Because the SPLA had originally received so much support from the austere Marxist government in Addis, the lobby worked hard to persuade Washington that the movement was not caught on the wrong side of history. The gang of four arranged for US congressmen to visit the south to see that Garang headed a modern democratic organisation, not a throwback to old-style communism. Dagne, in particular, formed a close bond with the garrulous Garang; they spoke on the phone almost daily, according to Dagne. He addressed Garang as ‘Uncle’ and the general reciprocated by affectionately calling Degne ‘Nephew’. The council was united in its respect for Garang, even though the Americans wanted independence for the south, whereas the general still proclaimed unity.
Until 1993 and the World Trade Center bombing, the State Department clung to the official line that they could not deal with the SPLM and instead had to work with the legal government in Khartoum. All the terrorist issues from bin Laden’s sojourn in the country to the assassination attempt on Mubarak swung the balance in favour of the gang of four’s activism. Winter persuaded many Africanists in the State Department that the Khartoum government was ‘too deformed to be reformed’. By the late 1990s millions of dollars of surplus US military equipment was going to the SPLA via Uganda, Eritrea and Ethiopia. And some military training was provided. Reeves joined the gang in 2001. He had no direct experience of Sudan, but he became a prolific propagandist, writing thousands of articles brimming with moral outrage. When George W. Bush became president, Susan Rice and Prendergast, as Clinton people, left government to join think tanks. That left only Dagne, plus USAID adviser, Brian D’Silva, on the inside track. Bush, however, had his own views on Sudan. Ending the war in the south became official Washington policy.
The SPLA’s endgame strategy
Would John Garang, an excellent strategist, push for a battlefield advantage before moving into the international peace arena? The long years of intermittent peace negotiations and broken ceasefires matched the complexity of the impasse. The ethnic, religious and cultural roots of the north-south conflict were clear enough, but the mosaic of conventional and irregular military forces, militias, warlords and plain bandits in the south was of Byzantine intricacy. While both Khartoum and the SPLA adopted the North Vietnamese model of fighting and talking, perhaps the best Asian comparison is with the military patchwork in China in the warlord period (1916-1928), where regional armies and militias loyal to ethnic groups and charismatic commanders flourished. It required leaders of a national status such as Mao Zedong or Chiang Kai-shek to absorb or defeat them, while simultaneously facing an invading Japanese army. The analogy is not precise, but it gives a flavour of the kaleidoscopic texture.
Before al-Bashir took full charge in late 1999, the year the oil started flowing, and before he could fully reform the army and afford new equipment, the government forces in the south were essentially a garrison army. The officer corps had been thinned by purges and promotion had sometimes depended on ideological zeal rather than military merit. The fighting tradition of the Sudanese army since the 1920s had relied on warlike volunteer other ranks from the west and south; now they had been partly replaced by more loyal but less hardy and more urbanized northern riverine Arabs. The introduction of conscription and the use of the PDF militia further de-professionalized the army that was often stuck in isolated outposts, unable to use the mined ‘roads’, and dependent upon air supply. Air power did give the north a major advantage, but the other key asset, armour, was often useless in the bush, especially during the rains. The Soviet-era tanks, mainly T-55s, were often forced to deploy in dug-in static defence. The array of armoured fighting vehicles from venerable Russian, Chinese and even British stock were often difficult to maintain, with spares in short supply. Technical support was weak. The same applied to the air force. So, under-strength and under-resourced, troops had to wait for air supply in the rains, but the aircraft were then vulnerable to shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles let alone technical faults. And, in the dry season, the complete lack of tarmac roads (except around oil installations) and the often heavy bush offered endless opportunities for guerrilla ambush.
Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, aptly summarized the conflict:
In the rainy season the SPLA would spread out from its bases, surround small towns and garrisons and sometimes capture them. In the dry season the Sudan army would counter-attack, retake lost towns and restock its garrisons. Militarily the war went nowhere.3
Because South Sudan had almost no all-weather roads, campaigning often related to the seasons. And there were few airstrips in such a massive theatre of war, so the fighting was rather like a boxing match on a football field. So this was a struggle of minor sieges, regular skirmishes and rarely major pitched battles in the Western sense, although frequent massacres occurred, usually inter-tribal.
The SPLA often debated the need to capture the capital, Juba, as a symbol of their success. They almost managed it in 1992. For years Juba was under more or less close siege. In June 1996 I flew to the besieged capital in a government Antonov cargo plane. Two large Russian transports had been abandoned on the edge of the runway. A sense of despair and dereliction hung over the town like a cloud. Gutted petrol stations and fleets of vehicles mounted on bricks littered the lush equatorial landscape. I stayed at the Salaam Hotel, Hotel of Peace. Certainly, I was not disturbed by any service or amenities. Nobody was shooting at me or the film cameraman, Irwin Armstrong, because we were told that the SPLA had been pushed sixty miles from the capital. We were minded by four large military policemen, one of whom I discovered was a Catholic. Somehow I persuaded him to take me in the dead of night, in a tropical rainstorm, to visit Paulino Loro, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Juba, who was under house arrest. The archbishop bravely opened up to me and said the guerrillas were all around the town and indeed inside it. The priest lashed out at the forced Arabization of the south and the many attempts to undermine the Christian faith. His frankness, despite many death threats, was impressive. The next day I flew in a Puma to Torit, the on-off HQ of the SPLA. It was under temporary government control, but the small town was in ruins.
By 1996 the SPLA had recovered from most of the effects of the schism of 1991 and ejection from Ethiopian sanctuaries. In January 1997 the SPLA’s 13th Division launched Operation BLACK FOX as part of its dry-season offensive. (The wet season varies according to latitude and is generally no more than eight to nine months a year, beginning as early as April and continuing usually to October but sometimes as late as December.) The operation captured Kurmuk again as well as other southern Blue Nile towns, once more panicking Khartoum because of the seizure of northern territory. The government mobilized a large armoured column that retook the towns. The SPLA counter-attacked the overextended government force and almost wiped out a complete Sudanese brigade. The SPLA also repelled another government attempted offensive north of the Blue Nile fight. Having contained the northern dry-season offensive, the SPLA cleared out many government outposts in central Equatoria. Thousands of government troops were killed or captured. Garang also started to eliminate progovernment militias. When the Juba garrison troops finally risked leaving their fortifications to try to secure the Wei-Juba road they were severely thumped by the SPLA and retreated back to the capital. The SPLA then mopped up nearly all the remaining outposts in central Equatoria. Then they retook Rumbek on the road to Wau. En route they gave a beating to another pro-government militia, Kerubino’s SPLA-Bahr al-Ghazal. Other towns, such as Warrap, fell to the guerrillas before the onset of the rains.
John Garang’s strategy of taking on the SPLA splinters and outright government militias forced Khartoum to rationalize its militia strategy, which had been ad hoc before. In April 1997 al-Bashir had tried to forge some kind of unity from the chaotic ethnic and personal rivalries in the southern militias. They mainly consisted of:
Riek Machar’s South Sudan Independence Movement/Army (SSIM/A)
Kerubino Kuanyin Bol’
s SPLA-Bahr al-Ghazal
Theophilus Ochang Lotti’s Equatoria Defence Force
Arok Thon Arok’s Independence of the Bor Group
Muhammad Harun Kafi’s SPLA-Nuba
Kawac Makuei Imayar’s Independence Movement for Southern Sudan
Khartoum had dubbed this alliance a peace agreement, but it was obviously a temporary stratagem to divide and rule and weaken the successful SPLA offensives. The cliché of herding cats applied to nearly all attempts to unify southern factions, especially in alliance with Khartoum, against whom they were supposed to be fighting to achieve southern independence. The militias were aggregated for military containment, but al-Bashir also realized that it needed a political front. In August 1997 Riek Machar was made president of a ‘Council of the South’. This had little effect. Al-Bashir tried to further integrate the militias into the army by giving their commanders the rank of brigadier. The ever-touchy Kerubino was made a major general, but he was angered by the promotion of Machar as titular political council president. In a fit of petulance, Kerubino defected back to the official SPLA a few months later, though this damage was partially balanced by the affable and ambitious Lam Akol’s re-alignment with Khartoum. His SPLA-United controlled a large area around the strategic town of Malakal. Akol was a leader of the Shilluk people, but his vacillation lost him support even among his own tribal following.
As recounted earlier, in January 1998 to regain credibility with Garang, his kinsman and former captor, Kerubino attacked and captured Wau, the capital of Bahr al-Ghazal. It was a stunning if brief victory. The army concentrated its forces and its superiority in artillery and air strikes and soon regained the state capital with much loss of civilian lives. Exhausted, both sides declared a three-month ceasefire during the rainy season in Bahr al-Ghazal.
Meanwhile, a more sensible and (and slightly more) effective herding of cats was the National Democratic Alliance’s formation of a Joint Command in July 1997.4 Garang was made commander in chief, but his deputy was a senior defector from the Sudanese army, Lieutenant General Abdel Rahman Said. It made little immediate difference militarily for the eastern front, however.
Al-Bashir had to deal with (sometimes) pro-government militias in the east and west of his own country, as well as clandestine military allies in Chad, for example. One of the most bizarre proxies came from Uganda, although Western critics might say it materialized from a horror movie: the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As if the Sudanese imbroglio was not sufficiently fragmented and militarized and not enough religious fanatics were running around with guns, the Lord’s Resistance Army further stirred the hell brew. Still not resolved at the time of writing, the LRA, captained by Joseph Kony, ravaged the borderlands of South Sudan, northern Uganda, and later the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Originally a tribal revolt of the Acholi in northern Uganda, it assumed religious pretensions. It emerged initially from the Holy Spirit Movement led by Alice Lakwena, a self-styled prophetess. Inspired by visions from God, she said, Lakwena formed an ‘army’ to sweep away tribal enemies in the capital, Kampala. Although usually armed with spears and machetes, she claimed that strict adherence to her rules would permit her followers to be immune to bullets (a not uncommon belief in many primitive insurgencies in Africa). Her acolytes were told to cover their bodies in shea nut oil and they would be invulnerable. Luckily, shea nut oil or butter (known locally as moo-yahoo) is very common in Uganda. Unluckily, it didn’t work when Alice led her bulletproof army in trying to capture Kampala in August 1987. Perhaps the spiritual army did not follow her other precepts that dictated they never took cover or retreated, or ever kill snakes or bees. Without a Green Party in Uganda, it might have been assumed that her movement would have collapsed when she fled to Kenya, but Joseph Kony, sometimes said to be Alice’s cousin or nephew (the spiritual powers were supposed to run in the bloodline), absorbed the remnants of her followers to set up the Lord’s Resistance Army. It was based on the Ten Commandments, animist mysticism and Acholi nationalism. Kony’s variation was that moo-yahoo should be spread on the chest in the shape of a cross. This seemed to work better because his movement lasted for decades, despite being hunted by a variety of modern conventional armies.
For a time in the mid-nineties, Khartoum armed Kony’s movement because it raided into South Sudan and distracted the SPLA. This was a riposte to the Ugandan government’s support of the southern rebels. A little like RENAMO in Mozambique, Kony’s movement took on a life of its own once it had been re-armed. In March 2002, a major offensive by the Ugandan army (Operation IRON FIST) failed to capture the ever-elusive Kony. Khartoum, as part of the peace negotiations with the SPLA, sanctioned the 2002 offensive and a repeat in 2004. Then the International Criminal Court intervened and made it worse, when Kony saw no reason to make peace with Kampala and be sent to The Hague. Even the multi-faceted wiles of Riek Machar failed when he tried to intercede, as the vice president of the autonomous South Sudan in 2006 to 2008. Barack Obama sent in over 100 US special forces in 2011. Though reduced to a rag-tag force of perhaps hundreds, not thousands, Kony kept going in the DRC and CAR, to continue his pillaging and capturing child soldiers. Alice would have been proud of him.
Meanwhile, during the late 1990s, Machar was up to his old shape-shifting tricks. He renamed his SSIM/A the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF). This coincided with a fall-out with a previous ally, Paulino Matip, who led the South Sudan Unity Army (SSUA). Matip was a military maverick and privateer who was keener on cash than any political ideology. He had become a mercenary to protect the oil facilities in his tribal Nuer areas. The Matip-Machar antagonism extended to shoot-outs in their private homes in Khartoum and at a wedding in Omdurman. Soon the personal animosity between the two men led to serious factional fighting around the main oil facilities in Bentiu. Khartoum had to use force to impose a truce.
Despite his intelligence and charm with Westerners, Machar possessed a genius for spawning vendettas among his own people. During 1998 a number of his units in the Upper Nile broke away to rejoin the official SPLA. In 1999 Machar formed a new political party to fight in a national election announced by al-Bashir. This further antagonized his dwindling band of supporters because any northern-based election would re-enforce sharia law, anathema to most southerners. Machar’s splinter group splintered again and his latest internal rivals formed the SSDF-2. At least Machar’s rivals avoided the common splitters’ habit of putting ‘unity’ in the title. Perhaps they had no sense of irony. Even al-Bashir, a master manipulator of the southern fissures, felt that Machar had outlived his usefulness to Khartoum. As ever, Machar adapted to his changing (and dwindling) fortunes to return to his roots to negotiate in Nairobi to re-align with Garang. Along with Lam Akol and other vacillating militia commanders, they were taken back in to the official fold in early 2002. Garang was tactically generous: he made Machar vice president of the SPLM even though the Nuer commander had lost the support of many of his long-time fighters. This re-integration was at least bloodless, especially compared with Kerubino’s second attempt to rejoin Garang. Kenyan security forces had to intervene in a shoot-out between their respective bodyguards in Garang’s Nairobi residence. Kerubino then rejoined Matip’s pro-government militia and was apparently killed fighting the SPLA in 1998, although it was alleged that Garang had arranged his assassination.
Dealing with on-off allies such as Machar, Akol and Keubino, some of them arguably psychopathic, Garang could have been forgiven for being surprised by the intensity of the government’s dry-season offensive in 1999. Northern forces took a number of important SPLA air strips. The offensive in 2000 inflicted serious reverses on the SPLA in the Nuba Mountains. In 2001 the new equipment purchased with the oil money boosted Khartoum’s morale and effectiveness and the SPLA started to lose more ground. It was only the arrival of Senator Danforth’s peace mission in late 2001 that allowed the SPLA to stabilize its lines, not least in the Nuba Mountains. Danforth’s mission included a series o
f tests of sincerity such as establishing ‘zones of tranquillity’ which would allow humanitarian relief. But in essence Washington wanted to know whether al-Bashir and Garang could and would make peace. A trial ceasefire in the Nuba Mountains was signed in Geneva in January 2002. Khartoum disrupted World Food Programme missions in the region by an air raid on Bieh, prompting Western criticism in general and, particularly, hawks in Washington to propose sending surface-to-air missiles to the SPLA. Danforth took the standard line of introducing international monitors to audit the goodwill on both sides. An overall Joint Military Mission was set up that included experts for military and civilian protection verification.
The SPLA had been making gains in the east. They had joined forces with a united brigade sponsored by the NDA and they both allied with insurgents from the Beja Congress. The Beja, who are Muslim non-Arabs, consisted of four main clans. One of them was the famously warlike Hadendowa, whom the British had named the ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies’ because of the distinctive Afro hairstyles, and who were famed for breaking a British square. The Beja people’s cattle had suffered severely in the drought years and some of their land had been seized by Khartoum and sold to a new class of mechanized farmers, as well as large tracts to Osama bin Laden. The Beja insurgency had been revived in 1994. In 1999 and 2000 the combined opposition forces overwhelmed a number of army garrisons around the strategic border town of Kassala. The eastern front was now posing a major threat to the government.
Omar Al-Bashir and Africa's Longest War Page 21