Fears of a bloody birth for the world’s newest country, South Sudan, are becoming ever more real after weeks of battles between its autonomous government and their opponents. Hundreds have died in fighting between South Sudan authorities and rebel militias. Now five rebel groups in four of the country’s ten states appear to have united under one name, the Southern Sudan Democratic Movement, and one commander, George Athor. “There is a need for the world to know who we are,” Athor told TIME via satellite phone from an undisclosed location. “Our manifesto will come out very soon.”
Even without such a document, the aims and motivations of Athor and his men are clear. Athor is a former deputy chief of staff for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army , the armed wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement , which led the fight for independence and now runs the government. Athor took his men to the bush last year after an unsuccessful bid in the election for a state governorship. In February, his forces killed more than 200 people, mostly civilians, in an attack on the village of Fangak in the northeast of South Sudan. Among his recruits are warlords who in the past have hired out their services to the northern Sudanese government to repress the southern population and clear villagers away from oil fields. Their alliance is likely as loose as all their previous fleeting allegiances, but the rebels clearly feel emboldened.
When they voted overwhelmingly in a January referendum to secede from Sudan’s northern, Arab government in Khartoum, most southern Sudanese hoped they were turning a new page after decades of war. South Sudan’s independence, scheduled for July, is the endgame of a 2005 U.S.-backed peace deal to stop a half century of north-south bloodshed in which more than 2 million people died. But the jubilee of January was short-lived. The referendum instead signaled a new round of intra-south killings, as old warlords awoke from hibernation and new dissidents gathered strength.
The rebels are not just driven by opportunism. If the new southern government wants peace, it will have to solve some fundamental divisions. First among them: the government’s domination by the south’s largest tribe, the Dinka. Bapiny Monituel, a beefy, boyish-faced general who joined Athor earlier this month, says that after the 2005 peace deal, he joined the northern army rather than the SPLA because he is Nuer. “Everything [in the south] is controlled by the Dinka. They don’t want us to come to power.”
