President Kiir] was training a parallel army of 15,000 soldiers which he called “the Republican Guard”. We raised that question. Why train a parallel army when the national army was there? If he wanted to train people he could have taken a quarter from the national army. We raised the question of 15,000 being trained. Why is that?
These were the two questions he kept out of the press conference and wasn’t happy about. He instructed his Vice President, Comrade James Wani to be at the press conference. And when Vice President James Wani came to the press conference, he did not address or answer the issues we had raised in the press release. He started with insults, insulting the groups. Here was the vice president insulting his army colleagues. They were his colleagues in the struggle, the armed struggle and were also his colleagues in the government.
Nobody answered back. And then we said our rally will follow on the 14th of December. Now they went and put the meeting of the National Liberation Council which is a political organ [to take place on the same day]. Now we went and sat again as a group and said OK. If the meeting of the National Liberation Council will be on the 14th[the same day as their proposed rally] then we don’t need to conduct the rally. It will be a controversial issue because we are SPLMand this is a meeting of the SPLM. So we put off the rally and then we sought the advice of the deputy Chairman [of the SPLM] Dr Riek Machar who told us we do as they wanted. We [agreed] to postpone the rally because of the meeting of the National Liberation Council and let the Chairman reciprocate by saying that because [we had agreed to put] off the meeting of the National Council, [we could then] dialogue before going to the meeting.
In the evening somebody came to me and said the president wanted to see me Madam Rebecca, at 9 O’clock on the 11th and then the group on the 14th [of December]. Then we said OK, maybe the president has accepted what we have proposed; very good gesture. But on the 14th in the morning he didn’t call up. Then I was called from the meeting placeand people had already gathered. [They asked me] are you not coming? Then I told them Oh! I was expecting that the president was going to see us. They said ‘no’. People have gatheredand the president is coming in 30 minutes. So all of us went in the meeting.
And when we went to the meeting, two Archbishops; the [Catholic] archbishop and the Archbishop of the ECS (Episcopal Church of Sudan) [Daniel Deng] and all other bishops were in the meeting. So the [Catholic] Archbishop, Archbishop [Paulino] Lukudu [Loro] was given a chance to say the prayersand he gave a very good speech, urging us to dialogue and urging us not to interrupt Christmas, saying that Christians should be allowed to pray well and dialogue. Then came Madam Hilde Johnson, a representative of the UN Secretary General who also took the same line as Archbishop Lukudu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JMWnT_5tiQ
But when it came to the turn of our chairman, Comrade Salva [Kiir], he just dropped a bombshell of [insults]saying he would not allow 1991 to pass and that if Dr Riek wanted to do anything, he was ready for that and that he was not a betrayer, something like that. It was a very provocative speech which was divisive. Some of us, especially myself, were shocked because I thought that the president, as a leader of our people, would be speaking in the same voice as the people of God were speaking. That was a very bad speechand I think it was the start of all the problems.
In the afternoon session they (the Salva Kiir group) decided that some of us would not be given a chance to talk. The president remarked that he had come here to pass a document. He did not even say we would discuss it which is the SPLM constitution. So the document was passed with all the things that we were supposed to amend and add some other issues because now that we were in a bigger house. The president refused some of us [to speak] saying we should not participate [in any further discussions].
On the [following] Sunday, I didn’t go to the meeting. I went to church and from there I returned to my house. Dr Riek called me in the afternoon and said ‘did you go to the meeting?’ and I told him no, I didn’t go. Then he told me that some of our members were feeling this and feeling that and were saying that they did not want to go to the meeting because yesterday we had been refused to talk, not to participate. I think this is when they made a decision that they would do what they did. They may have thought that these people did not come to the meetingand so they were maybe planning a coup. So they made a decision that these people would be arrested. Some of them said they would try to make something so they could accuse these people of planning a coup and arrest them. This is what happened.
This thing happened in his [Kiir’s] headquarters. When they went there, they wanted to disarm a group of Nuer. They went and found that in the president’s headquarters they were many [soldiers belonging to the] Nuer. Their commander then went to the chief of the general staff and asked what he could do. He was then told to leave the [Nuer] soldiers until the next morning. But the officer did not listen to his orders and proceeded to try and disarm the Nuer soldiers. This was the time when this thing eruptedand war begun in the headquarters of the president. Then at one o’clock at night, that is when the army headquarters started shooting because there were Nuer members there. Because they were watching the speech of the president, they knew there was a problem.
So some of them [the Nuer soldiers] went home to Dr Riek’s house to get him out because if he had been in his house, he would have been killed. If you went to Juba now you could see the way his house was destroyedand it is not his private house, it is a government house. It was destroyed by Tiger, Kiir’s army. And then the soldiers who were in Dr Riek’s house, about 34 of them, were all killed, were murdered. The Chief of the General Service had told some people to disarm them [the Nuer soldiers] after telling them he was saving their lives by disarming them. These people (Kiir’s Tiger troops) came and killed all of them. His [Machar’s] office manager who was his brother, was also tracked down at a hotel and killed. So when they came in, they targeted massacring Nuer members. A lot of officials, administrators in Juba were killed. This is what literally happened.
Sending of Ugandan troops to South Sudan was an “invasion”
‘Mother of the Nation’ Rebecca Garang: “President Salva Kiir has been talking about coups, about coups, about coups.”
The sending of Ugandan troops to South Sudan was seen by the people of South Sudan as an “invasion”. In the second and last part of his interview with Madam Rebecca Garang de Mabior, widow of Dr John Garang who is often referred to by many as the Mother of the Nation, our EditorHenry Gombya asked her what she thought about the presence of Ugandan troops in South Sudan and whether there was any truth in the allegations that former Vice President Riek Machar had tried to stage a military coup. Here is what she had to say:
Henry Gombya: Is there any truth whatsoever that former Vice President Riek Machar attempted a military coup in your country?
Rebecca Garang: There was nothing called a military coup. There was no military coup. Since Dr John [Garang] died, President Salva Kiir has been talking about coups, about coups, about coups. Nobody staged a coup because we are politicians. Those groups that were arrested are politicians, are civilians but [while] they were army people before, they are politicians and civilians.
If you wanted to plan a coup, you don’t plan a coup and go back to your room and sleep. A coup is not a simple thing. It is a very dangerous thing. You cannot plan a coup and go to sleep. That is Number One. Number Two, you cannot plan a coup without any general that you are in communication with. If you are saying there was a coup, where are the generals that they were cooperating with who have been arrested? This is a question [we have been asking] and they don’t answer [it].
HG: What is your view about the sending of troops by Ugandan President Museveni to fight alongside President Kiir’s troops against soldiers loyal to Dr Riek Machar?
RG: Yea. It is already a problem because the people of South Sudan are not very happy and when I met with President Museveni I asked him about it. He said what he did was to prevent a total collapse of this young country and the SPLM as a party. That’s what he said he was afraid of. Secondly he said he feared that Dr Riek would capture Juba and that Dr Riek has not been a good leader. These are the two issues that he was saying. Although he later said he had been asked by President Salva Kiir to send his troops, but by sending over 3000 troops accompanied with helicopter gunships, this was seen by many as an invasion.
But I will not count this on Ugandans about our leadership because if our leadership had been strong, there would have been no other people coming to the country. But because of a weak government, that’s why things are like that.
HG: What role are you yourself playing now amidst all this chaos?
RG: Em! You know I am a victim. I lost my husband in this struggle and I lost my husband because of his love for the people of Southern Sudan and for their freedom and independence. And if I feel that these people are not getting what we promised them during the struggle, I will not keep quiet. I will always talk. I am a mother of these people, I am the Mother of the Nation, as they call me and if there is anything that is not going right, I will speak for the voiceless because as a government we are not delivering to the people what we promised them during the struggle.
It is very clear that what we fought against is what we are doing to our own people. We are intimidating our own people, we are killing our own people. There is no freedom of expression, there is no freedom of the press. Basic social services are not being given to our people, no schools, no hospitals, no roads, nothing. And we have resources. God has given us all the resources [we need] in our country and we are not doing all these things. So I speak out against that because there are people suffering in Southern Sudan.
And [it is said] we’re among the poorest countries in the world. For me I will not believe that because we have all those resources. How come [then] that we are said to be among the poorest in the world? The problem is that the distribution of wealth is not correct; it is not equitable because this is the same thing we fought against with the North because we believed it is a division of development, the wealth and it was there in the CPA (the Comprehensive Peace Agreement – a set of agreements that were signed between the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and the Government of Sudan. The CPA was meant to end the Second Sudanese Civil War, develop democratic governance countrywide and share oil revenues. It further set a timetable by which Southern Sudan had a referendum on its independence) about wealth sharing.
But when we came after the interim period, we shoved the CPA instead of [using it] to resolve our problems. And the same issue which we quarrelled about with Khartoum which is wealth sharing and power sharing are the basic problems that we now have in southern Sudan.
So we should have used the CPA to take these two protocols and we use them because that would have helped in sharing power. Like you talk about nepotism, you talk about tribalism, human rights violations, you talk about all these things that are happening in Southern Sudan. That is why I am speaking on behalf of all those “right less” people and I am the mother of everybody.
HG: Excuse me for taking you back to that unfortunate incident when your husband lost his life. There has been so much that has been said about the way your husband died. I was very young when I first read about his struggles in Southern Sudan. Did you really believe the reason given that he died because of a mere helicopter accident?
RG: Aah! For me I do not believe that but I don’t want to mix the issues about the death of my husband and the situation now in the south. I left that issue and I believe that after we have tackled our present issues we will get back to it. But I have said many times that I do not believe that it was a mere accident. No.
HG: After the many years that your husband spent fighting for your country, do you now feel his efforts were in vain?
RG: Yes. I will say that because not only my husband but there are so many people who have lost their lives for the struggle of the people of Southern Sudan. So it is not only my husband. So if these people (the ones who have lost their lives) would come back and see what we have done, they would cry for their lives. They thought that the price was right when we got our independence which was unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council and the UN and the whole world.
HG: For some of our readers around the world who do not know who Salva Kiir or Riek Machar are, can you take a few moments to tell us what these two people really are like?
RG: Aah! Really I wouldn’t know much about them but if you asked me about my husband I would be able to explain about Dr John. But at least I will tell you that Salva Kiir is somebody I thought I knew but later I found out that I did not know him very well. Because this is somebody who [we] really started with the struggle, the first war, during the first Anyanya war and he was in that struggle when he was a very young man.
In the second war he was with my husband in the struggle. He is a very quiet person who I thought he knew that struggle of the people of Southern Sudan because he has been in it for a long time. But after he became the leader of the people of Southern Sudan, I didn’t know him anymore who he was because we everything is clear. We have our documents and I don’t see why he could not deliver to our people. So it is something that I do not know how to describe this man very well.
Dr Riek Machar was in the SPLA/SPLM and he finished his PhD in the UK and then came to the struggle. He was one of our commanders at the early times of the SPLA struggle. He was in Unity State. He did very well. He was fighting. But he was really ambitious and in 1999 he staged a coup against Dr John. But you can’t make a coup under a tree. But this is what happened and it brought a very bad mark on him because the people of Southern Sudan felt that he took us back very badly. Our troops were organising to come and capture Juba but when he staged that coup, it took us back ten years because the enemy recaptured all the towns that we had and we had to start from the scratch.
A lot of people died. There was a massacre in Bor. That is why I told you that in this there are bitter bad memories about it. But yes. We are people of South Sudan. Dr Riek reconciled when Dr John was still here. He brought all the people of Southern Sudan together and we won. We won the unity of Southern Sudan and the people of South Sudan became independent. Unity is a strength. So when Dr John died he became vice president of the movement. So these are two people I don’t know very well but this is how I can describe them.
HG: Would the presence of foreign troops in your country help ease the situation?
RG: We already have over 1500 UN troops currently in the country. If the secession of hostilities is signed then there is no need to have foreign troops in our country. But the problem for me could be, first of all, I do not trust our government and I do not trust our president himself because they will turn the secession of hostilities into other things. That’s my fear. But otherwise none of us wants foreign troops to come to our country just like that. But we have political leaders who can see how we can quickly bring this [conflict] to an end.
HG: Finally can you confirm reports we have heard that soldiers loyal to Dr Riek Machar are rounding up Ugandan citizens working in your country and bludgeoning them to death?
RG: You know! The coming of troops to another country is not an easy job. It’s war. It’s fighting and we will have losses on both sides. A lot. We have losses from Ugandan troops and we have losses from South Sudan troops. So the loss is not good.
But what I wanted from President Museveni himself was to make himself as a mediator like what other leaders in the region, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti [are doing]. But he said he had to get in because President Salva called for the troops. But this is a bad government because we did not build our army. If you do not build your army you end up like that.
But before my husband died he showed he loved the people of Uganda. He worked hard for the harmony between the people of Southern Sudan and Uganda. We do not want any problems with Uganda. Even with this, we want to [amicably] solve this problem together so that we do not have any problems with our brothers [in Uganda]. We have brothers and sisters in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. We have tribes along the borders. So we do not want any problems. If we have problems, we want to resolve them as brothers and sisters.
I always want to say the truth. I have not heard any reports that our troops are targeting Ugandans. I have heard about the targeting of the Nuer and the Dinka especially in Malakal but I have not received any reports that Ugandans had been [specifically] targeted. You know that during the struggle, the people of Southern Sudan knew we were being supported by Ugandans. We would not transfer [our] problems to the Ugandan people.
Secondly, even if President Museveni brought his troops to Southern Sudan, it would not amount to South Sudan troops targeting Ugandans in our country. The problem would be with the people who are in uniform. Even those Uganda troops that have been captured, our troops did not kill them.
HG: Madam Garang! We thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. You are a very busy person and we can now let you return to your efforts. Thank you so much.
RG: Thank you very much and Happy New Year.
http://www.thelondoneveningpost.com/sending-of-ugandan-troops-to-south-sudan-was-an-invasion/4/
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