We seek to avoid conflict, while maintaining strong defenses on ethnic diversity
By Daniel Machar Dhieu, Juba, South Sudan
June 9, 2015 (SSB) — First and foremost I congratulate the management of PaanLuel Wël: South Sudan Bloggers website for giving me opportunity to express my opinion on most important things that concern our national aspect of development.
I like this move because is my obligation to point out most of critical element of a successful peace in the nation. So today, I want to discuss or speak my mine to the general public on the most important question concerning keeping the peace in the nation.
In our country, the line between peace and war is less clearly drawn than at any time in our history. Our local communities are not aware of the consequences of any misstep, yet convinced of the precious worth of the freedom we enjoy, we seek to avoid conflict, while maintaining strong defenses on ethnic diversity.
By then our policy as South Sudanese communities has been workings hard for peace, but to be prepared if war comes. We must be prepared, at situation, to meet threats ranging in intensity from isolated terrorist acts, to guerrilla action, to full-scale military confrontation. However, there is confusion nowadays our people are divided alongside tribal line with the aim of leading the country.
Currently we are aware of most violence across the country since 2013 as new rebellion is testify in Western Equatoria killing civilians for no reason at all. Why do we kill ourselves in our own nation? This move of fighting one another will proves us as people of no vision and baseless country that has nothing in term of development.
Do we want to clear ourselves on this land of South Sudan? We have to make suggestion on our status of living and come to full agreement if accepted by all communities of South Sudan to do so. So that all people will join hands to kill themselves and there is will be nobody to claim for peace.
And how much more important is it now, considering the consequences of failing to deter conflict at the community level possible. While the use of military force to defend territory has never been questioned when a democracy has been attacked and its very survival threatened by the same country-mate.
Let me ensure you on this point that, all Policies formed without a clear understanding of what we hope to achieve would also earn us the disparagement of national troops, who would have an understandable opposition to being used in every sense of the nation casually and without intent to support them fully.
Ultimately this course would reduce their morale and their effectiveness for engagements we must win. And if the military were to distrust its civilian leadership, recruitment would fall off and I fear an end to the all-volunteer system would be upon us, requiring a return to a draft, sowing the seeds of riot and discontent that so wracked the country in nearest future.
We have now restored high morale and pride in the uniform throughout the services. The all-volunteer system is working spectacularly well. Are we willing to forfeit what we have fought so hard to regain?
In maintaining our progress in strengthening South Sudan’s military wing, we face difficult challenges while maintaining peace in the country. For we have entered an era where the dividing lines between peace and war are less clearly drawn, the identity of the foe is much less clear. Our policies had the unqualified support of the great majority of our people.
Indeed, the two wars of Anyanya I & II ended with the conditional victory of over our enemies. The only acceptable ending when the regional communities and international agencies came with resolution helps was independence of South Sudan. The independence of this nation was as meaningful to all the people of South Sudan as worldwide at large.
But in the aftermath of the independence, we encountered a more subtle form of warfare in which, more often than not, the face of the enemy was masked. Territorial expansionism could be carried out indirectly by proxy powers, using surrogate forces aided and advised from afar. Some conflicts occurred under the name of national liberation, but far more frequently ideology of nepotism.
Our freedom presents both a challenge and an opportunity. It is true that unhealthy nations such as Uganda and Kenya have supported us in other way round; they have accommodated our local people and they have gone protecting our nation through providing their troops to our soil.
On other hand they also play disadvantage role in a conflict. Those threats may not entail an immediate, direct attack on our territory, and our response may not necessarily require the immediate or direct defense of our homeland. But when our vital national interests and those of our allies are at stake, we cannot ignore our safety, or forsake our allies.
At the same time, recent history has proven that we cannot manage leadership among ourselves without any help from other nations. We have learned that there are limits to how much of our spirit and blood and treasure we can afford to forfeit in meeting our responsibility to keep peace and freedom in our own-land.
We should only engage in peace process if we must do so as a matter of our own vital national interest. We cannot assume for other sovereign nations the responsibility to defend our territory without our help.
Furthermore, we have to love one another in building nation.
The writer is the Student at South Sudan Christian University for Science and Technology
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