Originally published in 2021; this essay reflects the author’s thinking and observations at that time.
Abyei has been prominent on my mind since last Friday. On Saturday, I started to write this article. Little did I know that it would be prophetic. Sunday, 16 May 2021, was another ominous day for Abyei. Messiriya assailants massacred twelve innocent Ngok Dinka civilians and injured others in Dunguop village, northeast of Abyei town. I extend my sincere condolences to the families of the victims and to the people of Abyei.
May is an ominous month for Abyei.
In May 2008, the Sudan Armed Forces burned most of the town of Abyei to ashes. Dozens died, and tens of thousands, displaced yet again, sought refuge southward among their kin in southern Sudan. The market was wholly eviscerated, save for the mosque, left towering over the ruins. To me, it seemed to stand as a symbol that Islamic conversion was a condition for mercy.
I remember standing in front of the then Sudan People’s Liberation Movement’s (SPLM) party headquarters nearly a year later, in April 2009, in wonder. The building looked as if some grand steel robot had trampled it underfoot. I was in Abyei with a team accompanying the SPLM’s legal counsel to meet with the Ngok Dinka chiefs and other community delegates in preparation for our trip to The Hague for the Abyei Arbitration Hearing later that month.
I walked the town when not in sessions. Burn markings remained on walls and where tukuls once stood. Roofless buildings and burnt vehicles were everywhere.
I visited the Comboni Primary School, a beautiful concrete building. Some of its classrooms still stood doorless and windowless, a testament to the looting. Yet they stood. And the children stood too. Energetic, defiant, they stood in the morning assembly. I can still hear the voices of the little kindergarteners in their tents, singing songs of hope.
At night, I remember seeing searing lights, widely spaced, from the edge of town. I wondered and asked about their source. People told me they were from the United Nations Mission in Sudan’s (UNMIS) compound. After the attack on Abyei town, UNMIS almost doubled the height of the compound’s wire fence and added huge lights, facing outwards, for protection.
For UNMIS’ safety, not the people’s.
UNMIS had refused to open its gates to protect civilians during the siege. I understood civilian protection to be within its mandate. Afterwards, they bolstered their enclave, should it happen again.
I saw the compound for myself. It was shameful, but not new. The United Nations’ record on civilian protection in Africa is, at best, dismal. The current United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) may even be a regression rather than an improvement.
International and regional mechanisms of dispute management have miserably failed the people of Abyei.
For starters, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended Sudan’s long civil war, was repeatedly held up by the lack of agreement on the issue of Abyei. It took a proposal presented by Senator John Danforth, the then US Special Envoy to Sudan, to achieve a breakthrough. That proposal, accepted wholly by the two parties, the NCP and SPLM, became the basis for the Abyei Protocol.
Hailed by many as groundbreaking, unprecedented, and a model for dispute resolution agreements, the CPA suffered many setbacks in implementation. And to date, Abyei, the Nuba Mountains, and the Blue Nile hang in the balance, casualties of ensuring the right of self-determination for southern Sudan.
One wonders whether the two parties traded the fate of the three areas in an under-the-table deal for South Sudan’s independence. Perhaps a duplicitous feat, perhaps naiveté, maybe both. One also wonders, at the risk of sounding treacherous, if there was another way.
Whatever the case, Abyei suffers to this day.
There are two levels of disputes in Abyei.
One is between the two governments of Sudan and South Sudan, with different motivations on each side. Sudan’s motivation is the oil and, therefore, the land. South Sudan’s motivation is the people, tied to their claim to their ancestral land.
The pattern of Sudanese government policy suggested a commitment to clearing the Ngok Dinka from Abyei. As a consequence, they have suffered repeated cycles of massive internal displacement since the 1960s. The Sudanese Government repeatedly employed depopulation policies in Abyei, mainly through terror, for which recorded history can attest.
The other level is between the Messiriya and the Ngok Dinka over shared resources, grazing land, and water for cattle that lies within the territory of the Ngok and further into South Sudan. A common dispute between communities with shared resources.
Traditional dispute mechanisms usually restored calm, and the two communities co-existed in relative calm until Sudan increasingly militarized the Messiriya and used them as proxies in its bid to depopulate, or more accurately, ethnically cleanse Abyei.
The Messiriya have been used to the detriment of the Ngok and their own.
Of course, they are the hand meting out atrocities, and to humanize them is counterintuitive. Yet to humanize them, one would hope, is to loosen them from the radicalizing grip of the real culprit.
One wonders about their calculus and what they hope to gain from their arrangement as proxies. The only explanation that makes sense is that Khartoum promised the Messiriya the land once depopulated, or ethnically cleansed.
The Messiriya areas are severely underdeveloped, with no access to the most basic services, yet they constantly breach their ties with the Ngok, to whom their livelihood and destiny are linked.
The ultimate breach of whatever shred of good faith remained between the two communities occurred on another ominous day in May: 4 May 2013.
On that day, the Paramount Chief of the Ngok Dinka, Chief Kuol Deng Majok, was gunned down and murdered by Messiriya gunmen while in the escort of UNISFA.
A shock.
A man of the people, gunned down!
A betrayal.
How can it happen while in the protection of UNISFA and within its convoy?
Apuk Ayuel Mayen 