Attachments
Introduction:
Despite both the SPLA and the SPLA-IO signing a peace agreement in August 2015, conflict has continued across South Sudan (see Figure 1). To date, almost 17,000 people have been killed in the five years since Independence; over 15,000 since the ‘civil war’ of 2013 onwards. There are multiple active conflict zones, and a recent count for 2016 suggested three rebel groups and upwards of forty active militias (both political and communal) (see Figure 2 and 3). A recent increase in attacks across Juba is concern-ing mainly because of the combatants: both the SPLA (as the armed faction of both the government of South Su-dan, hereafter GoSS and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-SPLM) and SPLA-IO (the Sudan People’s Liber-ation Army-In Opposition) are in contest again. This cleav-age has dominated the civil war that has gone on nearly as long as the country’s short existence. The August 2015 peace agreement has had little effect on the actual fighting patterns throughout the state. There are im-portant caveats to that general pattern:
- The conflict has demonstrated a shift from the north/northeast area to the south and southwest of the state over time (see Figure 2).
Figure 1: Timeline and Rates of Conflict Events in South Sudan, from December 2013 - 9 July 2016.
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There are several active conflicts throughout the state, which are linked through strategic relationships, but are loosely integrated into the dominant competition be-tween the SPLA and SPLA-IO.
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Changing the political geography of the country through the 28 states plan has created multiple new grievances, land disputes, resource access conflicts, and opportunities for politically connected agents who want to benefit from the newly enforced distribution of resources.
A renewed focus on South Sudan is in order given the re-cent conflict in Juba from July 7-11; this time period coin-cided with the country’s fifth anniversary. There are many questions as to who is behind the violence, although that appears to be a superficial question given the highly con-tentious nature of Southern Sudanese politics; the level of militarization across the society at large; the ineffective-ness of the peace agreement; and the presence of high ranking, discontented elites who can benefit from further violence.
The violence is likely to have massive ripple effects, similar to the situation in December 2013. However, the agents, issues, and locations of interest have shifted somewhat to make this probable return to conflict unlike earlier instances.
The patterns of the conflict underscore that political wrangling and opportunism is behind most of the violence in Southern Sudan, and that local defense forces and militias are responsible for conducting campaigns to benefit national level elites, who have cast politics as distinctly ethnic. Despite this casting, the alliances throughout the state are not uniformly the same for ethnic communities.
For instance, in some cases, subclans of Nuer and Dinka (the main ethnic cleavage represented by Vice President Riek Machar and President Salva Kiir, respectively) are fighting against their dominant clan association (SPLA-IO and SPLA, respectively).
This return to violence is taking place within a context of many national and local issues and grievances, including the government’s decision earlier in 2015 to postpone June’s scheduled elections in the interest of: ongoing peace negotiations; the extension of Kiir’s presidential term until 2017; and the ‘redistricting’ plan which nullifies the proposed system of power-sharing of the existing 10 states (SPLA/M-IO was to be given control of oil-rich Upper Nile and Unity States), replacing it with 28 ethnically-divided states (per Kiir’s unilateral decree in late 2015).
Kiir recently agreed to allow a committee to review the borders of the 28 new states, but not to consider a reversal of the decree.
The various rates of activity by type of agent, and the increasing role of communal militias, are detailed in Figure 4.