Conversation with Barjok Madouk about the crisis in South Sudan
Sitting in the NP guesthouse with the afternoon sun streaming in, I leaned forward to ensure that I wasn’t missing a word that NP’s good friend and partner Barjok Madouk was saying. Barjok Madours is the Secretary General for the Greater Upper Nile, Bahr el Ghazal and Equatoria Youth Association (GUBEYA). “When the fighting started around my house, I told my wife and kids to lie down on the floor. I didn’t want the kids to be scared and feel something bad, so I told them there was a game going on and our job was to lie down.” As I caught my breath to take in this act of parental courage, he told me about his 7-year-old son. His son was lying next to him on the ground as they listened to the chaos of bullets, angry yelling, fearful screaming and people running. During this, his son had turned to him and said “This play is not good, Daddy, why should it continue?”
Why should it continue? This is the question about South Sudan that is on everyone’s mind and much the topic of our conversation. Barjok’s easy smile and soft voice belies the story he tells me about the killing and suffering he has seen during the fighting in Juba last month. Barjok’s first concern is for the people directly affected by the fighting. “There are places that are completely destroyed. We need to reach people where they are, for their basic needs. A person cannot understand peace if he has nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat."
As we talked about the nature of the hostilities and the issue of ethnicity, I wanted to know how he, as a South Sudanese man, saw the situation. “Many people are not accepting each other out of fear right now. This violence has reset us into a different mindset of ethnicities.” We talked about some of the discourse that paints a picture of Nuer and Dinka pitted against one another in bloody tribal fighting. Barjok became very animated on this issue. “Although many people see each other now as attackers, above all it is a political issue. There is a need for civic awareness. Civilians are able to live together peacefully. Through out all this fighting, Dinka are hosting Nuers and Nuers are hosting Dinkas in their homes to protect and support each other. This is our gesture of peace as brothers and sisters.”
Barjok went on to talk about the way forward, “To build national identity, we need to embody everyone by building reflective institutions where every person sees themselves in it.” I was deeply moved by this poetic description of state institutions reflecting diversity and bringing about a sense of common identity. This made me wonder about Barjok’s opinion on the role of civil society.
“Civil society needs the means and the training to be vibrant and more active. It needs to touch the areas of concern. Civil society needs to touch the wounds, the area that is paining. It means going to the affected people, sharing with them, talking to them, training them and bringing their voice out.” To this end, Barjok and his colleagues are putting every effort into moving the voice of civil society into the fore. Barjok is an active member of the South Sudan Civil Society Alliance (SSCSA). His purpose for dropping by had been to share the petition paper the SSCSA had drafted, in which they have put forward seven recommendations for resolving this conflict. Amongst other things, it calls for the participation of civil society, the ending of the hostilities, and accountability and justice on human rights violations committed by all parties to the hostilities.
Having been in South Sudan for the last 4 years, NP has borne witness to this emerging civil society. At this time, in this crisis, one of the greatest needs is to support South Sudanese voices, organizations and activists. As the international community meets in the safety and comfort of expensive hotels outside of South Sudan to discuss how they are going to “fix” this violent situation, as the negotiating teams sit in Addis Ababa entrenched in conflicting positions, the decisions of a small group of power brokers have unleashed violence that is affecting hundreds of thousands who did not make these choices. It is the citizenry of South Sudan who are suffering each day. In all of this horror, one of the bright lights is South Sudanese civil society. It is the citizens of South Sudan who are coming together in their role as active members of their own country, who are pushing an agenda of peace and reconciliation not heard in many other spheres. The only real and sustainable change that will ever happen will come from within, from the South Sudanese themselves.
In talking about the Alliance, Barjok highlighted one of the key issues – did anyone see this coming? There are voices in the international community who are saying, “no one saw this coming.” This for many, most specifically civil society activists, is frustrating to hear. There have been escalating signs of coming conflict for many months. As Barjok said, “We have seen the situation boiling, we saw the signs. The civil society on December 14th warned the ruling party, don’t bring your fighting to the public. Then on the 15th this happened, this means we have predicted this would happen. We have been describing the political environment and the coming of violence months ago. Should we have had the ability and resources, we would have called the political parties and brought them together at once to try and stop it from happening.”
I couldn’t help but smile at this. The enthusiasm of Barjok and his colleagues at the SSCSA gives us at NP hope and motivation to continue to work for peace together with the people of South Sudan.
The South Sudan Civil Society Alliance (SSCSA) is a consortium of non-political civil society organizations in South Sudan. The SSCSA was formed in June 2011 as a transformation of the South Sudan Civil Society Referendum Taskforce. The alliance contained 46 member organizations in the executive but has more than 100 national and state organizations. There are currently 91 membership applications pending the upcoming SSCSA conference.
The Greater Equatoria, Upper Nile, Equatoria Youth Association (GUBEYA) is a youth organization which advocates for youth empowerment and political dispensation. It also works on human rights, rule of law and democratization.
Photo: Tiffany Easthom, Country Director for NP in South Sudan, with Barjok Madouk.