The attacks on civilians by soldiers have made the Murle feel increasingly persecuted by their own government. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

By Skye Wheeler
JONGLEI STATE, South Sudan, Sep 12 2013 (IPS)

On the last day of July, South Sudanese soldiers shot dead two unarmed women, Anyibi Baba and Ateil Rio. The killings were the latest in a pattern of grave violations against civilians by Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) soldiers fighting a Murle rebel group in Jonglei state. 

Human Rights Watch researcher Skye Wheeler says the Sudan People’s Liberation Army should hold abusive soldiers accountable by deploying military and civilian justice officials to South Sudan’s Jonglei state. Courtesy: Human Rights Watch

At least 70 Murle civilians and about two dozen ethnic Murle members of the army and wildlife forces have been unlawfully killed since December. Panic has spread among the Murle. Thousands have fled their homes, too scared of the soldiers to return.

Tragically, violence in Jonglei is nothing new. Ethnic conflict driven by cattle raiding has cost the lives of thousands and displaced tens of thousands.

Attacks and counter attacks between armed members of the Dinka Bor, Lou Nuer and Murle ethnic groups over the past three years have been especially bloody and have increasingly targeted women and children. Because authorities almost always fail to investigate or punish criminals, these groups mete out their own justice in a cruel cycle of brutal revenge attacks.

The re-emergence of a Murle rebel group in 2012 and the government’s counter-insurgency has greatly complicated the situation and chances for peace in Jonglei and has plunged all of Pibor county, the center of the anti-insurgency effort, into humanitarian crisis, displacing tens of thousands of Murle.

But in particular the attacks on civilians by soldiers have made the Murle feel increasingly persecuted by their own government. “We are not the ones going to raid, we are not the ones rebelling against the government but we are the ones being killed,” one woman told me. Soldiers’ attacks on civilians often appear to be reprisals.

In one case, soldiers returning from a firefight with rebels in the bush in May executed 12 men, three of them chiefs, in the village of Manyabol. As a result, the whole village fled. Soldiers also burned and looted homes, looted aid agencies and hospitals and destroyed and occupied schools. “They don’t want anything good for the Murle people,” one man said.

President Salva Kiir has condemned abuses, saying that “something is wrong” when civilians are frightened of their own soldiers. The army has taken some actions to curb the abuses. In mid-August it court martialed two soldiers for killing Baba and Rio.

It acted quickly in that case, in contrast to the series of other abuses since late last year. On Aug. 20, the army also announced the arrest of Brigadier General James Otong, for the serious abuses by soldiers in his chain of command between April and July.

These first steps should help the South Sudan military to send a clear message that killings and lootings will not be condoned. But the army should follow through, by holding other abusive soldiers accountable and by deploying military and civilian justice officials to the area.

The army also needs to take immediate steps to improve its relationship with the largely Murle civilian population. These steps could include, for example, moving barracks away from town centers.

Even-handedness in approaching the ethnic violence in Jonglei will be crucial in counteracting the perception of persecution among the Murle. Authorities have not protected either side in the ethnic conflict from attacks, but they have encouraged young Lou Nuer men to arm themselves and did nothing to stop the mobilisation of thousands of Lou Nuer who attacked Murle areas in July.

As the attack was going on, the army said it would not be able to protect Murle civilians, most of whom had fled into the bush because of the conflict and army abuses. Several disturbing, and credible, reports even alleged that the army provided ammunition to Lou Nuer fighters.

There is a need for a long-term strategy so the police, courts and other parts of the justice system can provide remedy for all victims and end cattle raiding in Jonglei.  But for now, South Sudan’s leaders should ramp up and sustain efforts to address the abuses of government forces there and protect all vulnerable civilians. The army needs to demonstrate to all South Sudanese that it is there to protect them, not to harm them.

* Skye Wheeler is a South Sudan researcher at Human Rights Watch, which on Sept. 13 released a report titled “‘They are Killing Us’: Abuses Against Civilians in South Sudan’s Pibor County”. It documents 24 incidents of unlawful killings of almost 100 members of the Murle ethnic group between December 2012 and July 2013.

By Skye Wheeler
TORIT, South Sudan, Jan 20 2010 (IPS)

An old rite is long overdue in Paul Yugusak Tombe’s home village, in Central Equatoria State, south Sudan.

Young monyomiji listen in at a conference. Credit: Skye Wheeler/IPS

"We are making arrangements now. The change must take place," Tombe, also a member of Central Equatoria’s parliament, said. His age set has been in power about 10 years too long, albeit tumultuous ones.

Before the war in the tradition of handing over power, the ruling age set of men and the set below would go into the forest together, hunt and then fight fiercely over the dead animal.

Today it is more likely that a purchased bull, instead of a hunted animal, will be torn apart by the two sides in the heated tug of war, Tombe said. But the symbolism, and the genuine tensions that underlie this, and other similar battle or mock battle traditions among the tribes located east of the River Nile, remain the same.

"It is not an easy thing," cultural expert Lias Ohisa Affwonni said about the handover. "It is a struggle."

The younger men usually would win this battle; the elders would admit defeat and hand over control of all aspects of village life including its protection. (The upcoming set ranges in age from about 18 to about 45 years old, usually the eldest here are about the same age as the youngest of the ruling set.) This passionate cycle of societal renewal in Tombe’s section of the Olubu tribe is meant to take place about every 25 years.

But because of the war it has not taken place for a decade longer than it should have. But also because of the war the monyomiji are changing. And the upcoming leaders are men grown up in war and still affected by the trauma of it.

Monyomiji (which is used interchangeably to refer to the governance structure, the men in charge, and also the youth) is an effective structure of governance, its proponents say. It provides a clear path for societal change with each passage of control, usually about every 22 to 25 years. However, changeovers can occur more frequently in some groups.

The system has also been lauded as especially democratic. The men in the ruling age set govern together in a highly organised system that gives each member a role, in most cases won by merit.

Chiefs or "kings" – traditionally the community’s rainmaker, usually have a hereditary role, but more recently government-appointed headmen have also joined the monyomiji. Chiefs are usually changed in the handover of power, Tombe said, unless they are especially talented.

Anthropologist and development worker Simone Simons believes that the monyomiji structure is being under-utilised by development workers and south Sudan’s new government, formed in 2005 after a north-south peace deal ended more than 20 years of war.

There is more to the monyomiji system than just tradition. Tombe’s generation introduced and implemented new concepts to his home area, including cooperatives and self-help projects for education and health services.

The same capacity for high levels of organisation also proved an asset during the north-south war when the monyomiji joined the southern rebel movement, effectively defending their home areas from infiltration from northern forces even as other areas fell.

"It is easier to do things through the monyomiji. They are organised, with different functions," Simons said.

And their success in war is not surprising as Affwonni believes the monyomiji system was created hundreds of years ago as part of a war effort against the fearful Toposa tribe.

Organised and renewed with fresh blood, the monyomiji rule meant the villages did better in battle, and in protecting the integrity of the village in a wider sense; ensuring internal cohesion and the maintenance of spiritual practices.

While the leadership enjoy privileges they are also held strictly accountable, sometimes with their lives. In many tribes, rainmakers who failed to bring rain were killed, sometimes burned alive. This practice is now being changed.

"They have reason (rationality) now. They don’t do that to the rainmaker," monyomiji member Joko Jacqueline, one of a new generation of women who have been partly allowed into the system said.

She believes that ensuing generations will force change further, and women will be initiated into the monyomiji alongside men.

But how long that will take, is not certain. The monyomiji, like the rest of Sudan, are still coming to terms with the consequences of the country’s civil war.

Tension between the ruling generation and the one below it has always existed. But now leaders say their youth are especially antagonistic, and many believe it is a result of war trauma. They also believe that many of the youngsters have become heavy drinkers because of this.

And now the ruling age set no longer has the same amount of control over often-armed youth that it once did.

But even within some tribes’ ruling age sets there are problems, and several monyomiji admitted that their age sets are less close, less organised than previous generations of rulers.

Traditionally, the older or more accomplished men tend to form the head – the decision making part of the government – the youth are more likely to form warrior groups. But the war has even changed this.

"From the head, many of these people were killed in the war, the younger are now in (majority) and they want to do things by force, they can be insubordinate," Father Kamilo Afore, a priest and monyomiji member said. He celebrated his age set’s coming of age in neighboring Uganda, at the height of the war that fragmented his village. "They (the youth) have grown in war," he added.

It is, in theory, peacetime but cattle raiding has worsened between monyomiji-practising tribes and other groups. It has kept entire areas insecure and has hindered development.

"Unity often depends on hostility to outsiders. This is definitely a weakness," Simons said.

Monyomiji accept that violence is a serious problem in their home areas.

The monyomiji IPS spoke to say that the government has not been able to provide security they need in order to lay down the thousands of small arms acquired during the war.

"They could do it at any time," Affwonni said. But any group that did so in a generally insecure environment would make itself highly vulnerable, he added.

Some monyomiji told IPS that even government interventions, when they come, are sometimes biased and heavy-handed and can worsen relations between tribes or fail to provide justice.

"(Also) they get in the way of the monyomiji getting involved with their coercive kind of rules," Martin Napali, a monyomiji, said. "If we are belittled then we will just do what we want."

The government has equally high expectations of the monyomiji, who they believe not only allow raiding to continue but are the perpetrators.

"Are monyomiji still peacemakers or have they left peacemaking to the government?" Toby Atare a Eastern Equatoria State Peace Commission member asked. "The monyomiji are meant to promote the law and order in villages but all we see is a lot of lawlessness."

"(The monyomiji) are saying this is the work of the government and the government is saying this is your work," he added.

Eastern Equatoria State Governor Aleision Ojetuk went even further at a recent conference to try and bridge the widening gap between the monyomiji and the government in the state capital Torit. He cited cases where the monyomiji had stopped policemen he had sent from doing their work in villages, getting in the way of justice, which is meant to be a main function of the monyomiji.

"Your norms are being eroded and so a kind of ‘who cares’ attitude is settling in … if we are in competition, the gap between us will widen," Ojetuk said, adding that the government simply does not have enough resources to maintain security in a state chock-full with guns.

But the monyomiji’s challenges go beyond a rough and tumble relationship with the new government. Urbanisation is also eroding the old system of life.

"At the moment the attitude of the monyomiji is not as it used to be. Most try to migrate to towns, leaving the land without cultivation," Tombe said. The youth that stay behind are in some cases especially hostile to the ruling generation.

A new Local Government Act that gives traditional authority official standing in the government could smooth the way between the government and the monyomiji Affwonni said. He added that fitting the monyomiji into the structures dictated by the law will take patience and flexibility on both the monyomiji and the government.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
AKOBO, Sudan , Sep 30 2009 (IPS)

There was no moon the night the armed men from the Murle tribe attacked the fishing village: it took place in complete darkness. Nyakong Both grabbed her two youngest boys and fled across the nearby river, as the men from the Murle tribe burnt down huts.

The river drowned several children from her village that night. But her three girls, her elder children, managed to cross it and fled into the forest. And she hasn’t seen them since. It has been over a month, so she assumes they were shot dead. "I haven’t found the bodies," she said.

The inter-ethnic attack on Both’s fishing camp killed 185 people this August. It lasted from about 4 am to midday the following day – when the attackers were still burning down huts. Humanitarians who visited the area a few days afterwards reported dozens of bodies still lying in the sun. The living, who would have buried the dead, had all already fled.

This attack was probably revenge for a series of attacks on villages by hundreds of armed Lou Nuer on Murle villages in April. The 453 people killed in those attacks were mostly women and children.

This was quickly followed by another revenge incursion by the Murle on the Lou Nuer: early reports put the death toll at 177, but Lou Nuer officials now say 250 people were killed.

Jonglei State from the air: vast, green and wild, its endless flat plains are broken only by looping rivers and swamps.

Historically, it was a place of slavery, tribal conflict and two civil wars. It should now be in peace. But over 1,300 people – many of them women and children – have been killed here this year in a brutal resurgence of inter-ethnic fighting.

Akobo town is in the north-east of this wild area. It’s not a big place. There are mostly huts, surrounded by sorghum patches, and built next to a river that connects the town to nearby Ethiopia and the rest of Sudan. It’s to where Both and others from her village fled to after their homes had been attacked.

But today in Akobo, all the young men are missing. They have all gone into the bush – armed with guns.

"There were rumors 300 Jikany youth were coming towards Akobo," explained Jimem Riek the local head of the South Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, the humanitarian wing of the semi-autonomous Southern government.

After the call to arms had been made – shots fired in the air – the Lou Nuer youth of Akobo had mobilised themselves within hours to deal with the Jikany – a sub-tribe of the large Lou Nuer group.

"They think they are an army," William Khor Reath, a senior member of the local government, said about the young armed men. His boss, the area’s commissioner, is absent. He has hastened from the village to chase the youth, in order to calm them.

There is violence every year in Jonglei State. For as long as anyone can remember, groups of mostly young men have raided other pastoralist tribes and clans for cattle. The huge number of guns in the south have mostly been left over from the long north-south conflict in the region. The ready availability of weapons has worsened this dry-season fighting, setting up vicious cycles of revenge attacks.

Some in the south Sudan government have suggested that the hundreds of deaths this year represent an escalation in fighting that in the past would only have claimed dozens of lives. "Perhaps this is just the year," the south’s Vice President Riek Machar told journalists when pushed for an explanation of this year’s worsening violence.

During the war, relations between the various tribes were sometimes worsened by Khartoum backing tribal militias that fought against the main southern Sudan rebel army. These battles claimed many of the two million deaths of this civil conflict.

The southern Sudan army spokesman, Kuol Deim Kuol, is one of those who sees this year’s bloodshed as a re-birth of wartime militias, again supported by Khartoum. Many southerners feel that northern Sudan has good reason to spark violence in the south.

In 2011 south Sudan, whose leading Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a peace deal with Khartoum in 2005, will get a chance to vote on independence from the north. Most southerners say they want to separate. If they did, Khartoum would lose control over valuable oil-reserves in the south. Khartoum has denied involvement.

WILD LAND OF HOPE AND PAIN

Jonglei has been marked out into oil concessions, including one huge unexplored area that is owned by French major Total. Conservationists are excited about the potential of wildlife tourism for the area: two giant migrations of antelope take place here every year in numbers that rival those of east Africa’s Serengeti.

But few are focused on these stores of wealth right now. "I have not seen any peace. People are still killing themselves," Nyakuoth Lul, a woman in her 40s said. Lul is from the same village as Both, and like her, she was also displaced to Akobo after the attack by armed men from the Murle tribe. Like others here she views the Murle as a far worse enemy than the Jikany.

More recently there have been attacks on Dinka communities on the western side of Jonglei by the Lou Nuer. In mid-September over 100 people died in Duk County. A few weeks before 38 were killed and another 64 wounded during a Lou Nuer attack on Wernyol village.

Graves are dotted around pastures that surround Wernyol. "If there is no rescue from the government the people of this area will be finished," a local official who asked for anonymity said. The young men of Wernyol are bristling with anger. They believe the attackers were a Lou Nuer militia with a grudge against the Dinka of Wernyol, sent to bring chaos.

The Dinka and Lou Nuer fought in especially bloody battles during the north-south war after the south Sudan insurgent army split. These young men believe the attack in part sprung from remaining animosity between the two groups.

"This is not just cattle raiding," army spokesperson Kuol said. He pointed to the sizes of the attacking groups: in Wernyol survivors said they saw over 800 armed men encircle their homes. In another case, the same guns used by Sudan’s army were used by the attackers, he said.

Some say southern politicians are supporting their own ethnic groups, for among other reasons, to help them build up support in their base. Especially ahead of elections planned for next April.

Old tensions between senior southern leaders left over from the war have also not disappeared entirely and may also be a driving force. "We need to … look at our own problems. Our own politicians are involved," a member of one of the affected communities said.

For now confusion and fear reign but one thing is certain: south Sudan has much work to unify its many nationalities ahead of its vote on secession in 2011.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Sudan, Aug 14 2009 (IPS)

In the war-devastated South Sudan, a region with a population of over eight million people, Yeneneh Mulugeta is the only permanent ophthalmologist.

Dozens visit the eye clinic in the semi-autonomous region’s capital every day from across the South trying to have their sight restored, mostly old and silent, waiting their turn with a helper. The Ethiopian doctor has performed hundreds of cataract operations – removing the protein build-up that covers the eye – that miraculously bring back sight.

Reversible cataract is probably responsible for half the cases of blindness in the South, but Mulugeta and government officials in the health sector know there are thousands who have no access to treatment. They also know – although no comprehensive studies have been done – that many thousands are at risk from two of the world’s leading blindness-causing infectious diseases; river-blindness and trachoma.

“South Sudan looks to be the worst. Maybe two percent of the population is blind,” Mulugeta, who works with the Christian Blind Mission, said. This estimate is an extrapolation of numbers from neighbouring Ethiopia where 1.6 percent of the population is visually impaired but where there are far more public health services and infrastructure.

The Director of Eye Health at South Sudan’s health ministry, Ali Yousif Ngor, oversees the South Sudan part of an Africa-wide attempt to combat river blindness, also known as onchocerciasis (O.V). It is a disease spread by the black fly that carries larval forms of a worm parasite. These worms grow and breed, releasing thousands of larvae that move all over the body causing intense itching and blindness.

River blindness is prevented by widely dosing communities in affected areas with a drug called ivermectin. For the last two decades ivermectin has been provided free of charge by a U.S. pharmaceutical company in an attempt to eradicate the disease in endemic countries, mostly in Africa.

It was only at the end of the 22-year civil war in Sudan in 2005 that international health organisations and government officials were given a chance to reach many rural communities. “It is so hard to get everyone to take the drug at the same time, twice a year. That would really hit the transmission of the disease,” Ngor said.

Part of the problem is that officials like Ngor simply do not know how widespread the disease is. Ngor said that the government does not even know if O.V is more or less common than trachoma, another major cause of blindness in the South. Trachoma occurs when untreated, repeated infections of the eye by bacteria eventually causes scarring so extensive the eyelid partially turns in on itself. The lashes scratch the cornea causing intense pain and often first reversible and then irreversible blindness.

Ngor described one small village where the arrival of a mobile ophthalmologic team prompted 400 blind or partially sighted people to turn up in the hope of treatment. “But it was too late for many of them,” he said.

Even within Juba city, lack of knowledge about diseases mean patients often do not go to the clinic early enough to save their sight. But outside the city the situation is far worse; there are no ophthalmologists or even an optometrist to fix disabling short or long sight with a pair of spectacles. Glasses were desperately rare even in the capital until last year. During the 22 years of Sudan’s bloody north-south war the only way to get glasses was to travel to Khartoum, North Sudan, or to the neighbouring countries of Kenya or Uganda.

Levi Sunday is thin, smartly dressed and blind. As his stick tip-taps the ground uneven with tree roots and rain gullies, he moves faster than the average Juba citizen in the hot and small town.

He is Chair of the Equatorian Union of the Blind that has some 800 members. It is a comparatively large organisation by the South’s standards but Sunday said they are finding it hard to draw attention to the problems the blind and partially-sighted experience, including issues of poverty and stigmatisation.

“The union was formed in 1984 … to combat begging, train the blind in handcrafts like basket weaving so they can depend on themselves,” Sunday explained. Classes in other income-generating skills have also been put in place but in reality, Sunday said, many blind are begging.

The union also organises classes to help the blind learn to use a stick and has close connections to the blind school where Braille is taught. “Many of the blind are not educated because of the poor quality of education in the South, there is nothing for the blind – except here in Juba. Now we have Braille machines here so they can type their notes in Braille and read books in it,” Levi said.

Five former students are now enrolled at Juba University, a cause of some pride. The union is also responsible for dozens of marriages between Juba’s blind. Macho South Sudanese society is still too narrow-minded for blind men to easily marry girls with sight, Sunday said.

“There is great ignorance in the south. People do not consider the blind as human. They are seen as powerless. Sometimes they are not helped, even with food. The blind in the south can die because of a lack of support. Blind children are undermined,” Sunday said.

His chairmanship got off to a rough start earlier this year. The union spilt into those supporting Sunday and those supporting his predecessor (who established the union in 1984) over differences over the constitution and personal politics. Feelings ran so high a policeman was put outside the run down union building after someone punctured the wheels of the body’s ancient Suzuki (they have a volunteer part-time sighted driver).

Too much politics everywhere seems like a curse of the South. Even in peacetime life in the region is fraught for many. Southerners are still holding their breath for a 2011 referendum promised under the peace deal that will give them a long-awaited chance to vote for separation from north Sudan. But many worry that tense North-South Sudan relations will worsen in the run up to elections next year and the referendum vote. In the meantime tribal violence has intensified this year, with hundreds killed including women and children.

With these problems perhaps it is not surprising that the blind are side-lined. The four-year-old government has not yet met the poor standards of garrison times when the blind were provided free transport and educational support. Experienced blind teachers were recently threatened with dismissal, because they were deemed unfit to teach, a deep blow to the union’s confidence, although the threat was later retracted.

“Since the peace, I myself have not seen a change in the lives of the blind. People now (in power) are not cooperating with blind people… before the peace when Juba was under Khartoum at least we had free transport cards. Now there is nothing like that,” Sunday said.

For experts in the sector the problem is extremely worrying. The Carter Centre, an American non-profit that has trained surgeons to do trachoma surgery in rural areas, says that in Sudan some 5 million people could be at risk from river blindness.

“Early blindness is early mortality in South Sudan,” Dante Vasquez from the Carter Centre said. The blind tend to have poorer nutrition and are isolated so they die younger.

The Carter Centre has performed well over 4,000 trachoma surgeries, a procedure which involves cutting and re-sewing the eyelid in a way that turns the eyelashes back outwards, in the South and has treated hundreds of thousands of earlier-stage cases with antibiotics. Though Vasquez believes the true scope of the disease is unknown; and the centre could be just scratching the surface. In Ayod county the Carter Centre found 15 percent of the population affected, and three percent of children. Trachoma infection in more than one percent of the population is usually considered a serious health risk.

Children with the disease are stigmatised, not least by the pain that renders them unable to perform everyday duties. They also become a burden; as Ngor pointed out. He explained that every blind person also needs another to help them, thus creating a drain on family resources.

Children blinded by the disease are especially worrying as loss of sight follows repeated infection, normally only occurring by the time they are adults. “We’re seeing it in younger and younger populations. This is an indicator of how acute the problem is,” Vasquez said.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Mar 4 2009 (IPS)

Motorcycle Juba style: sit as far back on the seat of the bike as possible. Hold handlebars only loosely when riding but rev frequently whenever stationary.

Put a giant fake diamond into your ear, a Rastafarian or woolly gangster style hat on your head. No helmets, but sunglasses.

Go fast. So fast your shirt seems about to fly off your back. Grow your hair long and ruck it into waves that redden in the dust of your vocation.

The joyous, looping traffic-dodging irreverence of Juba’s hundreds of motorcycle boys – many pre-pubescent – or young men have become a visual centerpiece of peacetime Juba. And so have the dark pools of blood, oil or fuel that together with twisted metal and smashed glass mark yet another high-speed collision.

"We see maybe three accidents a day, mostly with the motorcycles," the Deputy Director of Central Equatoria State Police Service Latjor Peter said. Before its renovation, Juba's main hospital even had an accident and emergency wing nick-named after the most popular brand of the Chinese 125 cc bikes: the Senke Ward.

Thousands roared onto former garrison Juba's potholed streets soon after Sudan's 2005 north-south peace deal. Newly-opened borders and roads allowed in the tiny $600 bikes along with new tighter and brighter clothes, music, DVDs, handbags and high heels.

The motorcycles are not ridden just for the sheer love of speed; many provide a taxi service for the ever-increasing population in a town with few employment opportunities. There’s no industry yet. The young men have little chance in the government, having missed the chance to become part of the swollen former rebel army and lacking experience to set themselves up in other businesses after decades of stultifying war.

Those who have taken up jobs as cleaners at Juba’s new hotels, or as rock crushers or vegetable sellers in markets tend to be women. But riding motorcycles is empowering, at least a bit fun.

"They were trying to begin boda-boda businesses like in Uganda," the south's gender minister Mary Kiden said. "But now they face a lot of competition. It is difficult for them."

Too many on the roads

Prices per ride have gone down drastically as more youth – including migrants from neighboring Uganda – enter a business already jammed up. A short ride in Juba used to cost as much as $8. Now most trips cost less than a third that amount.

Competition comes in another form too: cheaper and safer buses. During the war, the garrison town had only a few beat-up buses of various sizes and colors and as late to 2007 they served only one main route.

With refugees returning and others drawn from war-broken rural areas to swiftly changing Juba whole new neighborhoods have grown up in former bush. Now hundreds of white 14-seat buses clog up numerous routes, swinging dangerously in and out of informal roadside stops.

"We're hoping eventually there will be enough public transport and the boda-boda will die out," Peter said. "They are dangerous."

They have also, so far, been irrepressible. A ban on motorcycles on some of Juba’s few miles of tarmac – treated like an ice rink by the boy riders – was ignored. But the recent appearance of buses there has knocked out an important portion of business ferrying civil servants.

"There are so many buses now, so fewer clients," Ugandan Sunday Charles said. "I am not really saving."

Like the 500 or so other Ugandan bodas he reckons are in Juba, he came to Juba looking for adventure in Africa’s newest capital and more cash. "And it’s too hot," he adds.

The metal floor of the bus Richard Sobek drives is so hot you can feel it cooking your shoes. Like many of the buses on Juba's streets, often imported through the Internet second hand from Dubai or Uganda, its exhaust is black and noxious-smelling.

Sobek talks about his job as he dodges other buses. He barely registers a near-miss as a motorcycle topped with three boys flies across the road. Like all the drivers IPS spoke to he doesn't own his bus.

He gets to choose his routes and how many hours he works for. But his boss, referred to as only ‘Deng’, demands around $65 a day from him. Sobek has to fuel the bus and pay for any small repairs. Most bus rides in Juba cost one Sudanese pound and he carries between 200 to 250 people a day. Other bus drivers work for a percentage cut of each day’s earnings.

"It's more or less about luck, having a good route," he said. "I make maybe 40 pounds ($17) a day."

He doesn't know how much the small boy who confidently finger clicks at passengers for their fare. "He came with the bus. He is someone with Deng," Sobek shrugs. Other busboys share the driver’s profits, getting the equivalent of six or seven U.S. dollars a day.

Like numerous other Eritrean and east Africans, Kenyan Samson Mburrah moved to Juba to get out of the rat race matatu (public buses) trade in Nairobi. There he used to often go home with nothing after paying all his dues to middlemen and his bosses.

Here there no gangs involved. No bus driver knew of any individual owner with more than two buses, unlike Nairobi and Kampala's cartels.

Traffic police are still being re-organized and regulation is light. Appalling driving and missing license plates are treated with an ‘early days’ attitude. There is no control over who plies the various bus routes.

"Of course we all want our own bus one day," Mburrah said. "That is the only way to make real money." With Juba’s fluidity, its constantly growing population and enormous needs this dream is easier to achieve here than back home.

Too cool for school

Appearing out of nowhere with his service, Ugandan Charles knows how to bargain and chat to customers. Southern bodas now also rush to compete for a customer. In 2006-2007, only hefty sums could pluck a motorcyclist away from his intimidatingly cool friends, clumped on market corners, to the despair of teachers or local officials who complained the boys should be in school.

Some saw them as youthful signs of peace. "They are at last aligning themselves to the machine, to modernity," Juba University professor Taban Loliliong said.

Much of the slow appearance of normalcy in town – plagued with slavery, colonialism or war for most of its existence – has come from neighboring Uganda, whose traders also dominate much of the food and drink market.

But professionalism is rubbing off only slowly. Boda Francis Lugga, who says he is 15 years old but looks 12, attempts to go around the roundabout the wrong way "because it is faster" and has a worrying tendency to look at passing traffic rather than ahead. The passenger foot rests slope to the ground. The bike is his brother's.

"I am searching for school fees," he explained. He asked for the IPS reporter's phone number and later made giggling prank calls.

But his chin tilts up when he rides. Like other southern boys, he points his flip-flopped feet downwards to get the breeze between his toes. He constantly increases speed, visibly enjoys the swerve of the bike.

Whatever happens – and analysts predict a return to conflict – at least peace has brought with motorcycles a chance for a moment of rebellious self-expression in a land locked in insurgency for most of the last 50 years.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Feb 26 2009 (IPS)

"The liberation struggle is over. Why are we still killing ourselves?" South Sudan's President Salva Kiir asked a meeting of chiefs, exasperation clear in his usually even-toned voice.

Kook Mawein - 'Cows are wealth, social status, the source of food and are central in the culture.' Credit: Ellen S. Morgan

During the dry season, stories of attacks reach the south's capital Juba every week. Officials know they don't hear of all the incidents but even so are so used to grisly news, reports of ten or 20 dead barely make a ripple.

Sometimes the numbers are higher: once or twice a year as many as 50 or 100 people are slaughtered in a single shoot-out. Huts are burned to the ground and entire herds driven away, leaving behind destitution.

"If you add up death and injury tolls, a lot of research institutions would call this a war," James Bevan from the Small Arms Survey said.

As Kiir spoke in far-flung Warrap State, in the shade of a mango tree nearby, the bloody head of a white bull rested against one horn, eyes rolled back: a leftover from an inter-clan peace ceremony. There have been countless similar deals, often violated within days.

The insecurity stymies development in rural areas: children can't go to school; and NGOs abandon clinics. The U.N. counted tens of thousands displaced by cattle raiding; people who will often lose what crops they planted and – as in wartime – become dependent on food aid. The U.N. situation report for mid-February registered 25,613 people displaced by inter-tribal fighting in recent months.

Fear of raids has made disarmament extremely difficult for the semi-autonomous South's government, set up after the peace accord. And perhaps most worrying, a belief peace has not set in.

During the long north-south war, much of the worst fighting was between the southern rebels and militia groups also from the south, but armed and funded by Khartoum. Relations between different ethnic groups, often competing over resources, remain strained, weakening southern solidarity.

"Could armed communities be exploited again? Yes, easily," Bevan said.

Kiir angrily told community leaders that this new cattle raiding would have deeply shamed his parents' generation. "In those days, thieves would have been rejected," he said.

Post-war everyone is trying to grab anything available, including, he warned, ambitious elites who come "at night like shadows" to manipulate the rural people that are their ethnic power base.

Love and hate

"Cows are wealth, social status, the source of food and are central in the culture," Kook Mawein, a former refugee, who recently returned to his pastoralist homeland from the U.S. "And you need them to get married, for bride price."

When young boys from the south's pastoralist tribes are weaned, they are put in the cattle camp, often together with a particular milk cow, forming a lifelong bond with the beasts.

Cowherd Deng Thon spends the last half hour of daylight cleaning dung from the area around his beloved white bull that nonchalantly chewed cud at dusk. He works close the ground, sweeping with his hands.

Thousands of long horns float like crowns in thick, eye-watering smoke from numerous cow dung fires.

Thon cannot really imagine another way of life but agreed that perhaps he could be a businessman. If he made money he could buy more cows, he explained. But the shadow of war is dark on this passion for the animals.

"All they know is war, they were born into it," Mawein said. He is hoping to use his American education to bring new ideas to his community like farming some of the – as he points out wholly organic – cows for meat production.

But until there's a true belief in long-term peace, he thinks change will be slow. "You can take your cows with you if you run from the war, but not a house or a business, or a job," Mawein explained.

Because so few will sell cows for meat, they bring in as much as $250 – $500 a beast in Warrap's small towns. Millions are grazed across the south's wetlands: probably more than the south's population. In the war-destroyed and poverty-stricken south they represent vast wealth but few are willing yet to cash them in.

Disarmament

Chief Madut Aguer Adel's community has had thousands of cows stolen by raiding neighbours. Without their cows, youth are leaving for towns.

"Some are waiters in the hotels. It is a waste," he said, adding that without their cattle his young men cannot provide dowries and so "do not marry properly".

The only hope is that the south's government will disarm the communities in neighboring states that are attacking his own. Adel's community was disarmed last year, but others around his area were not, leaving his cattle extra vulnerable.

But so far, wide-reaching attempts have failed and thousands have been killed in battles between communities and the south's army that some communities simply don't trust. Guns quickly re-enter the South through its porous borders, from Ethiopia and northern Kenya and Uganda.

In 2011, Southerners will get a longed-for chance to vote on whether they want independence from Khartoum. Most say they will vote for separation. But with less than two years to go, the intensity of inter-ethnic rivalries is beginning to make some worry about what kind of country an independent South would be.

A lack of clear legislation, courts and lawyers means there's often no recourse to justice for wrongs done.

Rather than forming part of the solution, the south's security forces – including a weak police and the former rebel army – often abuse their power, a report by the U.S. based Human Rights Watch said.

"Soldiers and other security forces that commit human rights violations and other crimes against civilians are rarely brought to account," the report, which described killings, torture, ex-judicial executions and arbitrary detentions by soldiers, said. The road to safety for these rural communities is long, but they will need to see more real change to achieve the faith needed to make it.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Dec 9 2008 (IPS)

Two Sudanese communities that face each other across one of Africa’s most contentious borders sat together recently in the shade of three large red tents to discuss a future tied to a recent past of bloodshed.

Well, almost together. A bank of northern Muslim Misseriya in white turbans, robes and long scarves filled one tent, an air of the desert about them. Two tents on either side were taken by Malual Dinka from the south. Tall and very dark, Dinka government officials wore safari suits, chiefs wore hats, and women leaders were decked out in luminous, West African styles.

Between the two groups: a history of trade, mutual pastoralist struggle, battles, grief and fear that reaches into the fiercest depths of survival.

In 2005, north and south Sudan officially ended Africa’s longest civil war. Kenya, Norway and the United States were among the many countries that helped broker the peace deal between Khartoum and the main southern rebel party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M). All have watched nervously as the two sides have sparred over implementing it.

Relations between the communities – pitted against each other during the war in a bloody patchwork of rebels, militias and garrisons – have received less attention. But the inter-communal nature of much of the conflict and its remembered, localised pain means the ability of groups like the Dinka and Misseriya to live together again is crucial to confidence in a lasting peace for many rural populations.

Thousands of southerners joined the SPLA, which was itself viciously split along tribal lines during its insurgency. Khartoum armed militias within the south as well as northern pastoralists including from the Misseriya that already had a tense, competitive relationship with the Dinka over the land’s scarce resources.

They swept down into the south, often on horseback, where they set hundreds of villages on fire, raped, killed and abducted thousands of women and children. The legacy of fear left behind runs deep, holding hands with anxiety about renewed north-south conflict.

But participants from both communities in the conference made much of special peace markets set up in the rural wilds of the Dinka’s Northern Bahr el Ghazal State, describing them as a lifeline for the Dinka southern rebel-held areas.

"SPLA guaranteed safety for northern traders who came in defiance of the northern government to sell salt, sugar clothes and take away cattle," analyst John Ryle, a professor of anthropology at Bard College in New York, explained. The word Misseriya may be linked to dread in Northern Bahr el Ghazal but it is also remembered in connection with access to food when no one else could or would help.

Bearing this important precedent in mind, increased trade could again, Ryle said, have a major stabilising role in a naturally competitive relationship aggravated by decades of divisive politics.

Peace and pragmatism

Misseriya government official Safi Galaeldin Gibriel estimated that a million Misseriya north of Northern Bahr el Ghazal depend on access to the south’s pastures for their survival as pastoralists.

"We know they are looking for peace. That is why they are here," Dinka Chief Deng Luol said, adding that with the dry season fast approaching, the November peace conference’s timing was crucial.

As the rains dry up, the pastoralist Misseriya bring their cattle from the arid north into the swamps of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, to graze alongside Dinka Malual herds.

"Dinka don’t need anything [from us] but security. In the end we are one country… you cannot stop me or I will fight you," Gibriel explained.

Since 2005 the Misseriya have been encouraged by south Sudan’s President Salva Kiir to graze in south Sudan as they have for generations. But they have to leave their guns behind. Misseriya argue that this is an unreasonable request saying they are threatened by thieving gunmen from neighbouring Darfur and armed civilians in the south.

Fighting on the border between the southern army and armed Misseriya broke out just before Christmas last year. The south quickly blamed Khartoum for arming and inciting the nomads, making much of machine-gun equipped Toyotas they said the Misseriya used.

Misseriya at the conference denied receiving assistance. They said they armed themselves only after the southern army moved well north – at least 60 km they said – of the still unclear border between the semi-autonomous south and northern Sudan.

"We come to the water and then the SPLA shoot our cattle and then they take the cows and eat them," Al Hirika Osman Omer, Misseriya headman said, adding that 106 of his people were killed in the fighting that continued into 2008.

During the fighting, armed Misseriya closed down the roads that bring crucial trade from Khartoum into Northern Bahr el Ghazal and further south. Retaliation, they said, for the SPLA obstructing their access into the south.

For the Misseriya the presence of the SPLA was a worrying sign for the future.

In 2011 southerners will get a long-desired referendum on separation and most say they will vote for independence. "With the possibility of a new sovereign state in 2011, there is a new element of uncertainty [for the Misseriya]," Ryle said.

Much will have to take place before the referendum, including elections next year. The border between the north and south will also have to be demarcated through some of the most resource-rich parts of the south. In May around 50,000 people were displaced in fighting over control of oil-rich area Abyei.

SPLM governor of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Paul Malong, said the Misseriya would have to trust in the new system of peace that includes a semi- autonomous south with its own police and army. "They should leave their guns behind. We will be ready to accept the blame if something happens and we will control our security," he said.

Malong, who was himself involved in establishing the peace markets admitted that SPLA soldiers – especially poorly trained recent additions from a former northern-sponsored militia – had been at least partly responsible for provoking the clashes. Leaders of this group were later dismissed.

"We are still going to live together. Nothing will change their need for the south for grazing," Malong said.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Oct 31 2008 (IPS)

A recent presentation at parliament by the South’s Finance Minister gave a few cursory details of how the South’s army managed to spend 99.6 percent of its budget by June. At the end of the public session, the South’s Parliamentary Affairs Minister Martin Elia told journalists not to write about the presentation for security reasons.

While no one could think of any legal reason for his position, all the journalists IPS talked to said they would not write about the report. With promised reforms to media laws still undone, it was not clear to anyone whether a journalist not conforming to the request could have problems.

There is also a strong desire not to betray the realities of the South to the North, says media expert Mach Michael. “You have to be a Southerner to understand. The struggle continues,” he said. “It is just the guns have fallen silent.”

Pressure on the media at least, also comes from further a field. In September, Sudan’s National Press Council (NPC) shut down two English-language dailies edited and owned by Southern Sudanese.

Official reasons given for the ban included that some of the papers’ journalists working in South Sudan were not registered by the council. But both editors said earlier warnings that the papers were too critical of Khartoum’s government reflected the NPC’s real reason for the move that took place against a general background of censorship and harassment.

A good deal for the press?

On most days in the month preceding the ban on his paper, editor and owner William Ezekiel had every copy of his The Sudan Tribune paper picked up from the printer by security agents in Khartoum that he believes works together with the NPC, costing him thousands of dollars in printing costs and lost advertising.

Editor Nhial Bol’s The Citizen was also shut down for a couple of weeks in September, prompting him to experiment with printing in Kampala for a few weeks. The NPC said Bol’s Darfurian managing editor had not been registered, a charge Bol denied, adding that the NPC was threatened by his senior staff being from the war-ravaged region. Last year the paper was also briefly shut down for an article that was deemed offensive to Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al Bashir.

The two editors from the South plug on, not knowing when Khartoum will crunch down on their papers again. There are no printing presses in the South and printing in eastern Africa is too expensive an alternative.

The 2005 deal between Khartoum’s ruling National Congress Party and the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) ended more than two decades of conflict over religious and ideological differences.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) pledged to share power – and oil wealth – between north and south but also contained a wider promise of democratisation for Sudan, including elections and greater freedom for the press.

The SPLM HAS accused Khartoum’s NCP – still the majority in Sudan’s parliament – of dragging its feet over reforms. “We need new press laws, new security laws and the human rights commission law to be passed before the elections for them to be free and fair,” the SPLM’s Secretary General Pagan Amum told IPS, referring to Sudan’s first free ballot in over 20 years set for 2009.

But louder roars of discontent have drowned out these complaints. Both sides have accused each other of failing to respect the accord. Full-on fighting between the two armies has erupted twice since 2005, worrying the governments throughout east Africa who benefit both economically and in security terms from a stable South.

Down south   An as-yet unpublished report on the state of the south’s media by a group of practitioners said that much of the region has no media at all. Other than the government radio there are only a few radio stations. Many gather around the few televisions in the capital to watch the single government TV channel. Three dailies dominate the press but are often very similar in content: financial pressures and low capacity mean much of the papers’ content is cut and pasted from the internet.

Without mass media even basic information has not filtered far into the rural South. “Many people don’t even know about the CPA. They know maybe that the war has ended. But they don’t know their rights,” a senior civil society member said.

Even the South’s most enthusiastic journalists have been stymied by a lack of training, electricity, access to internet and transport and many are not paid regularly because of cash shortages.

The press has the same infrastructure problems as all of the South’s businesses. A terrible road network makes transporting papers to many places by road difficult and expensive for the dry half the year and merely impossible in the rainy season muddiness that cuts off many of the South’s communities.

The extremely narrow economy – based on the drip-down of government oil cash – means advertising is still limited. Literacy, one UN report suggested, is probably at about 15 percent.

And few outside of the intellectual elite understand the rights of journalists either, Mach said.  Although there are no laws against photography, journalists snapping in Juba market places are liable to be picked up by plain clothes security men. Many report harassment by one or the other of the South’s different security branches, including government reporters. The situation is far worse Michael says, in rural areas where the army runs security.

“In the states things are still very authoritarian. In Juba there’s the international community, ministries, the UN and still these mistakes happen. You can imagine what it is like in the states.” he said.

Missing laws

A liberal policy on expression was immediately agreed by the Council of Ministers in the early days of the government Mach said: a good sign.

But this policy remains in the upper echelons of government and actual laws have still not been passed. “Without these laws, journalists are not properly protected,” said the Association for Media Development’s Advocacy Officer Mogga Richard, said.

“It’s hard because people do not know the rules, so they are scared to do anything new.” Press conferences are regularly attended, but there’s little of any kind of investigative activity.

There is a lack of clarity about what could happen to someone who stepped out of line: an activity Citizen editor Bol – six-foot-something tall with a big personality and strong sense of irony – is getting a reputation for.

Bol has been jailed twice this year and both times under orders from ministers that his paper has linked to corruption scandals.

Even under old rebel military law, Bol said, he should not have been thrown in jail on civil charges of defamation, but in the legislative confusion, it is entirely possible. “I would not be here if there was the new law,” he said while still in jail.

Corruption is widely recognised as a growing problem in the South. The South’s President Kiir warned recently that some big names would soon find themselves behind bars but many think this is unlikely given the careful and fragile balance of ethnic representatives in government. Top officials linked with corruption have generally been moved, not fired.

Several committees in parliament have been charged with investigating graft but none have produced a report yet, despite many months of promises. The Auditor General’s office is stuck in a rut after its leadership was fired and has not done a single audit except on itself. (Two top officials were then fired for corruption).

Also pending new legislation, the Anti-Corruption Commission has yet to investigate a single case.  As weak as the fourth estate still is, there is little else in the South to put up any kind of obstacle.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Sep 30 2008 (IPS)

When Sabrina Dario Lokolong, the Speaker of South Sudan's Eastern Equatoria State Assembly, enters or leaves Parliament, all the other members of parliament must stand up.

"People, especially men, really don't like this," Lokolong said. She is 40 – young in South Sudan's political scene – unmarried and without children; all factors that add to her difficulties as a female figure of authority.

It would be a tough job for anyone: the south is barely out of decades of conflict, physical and administrative structures are weak where they exist, money is short and deep ethnic divisions remain.

But like other women in Africa's newest government, she also faces obstacles men do not.

Southern politicians are frequently accused – usually with few consequences – of corruption and nepotism. Women leaders also have to contend with even juicier, sexual rumors that spread faster and are often entirely untrue. And while wrongly distributed cash or jobs can at least be understood as beneficial to the individual's relatives, accusations against women tend to hurt their relationships with their family.

Anne Ito, secretary general of the governing Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the southern sector, said she had been labeled as a prostitute by the press, causing her relations distress.

"They say things like you only got the job from having relationships with men," Lokolong echoed. It is hard to control lawmakers, to push for change with these rumors encircling you, she added grimly. "Change is slow."

But southern men and women know the commitment has been made to get women into leadership in the south. There is no going back.

A peace deal in 2005 ended the two-decade-long north-south war, allowing the South its own semi-autonomous government headed by the SPLM, the political wing of the main southern rebel group.

The southern constitution, passed in 2006, called for women to get 25 percent of jobs in the new judiciary, executive and parliament.

Ito said the much-cited 25 percent has a long history as a tool of inclusiveness for the rebel movement.

It was agreed in 2004, at the first SPLM convention, in recognition of the role women had played in the southern rebellion. Women fought as soldiers, farmed the land to feed the rebels, raised the young sons who were quickly engulfed into the army and drummed up cash in the Diaspora for the rebels.

"There was no way in which women did not serve," Ito said, adding that the SPLM also had to recognize the after the bloody conflict that killed millions of largely male southerners, most of the adult population is female.

In the war, Ito explained, women were also left alone to deal with the homesteads and internal and inter-tribal conflicts. Once they found themselves in these positions of authority, there was no way they would return to the dutiful shadows.

There have always been strong women in Southern societies, Ito said, but the push now is to make high-profile women the rule, not exceptions allowed by their families.

The 25 percent target was greeted with jubilation by women and is much talked about at rallies and in speeches by southern leaders who have managed to –- or are making steps towards -– filling the quota. In some ways it is an easier promise to fulfill than improving the wrecked health and education sectors.

But critics say the 25 percent has become a bar: male leaders think once they achieve this, there is nothing else to be done for the cause of gender equality.

Very few institutions have managed to achieve 25 percent representation of women, although a handful are close. Proportions across the board are far better than before, when women made up perhaps one percent of the Khartoum-controlled government. Still, women tend to be in less powerful positions.

A lack of qualified women is often given as the reason and Ito said this is not just an excuse but a real barrier. "Historically girls have not been sent to school and their literacy rate is extremely low," she said.

Figures back her up: the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said in 2005 that a Southern girl child is more likely to die in child birth than complete her primary education.

And while women did fight in the bush war, most senior commanders were men and a strong sense of entitlement to government positions often meant top jobs have fallen to them: gender equality still has less resonance than war-time loyalty.

The south's civil service is huge, containing both Khartoum's former employees and the thousands who served in rebel-held areas as administrators. Hiring more people, including women who have returned to the South with skills, has been discouraged and badly-deficient labor laws mean firing is difficult.

A bill has been written by the Ministry of Social Welfare, Religion and Gender that will make the 25 percent a law, Ito said, adding that this should put fire back into the positive discrimination instrument.

"When the parliament passes it, it will be an obligation to fulfill it," she said.

The quota has played an important role at the grassroots level. Business woman Eunice Elisama Warija told IPS the quota is often discussed in rural areas. "The few women that are there can speak for all of us," she said, "there's not much but at least they are in."

Without formal elections, village community leaders have tended to sit together and chose a representative through consensus, working carefully through the character and experience of each possibility. While a female representative might not be the most natural choice, the 25 percent has made it a possibility. "A community will choose a good woman, if a woman is requested," Warija said.

In national elections set for next year, a quarter of seats will have to be filled by women: following the precedent started by the SPLM. "Now there is 25 percent in the electoral law and even the most fundamentalist and conservative political parties talk about it," Ito said. It has been an important success for the SPLM who have always claimed to want political change across Sudan, not just in the South.

But Warija – like others – believes that the women leaders, like their male counterparts, need to do more to reconnect with the grassroots. Women selected for positions of power tend to be those who left during the war and picked up skills and ideas elsewhere.

Many raised their profile by working the ladders of the large network of NGOs during the later years of the war, civil servant Gladys Juma* said. While many of the NGOs were Southern Sudanese they were safely based out of Nairobi with the rest of the donor and NGO community.

Most, Warija said, still do not spend enough time back in the rural areas.

Like other women in government, the top handful arrived at their positions in a variety of ways, including an important proportion through being married to top rebel commanders. But all were passionately dedicated to the rebel movement, making enormous sacrifices.

"They're all tough and very scary," Juma said about the five or six top ladies. While enormously respected – as mothers and grandmothers they also have a special "layer of power, influence and status" – there's not a huge amount of sisterhood to be seen.

And sisterhood is badly needed. Not only between rural women but between high-profile women and others in more lowly positions in government who may experience less spiteful sexual gossip and lies, but instead face endless sexual harassment.

"Everyone's dealing with it in their own way, there's not much talk about it," Juma said. A few men in power are truly abusive but even the more enlightened sometimes demand a good flirt. "They need to know they're a man and in charge. It's a symbolic exchange."

*Not her real name – this high-ranking civil servant feared retribution if her real name was used.

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Jul 10 2008 (IPS)

A vast pregnancy has swollen the tiny woman walking South Sudan's shining new maternity ward clutching two pieces of paper stapled together. She looks no more than 16, wide-eyed with recent pain.

Aid flowing to South Sudan following a 2005 peace deal is beginning to improve health care for women. Credit: Manoocher Degati/IRIN

"She has already had a caesarean," Maclean said, shaking her head. "She is in labor but waited until now to come to the hospital."

Juba, the capital, now has a proper maternity ward, delivery chairs and even two incubators, still festooned with opening day ribbons. In its first five days, it dealt with 46 normal births and six caesarean sections. Unlike in the rest of the South, there are plenty of drugs in the new storeroom. Government officials estimate only 25 percent of the population has access to even the most basic medical care – the new ward offers women from Juba and its surrounds the best care available in South Sudan.

One in fifty births results in the mother's death

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Africa has the worst rates of maternal mortality in the world at 820 deaths per 100,000 births. After more than 50 years of on-off war, South Sudan has the world's worst rates of maternal death: 2,054 per 100,000.

Magda Armah from the UNFPA thinks the real number could be even higher. "It's shocking because most of those women just represent those who get to facilities, how many more did not reach them?"

Two years ago a visit to Juba's maternity ward was a trip into desperation. Dark rooms with dirty, peeling walls smelled of blood. The weighing scales and stirrups looked like relics from the 1960s, the obstetric instruments medieval.

Originally the plan was simply to refurbish the rooms along with the rest of the hospital, using some of the millions of dollars in aid that has flowed in after a 2005 peace deal.

But UNFPA, which promotes the right to health and equal opportunity for all by assisting with collection of data and designing policy, lobbied for a new, bigger ward with its own operating theatre. "It is a model of how other hospitals should be renovated," Alexander Dimiti, also from UNFPA, told IPS.

The three-year-old Government of Southern Sudan has a special work plan to reduce maternal mortality, although one official said there was so much to do – human resources, awareness building, medical supplies – that it has been hard to make a start. Practically, health workers' time is spent firefighting yearly disasters including outbreaks of cholera, meningitis and measles.

"Reproductive health is relegated to the background. There are a lot of competing needs," explained Dragudi Buwa, UNFPA's head in the South.

While effective methods for dealing with emergencies in cooperation with U.N. agencies, systems for the sustained supply of reproductive health drugs and equipment that Dimiti calls the "pillar" in a health system that could really impact the MMR have not been developed.

Very weak communication links between different levels of the emergent government are partly to blame, Dimiti said. The vast and region also has few roads linking scattered rural communities and many areas are cut off during the rainy season.

Transport is often expensive or very difficult, and as Dimiti pointed out, Southern women are often not the decision-makers about their own pregnancy or health. And even if women can reach a hospital, too often they are made to wait in long queues by poorly-trained staff.

Skills badly needed

Festo Juma, Juba Teaching Hospital's chief administrator as well as its only obstetrician, looks exhausted as he describes some of the emergency caesarean cases he faces; women brought in on trucks after traveling hundreds of kilometres over bad roads in agonizing obstructed labor and already having lost a lot of blood.

One aspect of the hospital’s maternal care unit has not been given a fresh start – the midwife centre where dozens of traditional birth attendants were trained is no longer operating.

"They (traditional birth attendants) had no real impact," Maclean says. "With a small level of education they just stuck to what they knew before."

The birth attendant would palpitate a pregnant stomach, as is the practice by usually elderly women who traditionally assist labour in this region – but their training did not equip them to draw important conclusions. The only result, Maclean suspects, was a general lessening of respect for trained midwives.

But women had little choice: a survey after the war found only eight trained midwives – a government official said the number was in fact only six – in the South, which UNFPA estimates has a population of around 10 million.

Thirty-six new community midwives have recently graduated from a new 18-month-course specially designed to suit the needs of the South by the government and UNFPA. But the U.N. agency estimates that at this rate it will take 60 years to get to international maternal health standards. A U.N.-government survey found only seven percent of births are attended by a midwife or nurse and only 13.6 percent of births took place in a health institution.

"In the rural areas the situation is very much worse… The main cause (of the high number of deaths) is the complete absence of obstetric services in three quarters of the South," Juma says, between operations in his white Wellington boots, green scrubs and a face mask around his neck.

"Most of our people died because of war. We want to replace them, to develop," says maternity nurse Susan Poni. Women are encouraged – including by top politicians – to have many children, and many start young. In one state, 47 percent of girls are married before they are 15.

The government has not yet finalized its Reproductive Health Policy but it will call for "spaced births, no matter how many children are wanted," health ministry official Pamela Lomoro said. But 92 percent of women in South Sudan are illiterate and the war has meant that the messages about a woman's right to choose when to be pregnant have not reached many even the capital, let alone rural areas.

"Of every 1,000 pregnancies, 200 are adolescents," Armah warns. "The young are dying."

Excerpt:

By Skye Wheeler
JUBA, Jun 24 2008 (IPS)

Nyandeng Akot rushed out of the rude shelter of thatch and plastic sheeting pinned against the side of a tree with sticks. Grabbing a passing aid worker's arm, she said she has nothing except the four children that she grabbed when she began running from renewed fighting in Sudan's Abyei area a month ago.

Thousands have been displaced by renewed fighting which threatens hard-won peace in south Sudan. Credit: Tim McCulka/UNMIS

The Comprehensive Peace Accord of 2005 encouraged thousands displaced by 20 years of civil war in southern Sudan to return to Abyei. A local dispute in Abyei town – close to some of Sudan's most productive and important oil wells – spiraled out of control in mid-May and brought northern and southern forces into open battle again.

The United Nations estimates that up to 50,000 people were displaced southwards by the fighting, walking for two days to cross the River Kiir, now an ad hoc north-south border.

Akot is amongst hundreds of displaced people in one swollen market place that is also bristling with soldiers. There is a rocket launcher under some trees on the other side of the road. Four wheel drives have been smeared with mud for camouflage. It does not look like the peace promised in the accord.

Difficult road to peace ahead

For Akot and thousands of other newly-displaced people in southern Sudan – and for the peace deal itself – the next few weeks will be crucial.

The Abyei region produces much of Sudan's crude oil and contains valued grazing land for both southern and northern-aligned tribes; it has always been a likely breaking point for a fragile peace agreement.

The area's citizens will choose in 2011 whether to join the north or south, but Abyei's boundaries are still disputed. A group of international experts delineated boundaries for the area in 2005 but Sudan's President Omar Bashir refused to ratify their findings.

The Abyei area has remained in limbo since, neither electing its own local administration or receiving the share of oil revenues due under the deal. Southern officials have estimate they should have received $1billion over the past three years from Abyei alone but have not received a cent.

The two sides have signed a new roadmap to restore peace in Abyei and allow people to return home. The plan calls for the redeployment of thousands of northern troops that southern forces say were moved into the area by the end of June. A new joint force made up of both northern and southern forces has already been transported into the area by the U.N. peacekeeping force in Sudan.

Khartoum and the semi-autonomous southern government headed by the former southern rebel group – the Sudan People's Liberation Movement – have agreed that the Permanent Court of Abritration in the Hague will re-assess the findings of the expert panel.

But U.N.-led focus group discussions with communities suggest that even if new security arrangements are put in place, many have lost faith in the peace process.

Lydia Poole, a U.N. Emergency Officer in Juba, said most families will at best send one person to check out the situation before moving back together.

"(People want) clearly demonstrated progress in implementation of security provisions… (They) expect progress in the security and political situation in Abyei to be communicated by the government as well as being verified and communicated by the U.N."

Those returning to Abyei town itself will also face the task of reconstruction. Recent visitors to the town – now more or less empty of civilians – say it has been largely torched.

"They don't want peace," Mayen Deng, a young man among the displaced, said of the northern troops that now hold Abyei town.

The swift destruction of the town and the emptying of surrounding villages has punctured Deng's hope that his adult life will be substantially different from a childhood lived in war.

The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 did not end tension and suspicion between north and south Sudan. Both sides have blamed each other for failing to implement key provisions of the accord. In October, southern ministers pulled out of a coalition government over both the unresolved final status of Abyei and Khartoum's failure to withdraw all its troops out of the south as agreed and increase transparency in how oil cash is divided.

Since then, clashes between the southern army and a northern militia that southern President Salva Kiir says is supported by Khartoum have weakened the fragile relationship further.

"I would be very surprised if the fighting has gone away. Everybody recognizes Abyei as one of the most flammable flashpoints of the many which are liable to derail the (peace agreement)," says John Ashworth, an independent analyst and commentator based in South Africa who has written extensively on south Sudan's peace deal.

"No agreement signed by the NCP (Khartoum's leading National Congress Party) is worth anything until it has been proven to be implemented. The Abyei road map is another one of many agreements that they have signed. We wait eagerly to see whether it will be implemented by the NCP," Ashworth said.

But Kiir is adamant that he will not be drawn into renewed war, a position much praised by many southerners and diplomats.

The people of southern Sudan are only beginning to put their lives back together after 20 years of war. A return to war would be deeply unpopular.

The challenges to the peace deal and the constant state of tension in north-south relations is a source of frustration to the southerners Reverend Peter Nyok a young priest working in the south's new capital serves. Many feel it is too early and too uncertain to be comfortable about the future,

"(But) Southerners must keep their eye on peace for today and tomorrow and wait for 2011 to make their choice," he said.

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