It is a picture that galls and sears the heart and wraps around every African head the bandana of shame and savagery. The battle is shameful because in the political rivalry between Kiir who is Dinka and Nuer’s top tribesman Machar, the two dominant communities have decided the best way out is to slaughter each other.
And so in Bentiu, the oil-rich town, which had been taken back by Kiir’s forces, Machar’s rag-tag militia landed and though they blame retreating government forces, over 200 people including pregnant mothers, children and amputees, were slaughtered and the bodies are still rotting. As the stench of their rotting bodies and savaged humanity rises to the skies, the top cream of South Sudan are probably somewhere in Nairobi or Kampala, taking life easy in air-conditioned rooms. You must thank God if on scrolling down your Facebook or Twitter accounts you have not stumbled upon the pictures of decomposing bodies left outside mosques and churches where the victims had sought refuge. There are four reasons why this savagery and brutality has refused to go. In Kenya, we fear Malaria may kill our children but in South Sudan, the scare of parents in the hotspots is that the neighbour may walk in, chop all your heads in the name of their ethnic tin-gods.
See also: South Sudan to free prisoners as pressure mounts for peace deal The first is that this is a country that fought so hard and so long for independence from control Khartoum, its northerly neighbour. The freedom struggle and the intermittent inter-ethnic rivalries, largely incited by Omar Bashir’s government, cost South Sudan over 1.5 million lives. There is debate as to how many millions were displaced and maimed.
One thing is clear, South Sudan must be having the World’s largest number of amputees after Afghanistan and Iraq. The struggle took 22 years and so you can imagine the relief of triumph in 2011 as the residents of the world’s youngest nation strode into the family of free nations. It was a nation united in blood and beating of the heart. The second puzzle is that when it came to a referendum on whether South Sudan should breakaway from The Sudan as an autonomous nation, the people now hunting for each other with machetes voted 99 per cent for self-government.
The one per cent that did vote was either in hospitals, sick at home or even on essential duty. In both cases, it is baffling how loyalty to tribe and the ethnic warlord in suits, has triumphed against the larger joy of self-government and return of free will in one’s country. The third issue is that this is a country that knows too well that if it does not stand united, Bashir’s rogues, who did not wish them independence in the first place, would be fanning and funding trouble by setting them against each other. Remember Machar had during the struggle, and in the style of the chap who used to tell us nitapitia katikati ya Raila na Kibaki (I will squeeze myself between Kibaki and Raila), had actually at one time defected and worked with the enemy in the name of peace and cooperation.
You would expect that the South Sudanese would do everything possible to ensure that the “enemy” is not given chance either to divide them or laugh at them as a people incapable of governing themselves. Finally, endowed with oil, South Sudanese have done exactly what other African states have done with their wealth reservoirs; light a political match and dance in its fires and literally roasting alive. This was before they even finished up the revenue-sharing agreements with Bashir or resolved boundary conflicts with its Arab-dominated neighbour.
source: standardmedia.co.ke
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