I was giving a work colleague a lift back home, about a 15 minute drive. Suddenly she started shouting; “Get off the road! Get off the road!”
It was difficult to react quickly. The road shoulder was just a ditch and dirt. If I’d pulled aside quickly, we could have rolled. As I slowed down to a halt, I turned my head to see a black limousine hurtle past, followed by a truck-load of soldiers, with their rifles trained on our car.
The commander had his hand outstretched, pointing hard at me, and his look could have frozen steel.
“You’re lucky you’re white and from the UN,” my colleague said. “If you’d been a local, they would have come back and beaten you up.”
It was a reality check. South Sudan is a country at war with its neighbour and itself.
Sudanese fighters have been bombing South Sudan’s Unity state. Juba seized the Heglig oil hub from Khartoum. Up until a month ago, competing tribes in South Sudan itself were carrying out long-running tit-for-tat cattle raids in Jonglei.
Within the same tribe, there’s also conflict. In one town, we held eight seed fairs in different districts, because neighbouring clans, living 15 minutes away from each other, can’t get together without beginning to fight.
The capital, Juba, is no picnic either.
The man living in the room next door to me was shot dead a few months ago. He’d parked his vehicle outside at 7.30 at night and was carjacked. I’d arrived an hour earlier and was lucky enough to get a park inside.
At a church service I attended on New Year’s Eve, the young, white-clad pastor said one of his parishioners prayed for 24 hours of daylight, fearing the violence night would bring.
It’s not just the nights. The manager of a hotel I occasionally go to for breakfast told me two of his staff had been attacked on the way to the bank. They were beaten up and the money they wanted to deposit was stolen. This was at 11am on a Wednesday.
It makes me feel for this country. Its people have been at war for so long, many have forgotten the tools of ordinary living. FAO has to teach many of them how to farm. A generation of people have grown up in refugee camps or spent their youth running to foxholes to hide from bombers overhead. Many now just want peace so they can create lives and families.
An ex-combatant I interviewed in Rumbek, in Lakes state last month, put this sentiment well.
Once a captain in the army, he bore the tribal scarring around his forehead and the three missing front teeth in his lower jaw, that is an initiation mark of his tribe, the Dinkas.
After more than ten years of fighting, last year he was demobilised and returned home. A few months ago, he was forced to run for his life, when his home and fields were set on fire by youths from a rival clan, who lived just ten minutes walk away.
“Why can’t they just give us a bit of forest, away from this community in conflict, and leave us to settle on our own,” he said. “We’ve seen so much war, and we’re tired of it.”
But how do you put down the guns and create a nation, when all you’re used to is war?
The pastor at the church on New Year’s Eve warned his parishioners sternly; “If you are a child of God, you can’t draw a gun on another. It’s like shooting yourself. Bless and embrace one another,” he said.
I foresee a long journey to peace.
©Jean Di Marino 2012
