Introduction

The last thirty-one years have witnessed a serious crisis of unity among the South Sudanese within the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLM/A). In the 1983, 1991 and 2013 crisis all are manifested in the social and communal cleavages by which the SPLM/A political and social order are threatened. SPLM/A has not been able to address this crisis. SPLM/A's institutional order, how it works and defines the problem and its possible solutions, are themselves substantial sources of the tensions and all the conflicts in South Sudan.

In many cases, these actions of contentious social forces that challenge uniform views within the movement are perceived as disloyalty, betrayal of the movement, or an attempt to undermine leadership, unity, and stability of the movement. Instead of exploring ways of accommodating those forces through conflict resolution and covenantal arrangement, leaders have insisted on ruthless measures such as torture, imprisonment, or killing. The patterns of response to problematical situations, has generated an organization where the Commander in-Chief of SPLA exercises absolute and unlimited authority. Since 1983, this structure of dominance has yielded temptations that have encouraged some SPLM/A leaders to use the coercive power of their position to oppress, exploit, and wage war upon other South Sudanese.

Shocking, but the truth is use of displacement innocent people as part of the game of war as a method by which the commanders accumulate wealth to benefit from people's displacement is a strategy. The SPLM/A leaders campaigning in their names is a byproduct of feeing soldiers and providing them with cover, protecting their families made-up of multiple wives is the ultimate goal prolong the war itself. The leaderships make sure that they are taking the country on the joyride as long as their families are being saved and secure in the foreign countries.

The personalization of authority, predation, and repression has led to disengagement as a means of survival for individuals and communities in South Sudan. The process of disengagement is evident in the emergence of an alternative liberation movement. The SPLM/A-Mainstream, of course, opposed this alternative arrangement and did everything it could to eliminate it. Inter-group fighting resulted from the splits and the hard hand of the SPLM/A leadership to the squalled the rebellions leave no understanding but create more conflicts. The conflict escalated into destructive violence. With request from our community who were much concern on the situation on the ground, we (Julia and Wal) accepted their call and decided to attempt to mediate between the leader of the SPLM/A Mainstream, Commander John Garang, and the leader of SPLM/A - United (the breakaway group), Commander Rick Machar.

The following is a description of our mission to the South Sudan and an analysis of our observations of 1983 - Present. We will first describe the problem in the Sudan. Second, we will consider the crisis of unity in between the Anya-Nya - II Movement and SPLM/A. Third, we consider the relationships between the SPLM/A and the South Sudanese civil society. Fourth, we describe the emergence of the SPLM/A-United and later known as South Sudan Independence Movement/Army (SSIM/A) as alternative liberation organization and its consequences. Fifth, we explored the conflict between the rival liberation organizations and between northern and Southern Sudan. Lastly, I (Julia) considered where we are now, since 2005 to 2013, compare to the 1983-1990s. While Wal was sick and in his death-bed, on December 20, 2012, he asked me to whether there is anything good in Juba politics, we both laughed and I replied there is nothing new in Juba; it is the same old stories of male chauvinist, ignorance, corruption, and the three (WWWs) womanizing, wine and war. The integrity and morality among the SPLM/A leaderships has become a challenge to many South Sudanese citizens. In 2009, I remembered one time in a conversation; the former Chief Justice, Mr. Ambrose Ring Thiik is now a leader of Ginka Elders who asked Dr. Wal Duany, 'who really gossip with the President'. Wal replied, 'I thought you do?' They both laughed, because no one knew what was going on in the presidency.

According to Dhol Acuil Deng (1987) and also observed by John Young, 2013, although the majority of northern Sudanese leaders derive some of their legitimacy from religion, in practice the leaders of the liberation movements are ultimately not that different. Young wrote, the functions of the typical means liberation movements organize themselves in which one person holds both the senior military and political positions. This is designed to ensure there are no divisions at the top and that the political and military approaches are in sync, but it creates a context that encourages the centralization of the power and breeds dictatorship. The SPLM/A under Garang is a case in point. Indeed, as Salva Kiir graphically put it in one of the SPLM/A meeting 2004, "Garang carried the SPLM/A around with him in his brief case." Although Kiir has shown himself to be more conciliatory, the fact remains that he also holds enormous powers and currently carry the government as his own brief case (John Young 2007; Thot 2012). Kiir-led SPLM/A had resisted democratic transformation and South Sudan has failed to reach the definition of statehood because it has sustained, perpetuated incompetent and corrupt system of governance.

Is there anything new or just the same old story of SPLM/A? The rhetoric of the ideology of the New Sudan had died and replaced by the constructed immorality, abuses and insults, intimidation and violence on the citizens that they were not liberators, they did not experience the bush life, they did not carried the AK47, 'South was not liberated by pen but by AK–47.' The meaning of the whole program in South Sudan is that the SPLM/A members should be allowed to loot the country's resources by will. The party members' gang-up to plunder the nation, it became the politic of peer-groupings, greed and terror. The hotel nights in Juba, Kampala and Nairobi for different types of the SPLM/A groups, good food, drinks; albeit, even champagne bottles, cognac, black and green-level Johnny Walkers whisky and beautiful women walking between executive suites glamorize the hotels lobbies. While the poor South Sudanese are lingering in the displacement camps under sever sun, wet rains and diseases taking their lives in numbers that will never be recognized in the time of peace. But only remain in the hearts of their love ones.

The SPLM/A leadership has been out of touch with the people of South Sudan, and the people have suffered greatly in the hand of ruling party, the system is brutal and leaders have been involved in criminal activities, they are driven by evils and the vices of an immoral society. Since the independent of South Sudan in 2011, SPLM/A ultimately transformed itself into extractive institution under the control of a narrow elite and commander class that monopolized both political power and economic opportunities. The absolutism persisted through two years after the independent and the reform efforts were frustrated by the usual fear of creative destruction and the anxiety among the ruling commanders and elite group within the SPLM/A that they would lose economically and politically. The intense tribal warfare and destruction of communities led to total collapsed of the social structures among the South Sudanese society.

Background And History

The North-South Problem

How to achieve peace in the Sudan was a problem of long standing since 1955-1972. The second Civil War between northern and southern Sudan broke out as early as 1975, but destructive violence escalated gradually. It has intensified since 1983-2005 and again in 2013 and 2016. The absence of consensus between northern and southern Sudan on the constitutional system of ordering political, economic, and social relationships has adversely affected the stability of the country, the absence of agreement on a system of governance has been compounded by the commitment of Government of Sudan to Islam and to the primacy of the Arabic language. Because this book is concerned only about the second civil war, we will consider the Aanyanya II movement and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement as the key actors along with the Government of Sudan with inclusion of the current South conflict after the independence 2011.

CONCEPTIONS OF GOVERNANCE

Ideas organize the thinking of individuals and the way in which human beings perceive their environment. Systems of ideas containing conceptions of the nature of the World in conjunction with value systems, affect the ways in which individuals treat one another and shape institutions structures.

How people think about themselves, their relationships with each other, and their relationships with the larger World are essential elements in what constitutes a people and their way of life. These common understanding are based partly on similar experiences in the past and partly on basic conceptions of universal order. Individuals think of and justify their own constitution of order in terms of their conception of their place in a universal order.

Conceptualizations of political order vary among the different culture groups living in the Sudan. Some communities such as the Anuak and Shilluk are organized as federated kingdoms (Duany 1993:2). Many also have the tradition of autocratic arrangements, especially, in the northern Sudan. Still others are known as acephalous societies. These are societies without a common head. Mary Douglas noted that these acephalous societies lacked both palaces and prisons and that regulative ideas or law emerged from social interactions (Douglas, 1980: 61-62). These traditions are held to be important in ordering these different communities, and they should be taken into serious account in constituting a new political order for Sudan as a whole.

The choices people make in selecting organizing principles are, therefore, not uniform, although many scholars have tended to believe that there is only one, hierarchical way to order human societies. This view ignores the way in which diverse cultures, operating in different local environments, have realized significant potential in the past. Submission to the basic constitutional commitment of the Government of Sudan and Government of Southern Sudan to pursue a monolithic (Arab Islamic) society implies the extinction of the diverse cultures and different ways of life in the South Sudan and in other parts of Sudan such as the Nuba and southern Blue Nile. Instead, members of the National Islamic front, the ruling party in the Sudan and the one which holds the most extreme views, believe that they have access to absolute truth, and that they should rid the Sudan of those who insist on divergent truths of their own. Their thinking is simple, Islam and Arabic language hold a key to united Sudan.

CENTRALIZATION OF GOVERNMENT OF SUDAN

Nimeiri's coup of 25 May 1969 instituted a secular, socialist state, with regional administrative autonomy for the South in recognition of the fact that the Islamic state favored by the main northern parties (Umma Party, Democratic Union Party [DUP], National Islamic Front [NIF] would be detrimental to national unity. Nimeiri, however actually began negotiations with the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM) after he lost his communist supporters in 1971. The negotiations resulted in the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement that ended 17 years of civil war in 1972. The agreement also led to the formation of a southern regional government, the first attempt to give a "Voice" to the Southern Sudanese in their own country since independence in 1956.

Despite reference to Southern autonomy, the structure of Nimeiri's regime was grounded in a conception of dominance. Its monopoly of prerogatives of governance closely resembles that of the previous governments of Sudan in the south. Dominating, Islamizing and Arabizing the Christians South were objectives shared by all the dominant political groups in the north before and after Nineiri's coup. They were clearly expressed by the most prominent leaders of the sectarian parties in the north. In January 1962, for example, the Minister of Education Sayed Ziada Arabi, asserted in a speech at Juba that national unity implied the universal adoption of Arabic as the national language and Islam as the national religion (Sanderson and Sanderson, 1981).

In his maiden address to the constituent assembly in October 1964, Sayed Saddiq el Mahdi, the Prime Minister, said: "The dominant feature of our nation is an Islamic one and its over powering expression is Arab, and this nation will not have its entity identified and its prestige and pride preserved except under an Islamic revival" (Mahdi, 1966). Dr. Hassan El Truabi, the leader of the Islamic Front, expressed himself in a similar vein. He argued that the people in the southern Sudan had no unified culture, so this vacuum would necessarily be filled by Arab culture in the course of an Islamic revival.

In the process of implementing these policies, attempts have been made by the Government of Sudan to create an Islamic national identity. Arabic was introduced as the administrative and educational language, although English remained the medium of instruction in all Sudanese Secondary schools since 1967. Friday replaced Sunday as the weekly day of rest in the Christian south, Islamic conversion is encouraged, but Christians are not allowed to proselytize Moslems. Apostasy by Moslems under the 1991 Criminal Act is punishable by death.

Nimeiri's centralized government did not permit southern citizens to exercise the powers and responsibilities promised in the Addis Ababa Agreement (Alier 1991, Garang 1993, Duany 1987). Thus, the treatment of the southern Sudanese in civil and military matters was still dictated by Khartoum; the nature of that treatment made southerners second class citizens in their own country. Some southern military officers rebelled in Akobo in 1975 led by Gen. Gordon Koang; others rebelled in Wau and Juba in 1976 in which high top officers were killed, Gen. Abur Matuong, Gen. Jibiril Makol Mangong and other young officers. These military personnel fled across the Ethiopian border and established what become known as the Aanya-Nya II Movement. This group began hit-and run guerilla warfare against the Government of the Sudan in the Southern Region.

The Anua-Nya II later attracted additional members of the Southern Armed forces who deserted because of the deterioration of the political situation in the country. The division of the southern Sudan into smaller regions was the catalyst for the southern rebellion. Gen. Joseph Lagu, former Vice-President of the Sudan and President of High Executive council in the South, the proponent of the division of the southern Sudan in to small regions thought the division would alleviate the majoritarian domination of the major ethic groups, especially, the Dinka. 4. Lagu did not see any reason to fear the northern Sudan because that region was also regionalized. He assumed incorrectly that regionalization meant the federalization of political relationships in the nation.

The replacement of the single south region by three smaller ones was decreed by Nimeiri without applying the principles of amendment embodied in Nimeiri's own national constitution. Amendment of the Addis Ababa agreement required a three-fourths majority vote in the National Assembly, confirmed by a two-thirds majority vote in a referendum in the South. Division of the South made it clear to many southern Sudanese that better future depended upon a different political arrangement with the North, not participation in the regional (administrative) government. Some Southerners joined the Anya-Nya II Movement while others, including John Garang, established the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and its military wing, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, in 1983.

Garang death and after signing of the CPA agreement, the interim and independent ears 2005 to 2014 were challenging times for South Sudan. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in 2005 turned out to be a shady affair, rushed by those in a hurry to birth an independent South and welcome by the South Sudanese people with jubilation; to them the independence was a start of the new journey. But many critics like Professor Mahmood Mamdani saw that the people of South Sudan are just beginning to pay the price for that haste. CPA was not well thought-out by the international community; they gave full support to empower SPLM/A and the NCP parties creating two states under their dictatorship.