“A process of land grabbing and demographic replacement is underway in South Sudan”

Tribune. While the Trump and Biden administrations denounced China’s “genocide” of the Uyghurs, the US government has never applied this qualification to the country it helped create: South Sudan, independent since 2011. Yet, massacres, mass rapes and organized famine of civilians other than from the majority Dinkanon ethnic group could have convinced him of this.

Since 2005, South Sudan has fallen into the hands of a clique of Dinka politicians from President Salva Kiir’s region. The state has become more and more violent and repressive to maintain this system of politico-ethnic domination.

On December 15, 2013, as Kiir continued to oppose a democratic transition, the political conflict with his former vice-president Riek Machar, a Nuer (second ethnic group in the country) at the head of a multi-ethnic coalition, led to fighting in Juba. The next morning, the people of Juba woke up to the sound of the largest ethnic massacre, mostly by bullets, in the country’s history: that of 15,000 to 20,000 Nuer civilians – twice as many as the Srebrenica massacre. , declared genocidal by the court in The Hague. “Seven days of killings ensued, door to door”an inhabitant of Juba explained to me. This massacre of the Nuer, committed mainly by government forces, would make civil war inevitable and set the tone for the violence to come.

The United States, leader of the international community in the country, has yet let it go while reducing its diplomatic presence. The Obama administration, mired in an ideology that, since the 1990s, Arab Sudan represented evil and the Christian South innocence, has maintained its support for the South Sudanese government.

“Rebel” and therefore to be eliminated

So this government continued its momentum: between 2014 and 2015, it attacked the Nuer of Unity State, Machar’s stronghold. The government coordinated multiple troops there to execute civilians, burn them in their homes, torture them, and rape them en masse. The reason was simple, explained a survivor: “The government says the Nuer are rebels. “ The selection of victims according to their belonging to a “rebel” ethnic group and therefore to be eliminated, was typical of genocide.

But the United States continued to support the government. Susan Rice, a former Clinton administration known for her support for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and for opposing the designation of genocide in Rwanda in 1994, served as national security adviser. In 2015, it blocked an arms embargo against South Sudan, as army chief Paul Malong recruited more and more Dinka militias, and government atrocities far exceeded those committed by Machar’s rebels.

In August 2015, under international pressure, a peace accord was signed between the rebels and the government. But ten months later, on July 8, 2016, the government unleashed bloody fighting in Juba against Machar’s men. Dinka government troops, joined by Dinka civilians, began to target in their killings the inhabitants of the Equatoria region, the seat of the capital. “We will be the next to be killed”, said to me at the time an inhabitant of Juba, to whom a Dinka civilian had announced: “After the Nuer, you Ecuadorians, it will be your turn. “

But Washington endorsed the strategy of the government, which after orchestrating these fights tracked Machar in the Congolese bush. Washington looked away when government troops, almost exclusively Dinka, began to inflict the same violence on the inhabitants of Central Equatoria state as they did on the Nuer. These troops displayed their intentions, a crucial element in the legal determination of genocide. A survivor of a gang rape confided in me: “The SPLA said they wanted to kill everyone so that only the birds would stay in South Sudan. “

The Obama administration intended to protect the sovereignty of this murderous government. It therefore supported it militarily, to the tune of $ 32 million in 2016-2017, including $ 2 million for an operations center of the security services and presidential guards – authors of the December 2013 massacre in Juba. Washington was rewarding, with its taxpayers’ money, the perpetrators of genocidal massacres and mass rapes.

Arms embargo

The US government continued to prioritize its war on terrorism in East Africa. He did not put pressure on Uganda which supported the Kiir regime with its troops, nor on Israel, seller of arms and surveillance equipment in South Sudan, nor on Kenya collaborating with the southern security services. Sudanese in order to eliminate opponents of the regime in Kenya, as in Uganda.

Washington only imposed a unilateral arms embargo on South Sudan in 2018 – a purely symbolic move, once government violence drastically changed the country’s demographics and political map. The death of at least 400,000 civilians and the mass exodus (4.3 million people) had started a process of internal colonization: “The Dinka take the land by force. Then they change the name of the place ”, told me a woman from the minority Shilluk ethnic group.

This process of land grabbing and demographic replacement is still ongoing. The supremacist Dinka organization of the Jieng Council of Elders, which teamed up with Kiir and Malong to recruit Dinka militias, is calling for elections that would bolster such territorial gains. These elections, doomed to be undemocratic, would only consolidate a genocidal peace or trigger other genocidal explosions, as in 2016.

The South Sudanese government recently approved the creation of the African Union Hybrid Court – an obligation under the peace accords. This announcement aims to stage its support for justice after having constantly hindered it, and especially to elude the search for other possible legal avenues, in a regional context unfavorable to international justice.

So there is not much hope for South Sudan. Washington still prefers a genocidal state to a failed state. Joe Biden has promised an administration focused on international human rights. But the return of those close to the Obama team, and their support for undemocratic elections in South Sudan, portends the opposite.