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[This article continues the analysis and commentary on the ongoing war in southern Sudan initiated in "Colonization, Arabization, Slavery, and War Against Indigenous Peoples of Southern Sudan," by the same co-authors, published in the Fourth World Bulletin Vol.3, no.1 (December 1993)].
On 10 January 1996, soldiers of the Southern Sudan
Independence Army (SSIA) assassinated William
Nyuon Bany, the commander of forces of the
Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA). Apparently, the SSIA
soldiers went to Nyuon's hideout under the pretext of a
peace mission. Ironically, Nyuon was the Chief of Staff of the
SSIA itself (the forces that killed him) as recently as one year
ago. Then, as representative of the SSIA, he signed an
important peace agreement (discussed below) with John Garang
de Mabior, the Commander in Chief of the SPLA. The news
of his murder suggests the possibility of a major rift between
the SPLA and the SSIA, both of which are at war with
the Sudanese Islamist regime of General Omer Hassan el-Beshir.
Both armies were understood to be at war with Beshir, that is, until it became clear that the SSIA had undergone factional division. Now the SPLA suspects that Riek Machar, the purported leader of the SSIA, has been working for the government. If these suspicions turn out to be true, it would explain at least in part why, from 1992 until last year, the SPLA and SSIA fought one another in bloody exchanges that equaled the violence inflicted by Beshir's government forces. Ostensibly, the SPLA/SSIA conflict was a matter of opposing objectives, and these were apparently resolved last year when the SSIA (purportedly in its entirety) rejoined SPLA forces against the government. Now the SPLA suspects that the violence with the SSIA was evidence of government complicity with Machar's faction. Nyuon's death may be the one piece of compelling evidence that resolves that mystery; it also may portend the dissolution of alliance between the SPLA and Riek Machar's SSIA.
Fourth World Bulletin • Spring/Summer 1996
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
Created by Aigis Communications, Ltd