bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 18–23
l’d woken at about three in the morning, to hunder and lightning. Odd, I’d thought, as the storm
passed, and the rhythmic whirr of the ceiling fan took over again. The rainy season had ended a few Soon after six, it started to get light. Now I could hear a staccato crackling outside. I got up and pushed aside the net curtain: no sign of rain. I pulled on a pair of trousers and, rubbing my eyes, walked to the front door and peered out. It was going to be another hot and hazy day. John and Emmanuel, our two night guards, were in the courtyard just by the main gate. John saw me and came towards me:
“Mr Nicholas: please go back! Is problem, I think…”
Jenny came out from the washroom and joined me at the door:
“What’s up?”
“I don’t know. Sounds like shooting, maybe…”
By now it wasn’t just small arms fire. There was the occasional heavier thump and you could feel the ground shake a little. Once, the glasses and silver in our dining-room dresser tinkled. From the direction of the main road, maybe two hundred metres away, we heard a loud clanking noise over a heavy engine. I wondered where I’d heard that noise before, then remembered: Saving Private Ryan. A tank.
With the sounds of machine-gun fire everywhere, diplomats were summoned to a surreal briefing at the Presidential
compound and assured that everything was under control.
Over the next 24 hours, one half of South Sudan’s army — the SPLA — fought the other half in the nation’s capital, Juba. On the second day, things got worse. With the sounds of machine-gun fire everywhere, diplomats were summoned to a surreal briefing at the Presidential compound and assured that everything was under control. The Foreign Minister several times had to pause as explosions made the windows shake, and more tanks rumbled past.
When I got back home, there was a body lying at the gate of our neighbour, where an hour ago there had been nothing.
“What happened?” I asked.
“There was a man, walking in the street… An SPLA pick-up came the other way. They stopped and spoke to the man. One question, maybe two… then they shot him”
An ethnic purge had begun. Victorious Dinka elements of the SPLA were roaming the streets looking for ethnic Nuers. Military on the run or civilian, it didn’t matter. They were killed on the spot. In a matter of a few hours, entire quarters of Juba emptied out.
By day three Jenny and I were at the airport, assisting Canadians — nearly all of Nuer descent — to flee. It was difficult at first to figure out what was happening. But I started to understand when one man, clutching all his possessions and his treasured blue Canadian passport in a small plastic bag, would not look me in the face, and eventually asked me if he could borrow my baseball cap. He needed to cover his forehead and those horizontal scars. He sat cowering in the back of our battered Land-Cruiser until the British C-17 that would take him to safety in Entebbe arrived. Then he asked me to hold his hand as we walked past scowling SPLA in the airport terminal, out onto the tarmac.
Another Canadian, Peter, arrived with his granddaughter:
“They came for my neighbour this morning,” he said.
“They made us both watch. They cut his throat. They said they would come back in an hour, and if we weren’t gone, they’d do the same to us…”
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Ordinary people in Juba had no Embassy to call on, no one to help them escape the pogrom. Instead they fled to what seemed to be the only safe haven: the United Nations logistics base at one end of the Juba Airport runway. Three or four days on,
An ethnic purge had begun. Victorious Dinka elements of the
SPLA were roaming the streets looking for ethnic Nuers. Military on the run or civilian, it didn’t matter.
They were killed on the spot.
20,000 civilians — nearly all Nuer — were crammed into the narrow roadways between the UN’s container offices, onto a basketball court, onto the apron where the white aircraft of the UN’s vast fleet were parked. Thus came into being the first of South Sudan’s PoCs (pee-oh-seas), or Protection of Civilians sites.
We all thought that once things calmed down, people would go back home, it would be a matter of a week or two at the most.
But the war spread up-country from Juba. In a few weeks it had engulfed one third of the country. By September 2015, 20 months on, 200,000 civilians were holed up in seven PoCs across the country, and a further 1.6 million were at large in much more informal, unprotected settlements. 623,000 had fled South Sudan. The PoCs had become a fact of life.
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Over those few days in December 2013 and January 2014, United Nations peacekeepers — by unquestioningly opening their gates — saved tens of thousands of lives. It was a high point in the history of the UN. The lessons of Rwanda had, it seemed, been learned.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. It soon became obvious that counting on the blue UN flag for protection was not enough. In April, following a rebel victory in the North of the country, the word went out in the Jonglei state capital of Bor that the Nuer within the Bor PoC were celebrating. A Dinka mob assembled, marched on the PoC, breached its puny defences and killed 50 civilians before the Indian peacekeepers could organize and expel them. Bor’s PoC now has 10 concentric lines of defence, with a tank permanently stationed on each
When the 2014 rains set in, the inhak
sites were within a few days knee-waters, floating with sewage and deac
slammed the UN for failing to meet € standards, and warned that ch
of its earthen berms, and seven heavy machine gun posts. Of the 3,000 remaining civilians within this POC, not one has dared set foot outside the wire since that April day.
And it was not as though any of the PoCs were designed as camps for the displaced. When the 2014 rains set in, the inhabitants of the Juba, Bor and Bentiu sites were within a few days knee-, even waist-deep in rancid flood waters, floating with sewage and dead animals. Médecins Sans Frontières slammed the UN for failing to meet even the most basic of humanitarian standards, and warned that cholera was virtually inevitable. The government chimed in with its own complaints: the UN was harbouring rebel deserters, it said; the PoCs were an affront to national sovereignty, to the dignity of South Sudan.
For a time, it looked as though the UN — after its moment of glory — could do no right. When it proposed relocating the civilians within the semi-flooded Juba site
to a drier location, the same humanitarian
abitants of the Juba, Bor and Bentiu -, even waist-deep in rancid flood id animals. Médecins Sans Frontieres even the most basic of humanitarian holera was virtually inevitable.
organizations that had denounced the appalling sanitary conditions now insisted that no one should be forced to move. There were simultaneous — but incompatible — calls for the peacekeepers to beef up protection at the PoCs and also move out into the hinterland to protect the much larger number of internally displaced scattered around the countryside. Some complained that the camp residents were receiving insufficient food and shelter assistance, while others said just the opposite: the PoCs were fostering dependency and entitlement.
More positively, over these 15 months, humanitarians and peacekeepers — who would normally be found at opposite ends of the bar at Juba’s main UN base — have had to learn each other’s job. The Mongolian troops who guard the largest PoC of all, at Bentiu (117,000), police the food distributions, help dig the latrines and shepherd the NGO workers into the bunkers when shelling begins; humanitarians who two years ago sneered at the blue-helmeted soldiers now ride inside the Mongolian Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs) with no qualms.
South Sudan’s PoCs represent R2P, the Responsibility to Protect, a concept that Canadian diplomats helped develop some years ago. It’s been messy. The Department of Peacekeeping Operations wants the camps emptied; the UN’s humanitarian agencies and NGOs dither, alternately insisting that no one must be forced out but that the peacekeepers need to get out and about. At every meeting of the UN Humanitarian Country Team on which we sit (twice a week) the fate of the PoCs is on the agenda. But it’s probably cutting edge, as well; this may be the future of peacekeeping.
Canada has been helping the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), as well as a number of non-governmental
Main street: Bentiu Protection of Civilians site organizations, to deliver security and assistance to those holed up in the PoCs. And our 12-person Canadian Forces detachment with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan has been providing Military Liaison Officers who play key roles in liaising between the peacekeepers, the humanitarians and the local authorities in places such as Bor and Bentiu.
We’ve also been engaged in some less traditional programming. One of the many side-effects of life in the camps is that children have been cut off from their old school and neighbourhood friends, who may be scattered around the different PoCs or as far afield as the refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda.
Using our Canada Fund for Local Initiatives (CFLI) and working with a media organization called Free Voice, in early 2015 we launched a three-month blitz to try to reconnect some of these children. Volunteers recorded messages which were then relayed or sent via Skype to other locations; the children made drawings which were carried from one camp to another with greetings; a link was re-established with the elementary school in the Juba suburb from which many of the children had fled, and a new one was made to a girls’ orphanage in town.
In March 2015, children from Juba’s three PoCs were brought together in one of the sites (normally they are not free to move between them). There were acrobatics and dancing contests, a sprint race for the Under Fives, drawings were judged, giant puppets performed and more messages were sent. Lots of new friendships were made.
There were sad moments too. The title winning song, performed by the boys and girls of Juba PoC One, said it all:
“When will I see my home again…”
Nicholas Coghlan is now Canada’s first resident Ambassador in Juba, South Sudan, the newest country in the world. His Embassy, housed in pleasant containers, is the only officially bullet-resistant Canadian mission in the world; happily, it has not yet been tested. Nicholas is the author of two books about postings in the Canadian Foreign Service — The Saddest Country (Colombia); and Far in the Waste Sudan (both reviewed by Gar Pardy in Vol. 22, No. 3) — and one about a two-year sailing odyssey through the frigid waters of Patagonia: Winter in Fireland (reviewed by Paul Durand in Vol.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 18–23. Read the rest of this issue →
