The Child Soldiers of Africa's Red Army

The Role of Social Process and Routinised Violence in South Sudan's Military

Carol Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000513288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

This book examines the role of social process and routinised violence in the use of underaged soldiers in the country now known as South Sudan during the twenty-one-year civil war between Sudan's northern and southern regions. Drawing on accounts of South Sudanese who as children and teenagers were part of the Red Army—the youth wing of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA)—the book sheds light on the organised nature of the exploitation of children and youth by senior adult figures within the movement. The book also includes interviews with several of the original Red Army commanders, all of whom went on to hold senior positions within the military and government of South Sudan. The author chronicles the cultural transformation experienced by members of the Red Army and considers whether an analysis of the processes involved in what was then Africa's longest civil war can aid our understanding of South Sudan's more recent descent into ethnicised conflict. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology, and political science with interests in ethnography, conflict, and the military exploitation of children.

1 The Use of Child Soldiers in South Sudan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156826-2

You know why John Garang called it the Red Army? During the world war the army of the Soviet defeated the German army and they [the Soviets] had youngsters. Does that mean we will be Communists? No. It means that all children who are going to join the movement are going to be Red Army and he was going to be their commander. And he was going to educate them. Because that was his vision for Sudan, to educate us. But he didn’t educate [us] because of the circumstances—the war, the Soviet collapse.

—Red Army veteran living in western Canada¹

At that time we did not have what you call child soldiers. We were soldiers.

—Red Army veteran recruited in 1991 at the age of thirteen²

Introduction

For the past four decades, large parts of the former Sudan have suffered drought, famine, and war. In addition to the massive death toll, millions of people were displaced. After the signing of the peace agreement in 2005, tens of thousands of people returned to their home regions in what would become, in 2011, the independent country of South Sudan. But the numbers of returnees fell well below predictions. Continued insecurity and the lack of schools, health care, and basic services discouraged many from leaving refugee camps in neighbouring Kenya and the sprawling urban slums in the northern capital of Khartoum. It was only after the formal secession of South Sudan in 2011 that substantial numbers of returnees, now forced to leave northern Sudan, made the journey back to South Sudan. The following provides a background to the civil war as it concerns the subject of this book.

The war that began in South Sudan in 1983 left few lives untouched. This book deals with those who were taken into the rebel army as children and youth. Their experiences provide a compelling account of the costs of warfare, while at the same time showing the relative utility of using child soldiers, thus better contextualising the reasons why state and nonstate actors in South Sudan continue to rely on the forced recruitment of children and youth. The tragedy and triumph of their lives illuminate central issues that have dominated social, political, and economic life in the country of Sudan since its borders were formed by foreign powers in the late 1800s, and now in South Sudan, the world’s youngest nation. Interrogation of the life changes of individuals within the Red Army group enables an examination of the ‘making’ of culture. Because many of those recruited by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), and particularly those sent to Cuba, were related to powerful lineages (within the SPLA and the wider Nilotic-speaking society, including Dinka, Nuer, and Chollo [var. Shilluk] peoples) the consequences of their separation from kin and exposure to other cultural influences have affected a still wider group.

Background to the war

Located in what is known as the Horn of Africa, the former Sudan (southern Sudan then a region within the country) has long experienced instability from the spillover of conflicts in neighbouring Libya, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda. In particular, throughout the 1970s to 1990s, Sudan was affected by the long-running conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia.³ Sudan, then backed by the United States and other western nations, provided a base of operation for guerrilla armies opposed to the then East bloc-aligned Ethiopia. In addition to the tacit support for the anti-Ethiopian movements, Sudan allowed more than half a million Ethiopian refugees to live in its eastern region. Other displaced people, from Chad and Uganda, brought the total refugee numbers close to one million. It was to Ethiopia that dissident South Sudanese turned when the civil war began in the early 1980s. The country allowed the SPLA to headquarter its operations there and gave refuge to hundreds of thousands of southerners.

At the time of the North–South civil war, more than thirty million people lived in Sudan, most surviving at a subsistence level, working as farmers and pastoralists. The population was diverse, including more than 450 ethnic groups. Covering more than 2.5 million square kilometres, the terrain ranged from deserts in the north to tropical rain forests in the south. The main geographical feature of Sudan is the Nile River and its tributaries. The country was bounded on the north by Egypt; on the west by Libya, Chad, and the Central African Republic; to the east by the Red Sea, Eritrea, and Ethiopia; and to the south by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Kenya.

Sudan was administered through joint British and Egyptian rule between 1898 and 1956, when it became independent. During the latter part of Anglo–Egyptian Condominium colonial rule, British administrators pursued a policy of separate development for the mostly Arab and Muslim north and the African south. This policy saw the predominantly Arab northern region benefit from the creation of schools and institutes of higher learning, the building of infrastructure, and rail and road networks. The south, the last region to be pacified and brought under colonial rule, was administered by indirect rule. By 1930, attempts were made to prevent an Arabisation of the south, with trade links between the north and south frustrated by official policy aimed at maintaining the supposed traditional culture of the region. Further distinguishing the south from the north, Christian missionaries had been working in South Sudan since as early as the nineteenth century. But other than the regional capital of Juba, the south received almost no development. Education was the preserve of Christian missionaries, the different western denominations dividing the south into spheres of influence. While Arabic was the country’s official language, English was widely used among educated people in the south.

From 1955 to 1972 a civil war was fought in southern Sudan. The guerrilla army, known as the Anya-Nya, sought separation from the north. At least half a million people in southern Sudan died in the conflict, while another 200,000 people were forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries. The seventeen-year war was brought to an end in 1972 with the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement. The agreement set terms for regional autonomy and the absorption of Anya-Nya fighters into the Sudanese army and other civil institutions. By the late 1970s, however, large portions of the agreement had been dismantled by the Khartoum-based government led by President Gaafer Mohamed el Nimeiri. Development in the south was almost non-existent while Nimeiri sought to benefit the north with the oil reserves discovered in territory within southern Sudan. Despite opposition from southern politicians, the Khartoum government decided the oil would be pumped north for refinement at Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast. At the same time, the government adopted an increasingly militant Islamist programme. Both the autonomy of South Sudanese and their identity as non-Muslim Africans were increasingly encroached upon.

Amid rising criticism from South Sudanese, Nimeiri arrested large numbers of southern politicians and began to shift southern soldiers out of the region, replacing them with Muslim soldiers from northern Sudan. It was the latter action that immediately preceded the mutiny among southern soldiers stationed in Bor in May 1983. The mutiny by soldiers based at the Bor, Greater Upper Nile region, garrison, and attempts by government troops to disarm the dissenters weeks later, is considered the start of the civil war. The officers and troops who deserted the army in the wake of the mutiny were to form the nucleus of the SPLA.

In the years immediately before the mutiny, however, stirrings of armed rebellion in the south were already evident. The area was awash with small arms, a direct consequence of conflicts in neighbouring countries, including Chad and Uganda, and the absence of border controls. In the town of Bor, Upper Nile region, children had long made small clay figures, usually of animals. By late 1982, they were moulding the clay into the shape of the region’s favoured weapon, the AK-47.⁴ Long-standing grievances between southern Sudan and the northern seat of government were aggravated, particularly in the undeveloped southern region of Upper Nile, by the arrival of western resource companies. In the late 1970s, vast deposits of oil were discovered in the Bentiu area of Greater Upper Nile. The area, home to Nuer and Dinka, fell within an exploration concession operated by the U.S.-based Chevron Oil Company.⁵ The region had no services or infrastructure and the local population subsisted by cultivating cereal grains and raising herds of livestock, primarily cattle.

To the north of Bentiu lies Kordofan region, home to predominantly Muslim Arabs. Drought conditions in northern Sudan had exacerbated tensions between Arab and Nilotic-speaking peoples over the sharing of water and grazing lands for their herds of cattle. By the mid-1980s, armed Arab Baggara militias, known as the murahileen, routinely attacked Dinka villages lying to the south (Africa Watch 1990: 82–92). The arrival of western oil companies throughout Upper Nile region brought a new element of incursion into the long-neglected region.

‘Agostino’ was born in Bentiu district in 1976. He bears a large dent in his upper forehead and his arms are scarred from bullet wounds, injuries received when he was a Red Army soldier in the war. His second name is Khawajah, the Turkish–Arabic word for ‘teacher,’ commonly used in Sudanese colloquial Arabic to refer to a ‘foreigner.’ The name was given to him to mark an event—the arrival of foreigners in Bentiu. These foreigners, including Canadians and Americans, were oil workers sent to Bentiu to carry out exploration for oil in the Chevron concession. Because the area is undeveloped grasslands with no facilities to house or service outsiders, the oil workers would fly into the concession on a daily basis from work camps in northern Sudan. As a small boy, Agostino would wait until the helicopters had departed before running with other children to collect the tin refuse left behind by the work crews. They would bring the discarded drink cans back to their mothers who would fashion objects out of them. He lives in Canada now, sharing a house with other Dinka from his home region. Agostino was asked to recall his early memories of Chevron’s arrival:

What I remember about Chevron? I remember when people came by helicopter and landed on the islands [in Bahr el Ghazal (Gazelle River)]. They took [brought] all those cans and we would go get them, after they leave. They call us to come and we get afraid. What I remember was every day hearing the gun shots. They do that, shooting into the ground [shooting seismic to record geological data].

One day we were following the cattle and we found them just making a road, cutting every tree down. And they come to one guy and told him he had to move his luak [Dinka: cattle shelter] from here. They say, ‘We give you money.’ He say, ‘No.’ They say, ‘No, no, we give you money.’ Then they got a bulldozer and pushed it down. I remember the white guy, he went like this [imitating the foreign oil worker, the informant removed his baseball cap, raised his hand and pointed straight ahead, as if directing the bulldozer] and they did it.

I remember a lot of people were getting angry about what they were doing. And then, two years later, the Arabs came on the road that Chevron made. The first time they came with a camel and some by foot. The soldiers came with Majeros [a brand of truck used by the army] and they leave them at Lake Jow. They put them down [parked the vehicles] there and come walk and attack the villages.⁶

Agostino’s recollections highlight the most immediate consequence of oil development in his home region: the cutting of roads. While the small number of educated South Sudanese living in major centres were concerned that no revenue-sharing agreement had been struck to ensure the south benefited from the oil, people living in the oil region feared the outcome of roadbuilding and new infrastructure. Providing better access into the undeveloped region would make local inhabitants vulnerable not only to the central government but also Arab militias that sought to use the rich Dinka and Nuer grasslands for their livestock.

When the war began, the areas immediately affected were Upper Nile, Bahr el Ghazal, and the southernmost portion of Kordofan region. From the latter came the people from the disputed area of Abyei, a predominantly Dinka-inhabited district that lies within the boundaries of northern Sudan (its status, whether part of northern Sudan or South Sudan, has yet to be finalised despite years of negotiation over the post-war period). The first waves of refugees to Ethiopia came from communities that had been devastated by raids by the Arab murahileen and those where southern garrisons had mutinied against northern rule.

Throughout 1984 and 1985, the Abyei area of southern Kordofan and the northern districts of Bahr el Ghazal were devastated by cattle raiding, the burning of crops, and the hunger which followed. There were reports of death by starvation in Bahr el Ghazal region, reports that were to be dwarfed by the magnitude of the tragedy which followed (Burr & Collins 1995: 30–31). As one informant, ‘Marial,’ said: ‘The first people who died for us were from Abyei. The first soldiers for the SPLA [meaning Anya-Nya II, the precursor to the SPLA] were from Abyei.’⁷ He continued, ‘Abyei is the bumper of the car and Bahr el Ghazal is the back of the car. When the car crashes, it is Abyei which is the bumper.’ Others contend that the first affected area was in fact to the east of Abyei, in northern Bahr el Ghazal, among the Malual Dinka, who were targeted for raids as early as 1981.

The conflict between Baggara Arabs from northern Sudan and Nilotic- speaking peoples living directly to the south was an old one and centred on the control of water and grazing rights. For as long as people can remember, the two groups have fought for dominance. In the past, annual negotiations were held by the two sides to determine an equitable distribution of the area’s resources. At these meetings, the two sides would also exchange individuals who had been captured or kidnapped in earlier clashes. Such slaves, or hostages, would be returned to their families for a negotiated price.

In the early 1980s, however, the balance of power dramatically shifted in favour of the Baggara. This was in part due to an influx of automatic weaponry from Chad and Libya. Using northwestern Sudan as a staging point, Hissene Habre seized power in Chad in 1981 with the support of Egypt and Sudan. Soon the northwestern regions of Darfur and Kordofan were awash with automatic weaponry. The area was also suffering from drought and famine. The Baggara sought to extend their grazing and water resources by pushing south into Dinka and Nuer territory. The discovery of oil in southern Sudan also gave the Khartoum government reason to provide military support for the Baggara. Thus was born the murahileen, the Baggara militia that received support from the northern-led army in its campaign to depopulate the Dinka-inhabited land. In 1984 the south was struck by drought, further worsening the tenuous food situation. At the same time, fighting by the SPLA and its reliance on the support of the already hard-pressed local people led tens of tho...