THE SOUTH SUDAN STRUGGLE STORY CHAPTER I

THE ANYANYA STORY The War Before the Nation Chapter Two The Long Road to Peace By the end of the 1960s, the war in the South had lasted more than a decade. A generation had grown up under its shadow. Villages had been burned and rebuilt and burned again. Refugee camps had turned from temporary shelters into small towns. Yet the fighting had produced no victory for either side. The Sudanese army could hold the towns but never the countryside. The Anyanya could survive in the forest but could not drive the army out. Each side had learned, at terrible cost, that it could not simply win. But learning that lesson and acting on it are different things, and between them lay a long road. Two problems stood in the way. The first was in Khartoum, where governments rose and fell and few would offer the South a real settlement. The second lay within the Southern movement itself, which was brave and stubborn but divided. To reach peace, the South would first have to find a common voice. A Movement of Many Voices Anyanya was never a single army under a single flag. It was a family of commands, some large and some small, spread across Equatoria, Bahr el Ghazal and Upper Nile. Commanders often operated on their own, cut off from one another by distance, rivers and the rainy season. Their loyalties were shaped by local communities as much as by any central plan. The political leadership was scattered too. Many of the men who spoke for the South did so from exile, in Kampala, Nairobi, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa and beyond. They argued about strategy and about the goal itself. Should the South demand independence, or settle for federation? Should it negotiate, or fight on? And who had the right to speak in its name? Personal rivalries and old suspicions made each of these questions harder. Groups formed, split and formed again. Names appeared and disappeared: organizations, fronts and provisional governments, each claiming to represent the Southern cause. In 1969 a body calling itself the Nile Provisional Government was proclaimed, led by Aggrey Jaden, but it never won the loyalty of all the fighters in the field. Outsiders noticed. Governments that might have offered help, and diplomats who might have carried the Southern case abroad, could not tell who really spoke for the South. A divided movement can be ignored, and it can be outmanoeuvred at the negotiating table. The South needed a leader whom the fighters would follow. The Officer from Equatoria That man was Joseph Lagu. Born in Equatoria and trained as a soldier in the Sudanese army, Lagu had left the national forces in the 1960s to join the Anyanya. He was an officer by training and a strategist by temperament, more interested in organization than in slogans. In a movement where many commanders knew the forest but not the wider world, he understood that both the battlefield and the diplomatic table mattered. Around 1970 he rose to command the Anyanya forces, displacing older leaders after a period of tension within the movement. The change was not painless, and not everyone welcomed it. But over the next months he set about a task that no one before him had managed: bringing the scattered commands under one structure. In 1971 he announced the formation of the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement, the SSLM, as the political umbrella for the struggle, with the Anyanya as its armed wing. Field commanders were brought into a more coherent chain of command. Supplies were organized more carefully. And, importantly, the movement now had a single address to which anyone wishing to speak with the South could write. It did not end every rivalry. Loyalties were still tested, and some groups remained wary. But for the first time in the history of the rebellion, there was a recognized centre. Friends Beyond the Border No rebellion survives on courage alone. Weapons, ammunition, medicine and food all had to come from somewhere, and in the South they did not come easily. Neighbouring countries mattered enormously. Uganda, Ethiopia, Congo and Kenya all lay along the edges of the war, and each had its own politics and its own reasons for caution. Refugees flowed across their borders, and so did rumours of arms and money. Later accounts describe outside assistance reaching the Anyanya through these routes, including help from Israel, though the scale and details are still discussed by historians. The politics of the region kept shifting. Coups, new governments and changing alliances could open a supply line one year and close it the next. A change of leadership in Kampala or a new understanding between Addis Ababa and Khartoum could alter the balance overnight. For the South, this meant that its future was tied to events far beyond its own borders. It also meant that any peace, when it came, would have to be agreed with the neighbours watching. A New Ruler in Khartoum In May 1969, a group of young army officers led by Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri seized power in Khartoum. It was one more coup in a country that had already seen several, and few in the South expected anything to change. But Nimeiri surprised them. Within weeks, on 9 June 1969, his government declared that the South was entitled to regional autonomy. It was the first time a Sudanese head of government had spoken so openly about self-rule for the South. A Southern communist lawyer, Joseph Garang, was appointed Minister for Southern Affairs. Many Southerners doubted the promise. They had heard similar words before. Yet something had shifted. The idea that the South might govern its own affairs, once treated as dangerous, was now part of official policy. The road was not smooth. The war continued, and mistrust ran deep. Then in July 1971 a group of communist officers briefly overthrew Nimeiri. He regained power within days, and the reprisals were severe. Several of those associated with the coup were executed, including Joseph Garang, who had been the South's most prominent voice inside the government. The upheaval left Nimeiri weakened and looking for new allies. It also reminded him of what a long, expensive war in the South was costing the treasury and the army. Increasingly, peace with the South seemed less like a concession and more like a necessity. The Churches Step Forward If the South's leaders were distrustful, so were Khartoum's. Neither side wished to be the first to reach out. What was needed was someone both could trust. That role was taken up by the churches. The All Africa Conference of Churches and the World Council of Churches had followed the war closely, and many church leaders had worked among Southern refugees. They had relationships in the South, in exile, and, increasingly, in Khartoum. Quietly, patiently, and often at some risk, they began to carry messages between the two sides. The Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie, offered his country as a meeting place. Ethiopia had its own reasons for wanting stability on its western frontier, and its standing in Africa gave it authority. Addis Ababa, seat of the Organization of African Unity, became the setting for the talks that would follow. Preliminary meetings in 1971 and early 1972 were cautious. Each side tested the other. Each asked: is the other serious? Slowly, the answer became yes. Addis Ababa In February 1972 delegations from the Sudanese government and the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement sat down together in Addis Ababa. On the government side, the delegation was led by Abel Alier, a Southern lawyer who had served in Nimeiri's government. The SSLM delegation was led by Ezekiel Gatkuoth Gual. The negotiations were not easy. The questions were the same ones that had divided the country for years. How much power would the South have? Who would control the army and the police? What language would the South use in its schools and courts? What would happen to the men who had fought in the forest? Some Southern fighters would have preferred independence and felt a compromise was a betrayal. Some Northern politicians thought any autonomy went too far. Yet both delegations kept talking. They were tired of a war that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and they knew that the country could not afford many more years of it. On 27 February 1972 the agreement was signed. It came to be known as the Addis Ababa Agreement. What the Agreement Promised The terms were a compromise. The South would not become independent, but it would gain a large degree of self-government within a united Sudan. Under the agreement, the three Southern provinces of Bahr el Ghazal, Equatoria and Upper Nile were to form a single Southern Region. The region would have its own elected People's Regional Assembly and a High Executive Council to run its daily affairs, with its capital at Juba. Arabic would be the official language of Sudan, while English would be recognized as the principal language of the South. The Anyanya fighters would not simply be disbanded. Instead, a portion of them, roughly six thousand men in the most commonly cited figures, would be absorbed into the national army alongside Northern soldiers in a joint Southern Command, with the remainder returning to civilian life. A ceasefire took effect. Refugees could go home. Schools and clinics could reopen. The agreement was later ratified in Khartoum and became the basis of the region's constitutional status. Abel Alier became the first President of the High Executive Council, and Joseph Lagu, the former guerrilla commander, entered the national army with the rank of major general. The Silence After the Guns It is hard to describe what peace felt like to people who had known only war. In towns across the South, there were celebrations. People sang and danced in the streets. Church bells rang. Elders who had spent years hiding in the bush walked into the open. Fighters who had lived for a decade in forest camps laid down their rifles and, for the first time in years, slept without listening for footsteps. Along the borders, refugees began the journey back. Hundreds of thousands returned from Uganda, the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya and the Central African Republic, walking the same roads they had once fled along. Many found their homes destroyed and their fields overgrown. Clinics and schools had to be rebuilt almost from nothing. Families searched for relatives they had not seen in years. Some searched in vain. Nothing about the peace was easy. The South was poor, and the region had almost no trained administrators, teachers or health workers. The war had taken a generation's education. But for the first time in seventeen years, people could imagine a future measured in decades rather than days. A Peace With Cracks Peace brought hope, but it did not answer every question. The agreement left several matters unclear, including the location of some regional boundaries, the control of natural resources, and how far the central government could intervene in Southern affairs. Money for development was slow to arrive. Integrating former fighters into the army was difficult, and some felt neglected. Politicians in the South disagreed about how the new institutions should work. For roughly a decade the arrangement held, and the South enjoyed a relative calm that few in the 1960s could have imagined. But in the early 1980s decisions taken in Khartoum began to chip away at the foundations of the agreement. Trust, once again, began to break. That is a story for the next chapter. For now, it is enough to say that in February 1972, after seventeen years of war, the guns of the first great Southern struggle fell silent. The men and women who had endured it had won something no one had won before them: a chance to build. The question was whether that chance would last. End of Chapter Two