SPLM must rein in the Murle thugs
By Mading Ngor Akec de Kuai
Nov 14, 2006 — Slightly over three days ago, the Murle gangs have been reported to have killed 10 people in Bor. This is not an isolated case. The problem of Murle is a historical one. They have been terrorizing Bor for generations. Driven by a culture of plundering, greed and desire for someone’s property, the Murle go to steal cows, abduct children and assimilate them by removing two of the lower tooth to make them look like one of their own.
Imagine the fact that since time immemorial and even before the advent of war, hardly a month would go by without raids and deaths at the hands of Murle, and we are talking of decades before the Lord’s Resistance Movement began its daily errand of snatching children, raping women and spilling thousands of innocent blood.
While the actions of Murle might not be politically linked as the Lord’s Resistance Army’s, they are an LRA in their own rights.
It is easy to overstate, but hundreds if not thousands of children in Bor are orphaned as a result of Murle’s barbaric and random massacres.
Moreover, the Dinka Bor have tolerated the Murle’s savage murders and raids for a long time to the extent of negligence. In his ethnography on the Dinka of Sudan, Francis Mading Deng notes the view that as Dinka we see ourselves as resistors of aggression. The Dinka become perpetrators mostly when responding to an aggression weighed against them by others.
Until recently, the dangers posed by Murle have been taken as part of the normal Dinka Bor life. The encounters with Murle have left a scar and inspired much of our folklore and songs. Several age sets are named after specific periods of Murle invasions. There are generations borne during the Murle (Beer) invasion of Anyidi and Beer (Murle) invasion of Juet” to name but a few.
Similarly, some of the traditional Dinka songs narrate battles between the Murle and the Dinka.
A Dinka man once sang of “an afternoon when the Murle crept into our midst and snatched our cows at the cattle camp, but our heroic resistance allowed us to recover our herds.”
Here is where the SPLM comes in. Lately, there has been an upsurge in violence. We all know that barely a month ago a ferry carrying SPLA soldiers sank killing all on board. A week later, many of our people were stopped and shot in broad daylight strangely enough by a ‘New LRA’.
As South Sudanese, I don’t think we are asking much as politicians would have us believe when we call for the trickle-down of not the millions of dollars that are flooding Juba, but the basic trickle-down of the most basic of dividends of peace called security!
There is simply no room for accommodating backward cultures like that of the Taposa and Murle who live by hunting humans in the post-CPA period and the political groups who are instigating violence.
Unlike in the days where a Taposa would travel as far as Chukudum and as far as Turkana district in Kenya to terrorize and steal from other tribes, those days are long overdue and it is the duty of the SPLM to rein in those creating havoc.
This message is well conveyed by J. Ojoch in his article [Clean the House by Solving Grassroots Problems”, 7/14/2006]. “The SPLM must take care of inter-tribal problems. There is no peace if the solid base of the GoSS is at war with itself. No more lives should be lost when peace is already here.”
The Liberation Movement must heed this call of expansion of security to all areas of South Sudan since SPLA soldiers are not at war at the moment to avoid unnecessary lose of South Sudanese lives. However, this is unlikely to happen with the prevalent high rates of corruption in the veins of many a ministers in Juba.
Nelson Mandela once wrote in his book Long Walk to Freedom, p.198, that “I have always believed that to be a freedom fighter one must suppress many of the personal feelings that make one feel like a separate individual rather than part of a mass movement. One is fighting for the liberation of millions of people, not the glory of one individual.”
Clearly, this is the message that many rotten ministers in the GoSS would be paying attention to because if we go as far as to comment that the SPLM is doing nothing about the development of our country but the enrichment of certain people, we will be met with the common phrase typical of African countries: silence, we are developing!
As I have written in the past, we have suceeded in making South Sudan, but now we must make South Sudanse.
I find it difficult to live in a country where thugs from Murle and the like woud get up at dusk and ask themselves, “where can we go and make some easy fortune? Hymm…I suppose we go to Bor and loot their cattle. After all, they’re ‘Jongkoth’!”
* The author is based in Canada. Mading is the editor of New Sudan Vision website www.newsudanvision.com. Also he publishes his personal commentary and reflexions at his personal blog www.newsudanvision.blogspot.com. He can be reached at [email protected].