Jonglei: From basket weaving to conflict

This is a photo taken by a friend who is in Jonglei, South Sudan’s largest and most remote state, on the border with Ethiopia. I was supposed to be there with her, we had planned to spend a week over Easter together, but UNESCO, in a brilliant display of UN inefficiency, failed to get me on a UN humanitarian flight. Yes UNESCO, a UN agency, was unable to get me on a UN flight!

To be fair they did try, and it is a bureaucratic procedure. To get on the flight you have to be a humanitarian worker, or, you have to have a letter of introduction from an NGO. I am still a consultant, not staff, so I need a letter, but UNESCO’s country director said he was more than happy to write one as I had pitched them the idea of testing our manual (the one I’m writing ) on a women’s group in Akobo, one of the more remote and conflict ridden parts of the state. I had even offered to pay my own airfare. UNHAS, the UN Humanitarian Air Service, may carry NGOs and charities to remote areas, but it is certainly NOT a charity. For a 90- minute flight on an eight-seater plane, you pay US $200 each way. In fact, the airline had threaten to suspend operations in South Sudan if it did not get the funding it needed: US $3.5m a month.  

Other than UNHAS, there are no other airlines, commercial, non-profit or governmental, that fly to Akobo. In the dry season, most locals walk wherever they need to go. In the wet season, they stay home.  With that in mind, I gave UNESCO more than a week’s notice about my trip to Jonglei.  


The first day after the country director directed someone to handle my booking, I heard nothing. Day 2, they were busy filling in the form. Day 3, they had realised it was an outdated form and were trying to get the updated one. I emailed my friend and asked her to send me the form she used, which I forward on to UNESCO. But the project officer is not convinced, and wants to wait for the email from UNHAS. Day 4, they have the right form (and yes, it’s the same one I sent them), but now they can’t find the country director to sign the form. It’s Friday. The flight leaves next Thursday, and the deadline for submission is Tuesday. They promise to get it signed and sent in on Monday. I find myself saying “Well, we can only do what we can do, and if I get on, great, but if not, then we have done our best.” I have no idea where this calm resignation has come from.

Monday arrives, and they still can’t find the director, but at least now they know he’s on a mission. What about his deputy? I ask. Surely there must be someone standing in for him while he’s away. There is, I am told, but no one knows where she is either.

On Tuesday, the day of deadline, they get the form signed, but the person handling my flight booking has a training day. I get a phone call that evening to say they had missed the deadline. “Oh well," I say, "thanks for trying.”  

And that’s why my friend is in Akobo, taking this cool photo and meeting with women and youth groups, and I am sitting here in Juba, moaning on my blog about UN inefficiency.

So the photo: My first thought when she sent it through was I love that woman's hat. The next, was to ask what they were making. The answer: rubbish bins.  The women are creating those baskets to put the town’s waste in, although they seem more for aesthetic reasons than environmental because once they are full, they just dump the contents in a landfill or burn it. What else did miss besides the cool basket weaving? Well, a family of scorpions, two snakes, endless games of gin rummy, and sweltering hot days with no aircon. 

But there's more to Jonglei and Akobo than scorpions and basket weaving. It is the most conflict prone state, with inter-communal fighting between tribes over cattle raiding and a renegade soldier, with backing from Sudan, trying to start a rebellion against the government. But it's more complicated than that. David Yau Yau, the rebel soldier  is a Murle, one of three tribes in Jonglei. He has been stirring up trouble in the state since 2010, when he lost parliamentary elections. The other two tribes are the Luo Nuer and the Dinka. The Dinka are the most populous tribe, and the most powerful. John Garang, who led the rebellion against Khartoum was a Dinka; the current president, Salva Kiir, is a Dinka. But the Nuer are equally strong. During the rebellion against Khartoum, the Nuer initially aligned with Garang, but then split because they objected to Garang's vision of  a united secular Sudan, rather than an independent South Sudan. They eventually reconciled, and the current vice president of South Sudan Riek Machar (who incidentally married a British aid worker in the late 1980s), is a Nuer. 

So there is animosity between all three tribes, and within each tribe, but real hatred towards the Murle. 

In 2011, over 1,000 people were killed in clashes between the Nuer and Murle, and tens of thousands were displaced. In early 2012, it's estimated up to 3,000 civilians were killed, again when Nuer youth marched on the Murle to avenge cattle raids. Almost all of those killed were women and children, as the men were able to run much faster into the bush, according to the UN.  

This year, there have again been clashes after Yau Yau's men attacked a group of South Sudanese soldiers accompanying Nuer cattle herders. All 11/14 soldiers were killed along with 100 civilians. As a result, the government sent more soldiers into Jonglei to wipe out the Murle, with Machar even exhorting his Nuer tribes to dig up their decommissioned weapons. Every few days, we see reports, mostly in the Sudan Tribune or from the UN, of civilians being killed and people being forced to flee their homes because of the fighting.  

Another impact of the conflict is that people cannot look after their crops if they are continuously fleeing the fighting, and with the dry season almost over, and World Food Programme flights unable to land during the rainy season, deaths in conflict may be outnumbered by deaths due to starvation.