Why it’s Hard to Write about South Sudan

I got a new job a few months ago. I’m a foresight analyst now.

What’s that mean? It means that I use structured analytical techniques to build scenarios that are supposed to model and predict the path a country could take anywhere from six months to fifty years down the line.

No, I’m not an oracle. I’m just a guy who spends way too much of his time looking for trends in political and economic systems.

I’ve spent the last month working on a project for South Sudan. I traveled back to Juba and interviewed friends and former colleagues as well as in-country experts, local government officials, and average citizens to try to get a grasp on the extreme volatility that is South Sudan since independence. Not an easy task when the biggest question of the last two weeks has been a ‘will he, won’t he’ game of speculation around whether the former vice-president would return to the capital to take his place in a transitional government of national unity. 

The whole thing was a farce akin to a Beckett play, and “Waiting for Machar” became my hashtag on Twitter that absolutely no one found interesting (but amused me to no end). It was one of the few things keeping me sane while trying to write a report where one of the key uncertainties in the political situation was evolving right in front of me.

That struggle is only natural for Juba. Keeping my sanity was one of my most troublesome challenges for a year and a half in South Sudan. Now, looking back on two years of experience with the country, I’m surprised I managed it.

And that’s because South Sudan is an excruciating place to love and care about. It’s a place that builds up your love and respect for humanity’s resilience and ability to push through pain and tragedy before it tears you down when you witness the extreme brutality and violence that human beings are capable of raining down on their fellow men and women.

In May 2015, I wrote a brief for the Humanitarian Coordination Team, the top-level organizing body in the country, regarding the ongoing government offensive in Unity State. As a mobile protection actor, I had traveled the length and breadth of Unity State. I had spent weeks in Koch, Buaw, Mayom, Mankien, and Leer.

As a result of my work on both side of the front line, I knew exactly how and where a government offensive could take place due to troop positions and the geographical constraints of warfare in one of the biggest swamps in the world. I later drew a map from memory of the ongoing offensive and how it would unfold for donors and diplomats that looked exactly like an HSBA diagram that would be published months later.

As I wrote that one page brief for the HCT, I cried. I cried and I cried and I cried. Reports from the Bentiu Protection of Civilian site were sounding the alarm—old women and young children pouring into the camp, but no men or women between the ages of ten and thirty-five. No one could understand why they were missing this key demographic, one of the largest in the country and inexplicably absent from the influx.

I knew why. Exactly one year before, I’d been in Leer town, interviewing survivors of the violence that had engulfed the state as government and opposition fighters had stormed back and forth in pitched battles that destroyed anything in their path. The first woman I spoke to individually, a thin, cracked grandmother in her seventies, had been caught at a government check point with her seven grandchildren. The oldest boy, twenty, had been taken by the soldiers, his throat slit in front of her. The oldest girl, seventeen, was taken by the armed men. The old woman, the girl’s grandmother, hadn’t seen her since. She was allowed to continue with five small children, all under the age of ten.

Story after story continued like this, each one with the subtle differences that build credibility, and the core similarities that indicate a campaign of coordinated violence and the deliberate targeting of civilians. A year later, writing that brief through angry and grief-filled tears, I knew that history was repeating itself.

Numerous reports released over the next few months confirmed my fears and indicated that the violence was so much worse than I could ever have imagined.  Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN all described scenes of unimaginable brutality: homes looted and burnt, women abducted and raped, civilians of all ages tortured, mutilated, and murdered.

These crimes will likely never go to court; their perpetrators will never see justice. Despite the peace deal’s call for a hybrid court and transitional justice, reconciliation will be one of the first items on the chopping block as international actors and those responsible for violence negotiate an elite bargain as the best hope for a false peace.

That isn’t an opinion based off of foresight or analytical techniques; that’s an opinion based on history. It is a history of compromised promises, a lack of long-term planning, and false expectations generated by a theory of liberal peace.

I recently spent a few hours at Juba airport waiting for my flight back to Kampala. I sat and chatted to a prominent human rights actor who’d spent years working on the Sudans. I was struck, more than anything, by how tired she looked. She knew it as well. Everyone I’ve spoken to who looked like, felt that accumulated stress, knew that it showed.

I knew it after a year and a half of conflict and violence. I knew I had to take a break, knew I had to leave it behind before it broke me.

There’s a certain type of ‘expert’ on Sudan and South Sudan who have followed the country for years from university lecture halls and think tank conference rooms in the US and Europe. I’m convinced their longevity concerning the Sudans is the privileged position of never seeing the day to day in the countries that they know so well. It’s one thing to cite a chart with month-to-month inflation of 200% or more. It’s another to watch the price of bread double and triple over a few short months, to see more and more women and children out begging on the streets, to drive past long lines of cars waiting for petrol, to know that generators in homes and hospitals aren’t running due to a lack of fuel.

Seeing this, you know it could have been different, and that’s what hurts.

What kills you in seeing all of this is the hope, often dashed. The hope that saw the exchange rate drop from 22SSP to the dollar before the peace deal was signed in August 2015 to 10:1 after, only to rise to 44:1 around Easter this year—all false hopes that buoyed a shallow black market.

What kills you is the opportunity, often wasted. The promise of new hospitals, new schools built with profits from the country’s oil revenue, funneled out of South Sudan by corrupt elites who build new houses and buy new cars in Kampala and Nairobi.

It’s the possibility of unity after the 2006 Juba Declaration broken along historic divisions between the SPLA and the SSDF. It’s the fact that, when you think about it, you should have seen it coming, and maybe you would have, if you’d been more cynical.

It’s the long durée, the constant retreat into violence and elite power struggles that makes it so difficult to love this country.

That’s why it’s so hard to write about South Sudan.