{"id":2782,"date":"2014-05-27T14:36:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T21:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/?p=2782"},"modified":"2014-05-28T21:49:04","modified_gmt":"2014-05-29T04:49:04","slug":"south-sudan-new-nation-old-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/south-sudan-new-nation-old-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"South Sudan: New nation, old problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

When fighting broke out in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, in December, Asanta Jantana quickly gathered her seven children and fled for another part of the country where she hoped she could find peace.\u00a0They hitched a ride on\u00a0a truck for a day, then walked the last 12 miles to her brother\u2019s house in the village of Kotobi. Like many displaced people, rather than go to some formal camp run by the United Nations and large international NGOs, Jantana relied on the solidarity of other poor people to survive. Yet that wasn\u2019t enough. Because her brother was a poor farmer in a poor village, she eventually had to send on four of her children\u00a0to live with another relative who could feed them. She and three boys stayed in Kotobi, where her brother loaned her a mud-walled hut. She helped neighboring farmers dig up cassava in exchange for a share of the harvest. She had little cash, however, and when she tried to register the boys for school, they were turned away because she couldn\u2019t pay the fees. When I met Jantana in March, she hadn\u2019t heard from her husband Joseph since the fighting began. A soldier, he was sent to Bor, the scene of brutal fighting that left the town in ashes. Jantana assumed that Joseph was dead.<\/span><\/p>\n

I met Jantana as she walked along a road carrying some food and supplies she\u2019d received from a church-sponsored humanitarian network. Despite the horrible weeks she had experienced, she was singing hymns as she walked. When I asked her how she could be so happy, she replied, “I\u2019m thankful my children and I are still alive. When the fighting took place in Juba, we had to run between the dead bodies to escape.”<\/span><\/p>\n

The dead in Juba were the product of a political conflict between the country\u2019s president, Salva Kiir, and his former vice president, Riek Machar. Though both belong to the ruling party, the Sudan People\u2019s Liberation Movement, Kiir is a Dinka and Machar a Nuer. While members of those two tribes collaborated during much the independence struggle, there were times when the comradeship broke down, such as in 1991, when a militia of Nuer in Jonglei State known as the “White Army”\u2013so called because they cover themselves with white ash from burnt cow dung\u2013massacred some 2,000 Dinka around the town of Bor. Ethnic tensions were set aside long enough to win the struggle for independence, but in the last three years that unity has slowly unraveled. Kiir has often bought off dissident leaders with cash and material support, a practice that may pacify conflicts in the short run but leaves significant tensions unresolved in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part of the problem is the lack of any overriding sense of national identity that could take precedence over ethnic or tribal identity. Thus people quickly retreat into tribal corners when the going gets rough, protecting their own family and tribe against the other. When the political rift between Kiir and Machar suddenly went ballistic in December, it quickly tore the country\u2019s social fabric along tribal lines. Within hours of internal fratricide within the elite presidential guard, bodies were piling up in the streets of Juba, and soon towns like Malakal and Bor were nothing but ashes as ethnic militias sought out who to kill based solely on ritual facial scars that are usually a sure sign of ethnic identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Bewen<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Caught in the middle\u2013and civilians are increasingly caught in the middle of the world\u2019s wars\u2013people like\u00a0Jantana fled if they could. Despite all that, she told me she\u2019d like to go home to Juba, but she’s\u00a0waiting for the situation there to improve. After what she experienced in December, she\u2019s not hopeful, and she says the roots of the conflict don\u2019t really matter to her. “It\u2019s not an ethnic conflict, because once a bullet leaves a gun, it doesn\u2019t know if it strikes a Nuer or a Dinka,” she said. <\/span>Here’s\u00a0Jantana\u00a0sitting in her hut with her three boys.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Asanta<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

And here\u2019s a\u00a0rather rustic\u00a028-second video of her walking and singing. I wasn\u2019t planning on shooting video that day, so I had no external microphone attached to the camera, thus the cruddy sound. But it gives you an idea of her calm spirit of perseverance in the face of violence and suffering.<\/span><\/p>\n