For the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the Red Belt, a vigilante group complete with firearms, including machine guns, uniforms, insignia, and ranks, and a fleet of vehicles, who operate in Jonglei State’s Bor Town and other parts of Bor County. The people of Bor contend and insist, the group was created to check wanton and cyclic violent cattle rustling, child abductions, and to protect their properties, among other things, because the government has abdicated its role. However, Governor Dr. Riek Gai Kok officially condemned the Red Belt group and labeled them a criminal organization responsible for recent violence and insecurity in the region. Bor County Commissioner Samuel Ateny Pech followed suit and faulted the group for turning into a criminal network engaged in robbery and attacking security forces.
The blow to the Red Belt group and their backers came on 28 October when Chief of Defense Forces Gen. Paul Nang Majok told reporters in Juba that the Red Belt is not a community organization but “an armed group that must be dealt with decisively.”
“The Red Belt is a security danger in South Sudan and a threat to people’s livelihoods,” he said at the National Security Directorate for Operations. “Anyone found carrying weapons unlawfully will be arrested and disarmed.”
Gen. Nang said the Red Belt group poses a major threat to national security and swore to dismantle it as combined security forces intensify operations to seize illegal weapons across the country. Momentarily, he is in Bor Town overseeing the disarmament exercise.
Sections of the Bor Community at home and in the diaspora cried foul and said President Salva Kiir’s government is using the Red Belt, a community initiative for protection, to further an ulterior motive. Some even cited the operations against the White Army in Nasir and other parts of Upper Nile earlier this year.
However, for readers to critically understand the goings on, I will take a detour into history to give perspective.
Some of the dynamics at play commenced when President Kiir ascended to the leadership of the SPLM/A after the demise of Dr. John Garang in the last quarter of 2005. A couple of years before the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in January 2005, differences between Garang and Kiir had come to the fore with the latter accusing his boss of running the movement like his personal property, carrying it in his briefcase, being ultra vires, and not delegating power. The crisis reached a boiling point in 2004 with Kiir setting defenses in Yei after claiming Garang was planning to arrest and replace him. Tempers cooled, logic prevailed, and a leadership meeting of the movement and the rebel army, which was really indistinguishable, was held in Rumbek from 29 November to 1 December 2004 to resolve the impasse at the critical time of negotiating the tail end of the CPA. The meeting was inconclusive but created an uneasy peace and stopped an implosion of the movement.
Kiir’s differences with Garang extended to some of the latter’s inner circle, whom the former had marked for disparaging and maltreating him during the struggle. Many of the people who were close to Garang and came to be known as “Garang Boys” after his demise were from Greater Bor. Those who know Kiir well know that he knows how to hold a grudge well and does not forgive nor forget. He is vengeful!
After ascending to power, Kiir went about slowly but deliberately stripping the Garang Boys of power and dispatching some of those he felt had wronged him into political oblivion. He kept the ones he perceived to be powerful in his government, if only to watch them closely and also because they still had support in the army and the party. After sufficiently repositioning himself, Kiir started using rumors of a coup against the likes of Gen. Oyay Deng Ajak, the first chief of the SPLA after the CPA, and other former Garang allies. Yes, the use of coup rumors is not a new Kiir tactic. Gen. Oyay repeatedly repudiated the rumors. To give Kiir’s antannae credit, many former Garang allies used to openly say he was unfit to hold the highest office in the land and that it was a matter of time before he faltered. They contended that someone more worthy should be the leader of the SPLM Party and the president. They read the man wrong! He was simply biding his time.
Circa July 2013, after feeling he had complete control of the security sector, after establishing and firming up the now notorious National Security Services (NSS) and Presidential Guard (Tiger Division), in one fell swoop, Kiir fired his entire cabinet. The real purge on the Garang Boys and his other detractors had commenced.
First forward, Kiir looks at the Red Belt like a sleeper cell or dormant military outfit that can be sprung into action and used against him. Any amateur intelligence and security analyst can connect dots like Peter Biar Ajak’s attempted purchase of weapons in the USA, the desire by political and military elements from Bor to get back the power they lost after the demise of Garang and Kiir’s failed leadership and his current unstable health and deduce that there are many machinations by people who are looking at a post Kiir era and want to position themselves. This naturally scares Kiir because it can scuttle his succession plans and throw the future of his family in jeopardy.
Interestingly, the political and military leaders from Bor, like the vociferous Information Minister Michael Makuei, Gen. Kuol Manyang, etc., have gone mute on the issue of the Red Belt group. This might be because Kiir has demystified and has been casually firing the old senior SPLM carders, only recently seen to be untouchable, but also because they also know the man’s vindictiveness and how he treats actual and illusory enemies. Ask the notorious Gen. Akol Koor, who is now languishing under house arrest.
The people of Bor have complained that the SSPDF and NSS units that have been deployed in Bor are running roughshod, robbing money and properties, and harassing innocent people and beating and arresting youths who are not connected to the Red Army. This in itself might be by design to rile the Bor people to react and attack government forces so that the bullish and rash Gen. Nang can then unleash massive violence upon them to show them where true power lies and cower them into submission. The Bor people seem to have seen through this because the same script was used in Nasir before the “Nasir crisis” came to a head in March and morphed to the “Nasir Incident” for which First Vice President Dr. Riek Machar is now being humiliatingly tried in court. The same tactics were used to justify a scorched earth policy, purportedly to deal with rebels, in much of Greater Equatoria, where entire peoples were forced off their lands and into refugee camps in DRC, Uganda, and Kenya. For Kiir, the question that begs is who armed the Red Belt group, with what intention, and to what end game. Interestingly, it is a known fact that senior SSPDF officers and politicians have, over the years, armed their people across the country-especially among cattle-keeping communities. Kiir’s government has, in the past, given lip service to disarmament of certain sections and disarmed others. However, it seems Kiir is now calculatingly going after the Bor leaders and wants to start by dismantling their support base and the armed youths there.
It is evident that Kiir is pursuing real and imagined enemies to consolidate his power, if only to force a succession plan of his choosing. He will also want to score cheap points with the people of Greater Equatoria, who have often complained about pastoralists from Bor who often drive large herds of cattle to their area, which then destroy crops. The heavily armed Bor herders have also been repeatedly accused of wantonly killing people in Eqautoria who complain about the destruction of their crops and other disputes. Kiir himself has often publicly faulted senior political and military leaders from Bor for being the owners of these large herds that often move to Equatoria and attributed Gen. Thomas Cirillo’s rebellion to them.
Relatedly, on social and other media, Bor intellectuals have also argued that because the economy is in meltdown and the government is broke, Kiir wants to remove entire villages from Jonglei State’s Oil Block B2 so that South Africa’s Strategic Fuel Fund (SFF), which signed a six-year production sharing agreement with South Sudan, can start work. SFF, the operator of the Block B2 oilfield, and South Sudan’s Nilepet are working together under the Nile Orange Joint Venture and have started oil and gas exploration after aerial surveys. However, like most dealings in the oil sector, it is hard to verify this because most information is not made public and kept shrouded in secrecy. They postulate that Kiir wants to provoke war in Bor so that he can use the same scorched earth tactics Sudan’s former leader, Gen. Omar El Bashir, used in Unity State to kill and remove people from their villages to allow oil extraction in the 1990s. In South Sudan, sensitive truths often start making rounds as rumors.
It would be callous to conclude without providing some solutions. Like I have written severally (https://www.radiotamazuj.org/en/news/article/opinion-eyes-wide-shut-south-sudan-has-too-many-guns-does-not-need-more), South Sudan needs to genuinely reform the security sector, build a truly national army, empower the police, and have a representative security sector before embarking on a massive disarmament campaign. The quickest avenue here is implementing the peace agreement to the letter and unifying the armed forces to create a national army that has sufficient numbers and is empowered to carry out its mandate. As it is, we have seen incidents where half-naked youths have outgunned the national army because the latter does not have the will or capacity to have the monopoly of violence, or even protect the country’s borders.
Sadly, Kiir has torpedoed the agreement. In reality, Kiir is the aggregate of all the misery and suffering of the people of South Sudan; he does not prescribe anything positive but the spilling of blood.
The author, Koka Lo’Lado, is a journalist and can be reached via kokalolado@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.