Rebels of Our Nation: A disillusionment of Democratic Ideals?
5 min readBy Morris Maboch Madut Kon, Juba, South Sudan
May 12, 2016 (SSB) —- There are common words that linger on almost every South Sudanese’s mind seldom: young and old, educated and uneducated, men and women, poor and rich… almost all of us will identify with “rebels”, “war”, “UN (nyiwan)”, “SPLA (athielee)”, “Presidential Decree”, “Amnesty”, “Major Generals”, the list is endless. And whenever I hear these words, my conscience involuntarily associates them with some mysterious coalition of both hope and despair, the endless and undeserved suffering of the people of South Sudan.
Years before our independence, we fought side by side, regardless of our tribe, race, region of origin, religion, gender and age. United by a common course and bound by strings of subterranean patriotism. There was a deep unyielding desire to liberate our nation and declare the freedom of our people forever.
For close to six decades, South Sudanese were more united than today. Their mission and conviction was vivid, their hope for better days was relentless. Their spirit was high and lively. They wanted their pressed voice free and longed for a day their “2nd class citizen status” imposed by successive Khartoum regimes would be overcome. Two millions people died between 1983 and 2005. The children of Kush got scattered the world over, they were refugees in almost every nation on the globe, despondently wondering in the most inimical places like sheep without shepherd. They had become new slaves of the 21st century. Famines, diseases, sexual violence, extrajudicial killings were all instigated by the “Evil North” to see ethnical cleansing succeeds. The northern Arab powers ensued scotched-earth policy to exacerbate one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the recent years. But we never lost hope. Or at least we found some divine comfort in the words of Isaiah 18.
We identified ourselves with the chapter and closely related it to unimaginably situation we were in. The chapter spoke of “a people tall and smooth-skinned, a people feared far and wide… an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers”. It also talks of how birds of the air and wild animals would feed on their flesh all summer and winter respectively. And how eventually the whole earth will see when a banner is raised on the mountains. The word gave us hope and even the “Lost Boys and Girls of the Sudan” vowed to soldier on.
Finally the day came. 9th July 2011 was a day like no other. It was a day to be remembered by all South Sudanese for generations to come. Women and children danced and our flag towered on Mount Kujur at the Midnight. Despite years of wretchedness and anguish, there was eventually singing in every mouth and joy in every heart. Millions had laid their lives and souls for our freedom, we had endured inhumane treatments and homelessness while globe-trotting but ultimately the evil had been overcome by good, and our children and children of our children shall live forever free, and our motherland shall eventually rise and regain her dignity. Peace tranquility was to be followed by prosperity and economic advancement….that is what every South Sudanese knew, or at least assumed so…BUT;
All that was going to be a dream never-come-true. All that hope would vanish again. Hardly did we know that our people were going to be subjected to another face of extreme melancholy by the same people who fought to see them free. Innocent children and mothers were going to die again for reasons neither known to them nor authentic at all. The greed of a few illiterate and anxious “generals and major generals” was going to haunt the innocent people of our nation again. Jobs and opportunities would no longer be based on technical know-how, there would be a “better” category: “technical KNOW-WHO”…it had to be all about “connections”.
For 21 years freedom, equality and development were the goals we tried to achieve through war and rebellion. This time the main cause was going to be all about food. Greed was going to be the driving force and the new ideology would be the same. Defections after defections would follow. Proxy wars would openly be supported by Khartoum regime to advance their mission of “dividing the foolish South and teach them a lesson”. We have become a failed state and Khartoum is determined to show the arrogance and failure-bound attitudes of our leaders to the rest of the world and shame us as a nation. To show the world that South Sudanese people were not worth supporting for independence in the first place. That we weren’t capable of leading and peacefully managing our affairs.
But our selfishness and ravenousness has blinded us and we keep on fighting ourselves and bring back the suffering upon our loved ones. We all want to be either in positions were we can squander public resources for our own good or rebel because they only listen to you when you fight them. Others want to remain ministers, governors, major generals forever or jump to the bush and wage war against the people of South Sudan. Those remaining in the government would then have an opportunity to pocket peoples’ money.
But what are we fighting for? Are our grievances worth turning the gun on one another? Is there a clear ideology those in government and against are fighting to protect/instill or a mere disillusionment of democratic ideals? That’s for all South Sudanese to answer. Let our future not be stolen from us by a few selfish individuals who barely even care about us.
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