Apuk Ayuel Mayen

Originally published in 2022, this essay reflects the author’s thinking and observations at that time.

Chief Kuol Deng Kuol, Paramount Chief of the Ngok Dinka, was humble, bordering on self-effacing. If it were not for his introduction as the Paramount Chief, I would not have suspected it.

I first met Chief Kuol Adol in Abyei in 2009, and again during the hearing of the Abyei Arbitration in The Hague later that year.

Our paths crossed several times afterward, in different settings. At African Union meetings. In Juba. During visits with the Ngok Dinka Chiefs. One of the encounters I remember most was after another ominous day in May for Abyei: 21 May 2011.

I remember hearing the news of the invasion of Abyei. I was in Bishoftu, Ethiopia, at the Kirftu Hotel, where the Post-Referendum Negotiations between Sudan’s Government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) were taking place. I was a member of the Joint Technical Secretariat for the Talks.

We had begun a round of negotiations on 18 May 2011. We were discussing oil and the apportionment of debts and assets.

The lead negotiator for Sudan exited the meeting room to take a call. The call lasted several minutes before he returned. A few minutes later, our side received a call with news of the invasion.

The negotiations effectively ended at that moment. The mediation team reconvened the group the following morning before the two teams departed for their respective capitals.

On 21 May 2011, a delegation of the UN Security Council arrived in Khartoum as part of an African tour. They had been scheduled to visit Abyei, but with the situation unfolding there, the visit did not take place.

We arrived in Juba on 22 May, and a day later, the UN Security Council delegation arrived in Juba from Khartoum. The Ngok Dinka Chiefs had to drive to Juba to meet with the delegation.

I remember Chief Kuol among them.

Following the departure of the UN delegation, I was among a high-level political delegation that travelled by road to the Abyei Area to see for ourselves what had happened to the area and its people after the invasion.

The Chiefs had gone ahead of us. Along the way, some of the vehicles in their convoy broke down, and we incorporated them into our convoy.

We stopped in Turalei, where we were received by the Commissioner. There, we saw the displaced who had made their way there from Abyei.

All along the road through Twic, there were people moving southward, looking for safety. We gave our rations to some of them as we passed. They were carrying what little they could carry, walking away from everything they knew.

Along the way, we found family members of some of the leaders in our delegation among the displaced people.

When we reached Mayen Abun, we went to the church and the hospital, where many of the displaced had sought refuge.

It was there that I saw Chief Kuol in a way I had not seen him before.

His teenage sons came to him, frantic. They did not know where their mothers and siblings were. They were asking him what they should do, where they should look.

He admonished them.

“Go and look for them. I am responsible for the whole clan. You are responsible for your mothers and children.”

And he went on.

He went from one displaced person to another, asking about their welfare, checking on what they needed, listening to their stories.

I remember thinking about the weight of that responsibility.

His own family was missing. His children were frightened and looking to him for answers. Yet, for him, the responsibility did not stop with his own family. He was thinking about the whole clan, the displaced, the people who had nowhere to go.

That was my lasting impression of Chief Kuol.

Not the title. Not the politics.

The man carrying the burden of his people.

Two years later, another ominous day in May came.

On 4 May 2013, Chief Kuol Deng Kuol was killed while travelling in a UNISFA convoy.

I was at our Embassy in South Africa. I took the midnight flight back to Juba. I arrived at Bole International Airport a little past 6 a.m. I sat at a coffee shop, opened my computer to check my email and the news.

And there it was:

“Ngok Dinka paramount chief slain in Abyei.”

I stared at the headline.

I had first met him in Abyei in 2009. I had seen him again in The Hague. I had encountered him in Juba, at African Union meetings and in the ordinary corridors of diplomacy.

And now he was dead.

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?

His death brought me back to the question of Abyei. I do not hail from Abyei, yet I have had an intimate connection with Abyei and its people for more than a decade. I have had a close look at its painful experiences since 2009. It is therefore befitting that I write about it.

Abyei is often reduced to a dispute over territory, boundaries and oil between Sudan and South Sudan. But the political question is also about the people who live there and their right to determine their future.

The Abyei Protocol was supposed to provide a political way out.

It defined the Abyei Area as the area of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905.

That history, however, was more complicated than the shorthand suggests. The 1905 administrative change also affected other Dinka areas, including parts of Twic, while Ruweng and other areas experienced subsequent changes between the northern and southern administrations. Those areas were later returned to the southern provinces. The Ngok were the exception.

Their continued administration under Kordofan became the historical basis for the question that would later become the Abyei dispute.

The Abyei Protocol adopted that history as its legal reference point. It established the Abyei Boundaries Commission, made up of Sudanese and international experts, to define and demarcate the Area.

That question eventually went to arbitration in The Hague.

But there was another question, perhaps even more consequential: who would vote?

The Protocol provided for the people of Abyei to decide whether the Area would remain part of the North or be transferred to Bahr el Ghazal. The referendum was supposed to take place at the same time as the referendum on Southern Sudan’s self-determination.

Yet the Protocol did not settle the criteria for determining who qualified as a resident for purposes of the vote. That was left to the Abyei Referendum Commission, which was to be constituted by the Presidency.

I have always wondered about that.

Is it usual practice to leave the determination of residency — and therefore the right to vote on the future of a territory — to an electoral body that has yet to be constituted?

This was not a small technical matter.

It was the referendum.

The National Assembly passed legislation authorizing the Abyei referendum on 30 December 2009. But the parties could not agree on the composition of the Referendum Commission or on who would be eligible to vote. The Commission was never established.

And the referendum provided for under the Abyei Protocol did not happen.

The people of Abyei were left waiting.

But they did not wait forever.

In October 2013, after years of deadlock, the Ngok Dinka organized their own referendum. Voting took place from 27 to 29 October. The organizers announced that 99.99 percent of those who voted had chosen for Abyei to become part of South Sudan.

It was not the referendum provided for under the Abyei Protocol. It was a unilateral community referendum, and it was not accepted by the African Union as a settlement of the dispute. The two governments also did not recognize it at the time as the legally binding referendum contemplated by the Protocol.

But that does not make the vote meaningless.

It was the expression of a people who had waited for an agreed political process to deliver what had been promised to them.

The distinction matters. A referendum can have a political meaning even when its legal status is contested.

The question of the boundaries eventually went to arbitration. The question of who could vote remained unresolved. And when the people of Abyei eventually held their own vote, it did not settle the legal status of the Area.

Abyei remained suspended between two countries, two claims and two political futures.

There was also the question of resources.

The Abyei Protocol provided for the net oil revenues from Abyei to be divided during the interim period among the National Government, the Government of Southern Sudan, Bahr el Ghazal, Western Kordofan, the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya.

Fifty percent was allocated to the National Government, 42 percent to the Government of Southern Sudan, and 2 percent each to Bahr el Ghazal, Western Kordofan, the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya.

Two percent.

The Protocol further provided that the financial resources due to the Abyei Area would be deposited in special accounts acceptable to the Presidency, from which the administration of the Area would make withdrawals.

Were those accounts ever established? Who controlled them? And were the allocations contemplated under the Protocol ever actually received by those for whom they were intended?

I do not ask these questions as an accountant.

I ask them because they are part of the agreement.

An agreement is not fulfilled simply because it has been signed and witnessed. Its promises have to reach the people for whom it was made.

And that brings me back to Chief Kuol.

He died in the middle of an unresolved question that had already consumed years of negotiations, displacement, arbitration and international intervention.

I think about him often when I think about Abyei.

Not because he was the Paramount Chief.

Because he was a man.

A humble man who carried an enormous responsibility for his people.

I remember him in Abyei. I remember him in The Hague. I remember him in Juba.

And I remember the morning I read that he had been killed.

Another ominous day in May.

And I still wonder: how many more Mays will Abyei have to endure before the people of Abyei are finally allowed to decide their own fate?