Martyrs Day: President Kiir’s Speech Commemorating the Martyrs Day in Juba

Statement by His Excellency, the President on Martyrs Day, July 30th, 2019

Fellow citizens

Tuesday, July 30, 2019 (PW) —- On this occasion of the commemoration of the martyrdom of the millions of our heroes and heroines, whose bones are scattered across our land; in our forests, on the mountains, under the riverbeds and in the graves, I have the deep honor to salute them and salute you all. Every year on this humbling occasion, I am deeply touched at a personal level because many of our heroes, men and women who led our liberation, were my personal friends, dear comrades in arms, and as a matter of fact, many of them were my bosses. I am heavily weighted down on a moment like this when I reflect on our shared experiences with them and they are no more.

Many of you are aware of the fact that I am among a very few surviving founding members of our great liberation movement, the SPLM. Many of our founding leaders died in the line of fire wearing the uniform of our armed struggle. In honor of their sacrifices, I want to salute a few of these heroes and heroines by name.

I want to salute my dear comrade, my leader, my mentor and my elder brother, Dr. John Garand de Mabior whose entire life was selflessly dedicated to the freedom of our people, a cause he achieved before his death on this day in 2005. I salute also my comrades, founding members of the leadership of our liberation movement; Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, who shot the first bullet in Bor, William Nyuon Bany who followed Kerubino in Ayod, Arok Thon Arok, Joseph Oduho, and Martin Majier Gai, all of whom died fighting for the freedom of our people.

There are many heroes and heroines, who in their millions, deserve to be named in this statement, including those we may never have heard, who died for the cause of our freedom. We should deeply reflect on their sacrifices and pay tribute to their heroic actions. Their blood has laid an unshakable foundation for our country and their names and their contribution to our struggle is indelibly written in our hearts and our history. Let no man or woman in this country ever forget that we rode on the backs on these men and women to achieve our independence.

Freedom is not cheap, in fact, nothing causes more than freedom and it is the basis of this that our fallen comrades ultimately gave their lives to buy our freedom. Those of us who are Christians know this from the book of John 15: 13 when Jesus told his apostles that, “The greatest love a person can have for his friends, is to give his life for them”. For our heroes and heroines to give their lives for the sake of our freedom is the greatest demonstration of love for us individually and the personification of patriotism; the love for our country.

Those of us, who have been fortunate to have survived the heat of our struggle bear the greatest responsibility to honor the commitments and sacrifices of our fallen heroes and heroines. In doing so, my message this year is to expound on what it means to remain committed to the vision and the cause for which millions have given lives to bestow freedom and prosperity to the generations of South Sudanese to come.

My job as President and as a surviving founding member of our liberation movement, is to pursue unrelentingly the path that we promised to our people. This path is to seek total liberation of our people through three stages. The first stage was to wage an armed struggle for a total liberation of our country and thanks to the millions of our martyrs, the Republic of South Sudan was born 8 years ago, and we are extremely proud of this achievement. Many have started the quest for freedom, and a few have succeeded. The second stage of our struggle is to consolidate the unity of our people, liberate them from abject poverty, illiteracy and ignorance, and ultimately restore their dignity and worth. Unfortunately, we got distracted from pursuing this path and got bemused into petty politics, power struggle, and the pursuit of rents from the state.

I owe it to my fallen comrades and to the people of South Sudan to redirect our country towards the achievement of this objective. Lastly, the resultant product of stages one and two, is a rapid political, economic, and social development of our country that places us at the center stage of the African and world affairs. That is, we should contribute to the achievement of world peace, culture, scientific advancement and all other wild dreams that have come to define human race.

Fellow citizens,

These ideas may sound so wild and farfetched given our current state of affairs, but they are all within our reach. This is precisely the reason my government has been at the forefront of pursuing peace by all means and at all cost. For without peace, we cannot dream, leave alone achieving any dreams. I invite all our citizens within and outside the country to answer our call for peace and to join us in our efforts to rediscover our liberation path and to seek and pursue the core objectives of our liberation struggle. We cannot rest on our laurels just because we have achieved liberation stage one. Our liberation struggle cannot be declared complete until we have achieved the second and the third stages.

My surviving comrades and I have the duty to show you the way, but the work of the next generation has started and that is to pursue without waver, stages two and three of our liberation struggles. Let no man question the will, the resilience, and the determination of the people of South Sudan to achieve these objectives. We have proven to the world that when we set our sight on something, we have always gone to achieve it.

In concluding this statement, fellow citizens, I once again invite you to salute all our martyrs, to remember their unmatched sacrifices, and to live by their vision for a free, peaceful, and prosperous nation. I also invite you to join our efforts to restore peace to our country and to continue our pursuit for total liberation of our people through the remaining stages of our struggle.

May the Almighty rest the soul of our martyrs in peace and may he continue to bless the people of the Republic of South Sudan.

Thank you

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