Although the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of January 2005 formally ended the war between the Government of Sudan (GoS) and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), internal security has remained a major problem for the fledgling southern government. Indeed, internal conflict, rather than the prospect of a return to war between the north and south, poses the biggest threat to the holding of the CPA-stipulated national election in April 2010, the referendum on southern self-determination in January 2011, and the viability of South Sudan as an independent state.
Nowhere is the problem more evident than in Jonglei, the biggest state in area in South Sudan and with 1 358 602 people the most populous.1 There are a number of explanations for the high level of intra and inter-tribal conflict in the state. First, the campaign of destruction by Dr Riek Macher and his Lou Nuer allies in the early 1990s in their revolt against the Dr John Garang-led SPLM/A laid the basis for conflict between the tribes of the region that has continued until the present. Second, Jonglei’s conflict network must be among the most complex and violent in the south, and the state hosts the Lou Nuer and the Murle who are at the centre of this conflict.
Third, Jonglei brings together in one state the politically and economically developed minority Bor Dinka with a largely deprived majority from other tribes. And, lastly, Jonglei has long been an incubator for conflict in southern Sudan. It was in eastern Jonglei that Anyanya II in the mid-1970s began its opposition to the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement of 1972. It was in Jonglei that the 1983 revolt began that is generally held to mark the start of Sudan’s second civil war. The state was a core area of support for the main opposition to the SPLA, the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF), the centre of conflict between...READ FULL DOCUMENT