South Sudan’s Next Civil War Is Starting

Just when a peace deal seemed within reach, President Salva Kiir is threatening to plunge the country back into bloody conflict.

BY AMANDA SPERBER-JANUARY 22, 2016

JUBA, South Sudan — More than half a dozen cease-fires had been brokered and broken before opposition forces finally returned to the capital in late December as part of a deal to end South Sudan’s bloody two-year civil war. None of the previous negotiations had gotten this far. But late last year, with more than 2 million displaced, unknown thousands dead, and countless maimed and raped, advance teams representing rebel leader and former Vice President Riek Machar were back in Juba to hash out a plan with the current government to share ministries in a proposed unity cabinet.

Things were finally looking up. But just when it seemed possible to imagine an end to all the suffering, President Salva Kiir announced in a Christmas Eve broadcast that he was moving forward with a plan that could plunge the battered nation back into civil war even before the current peace agreement is implemented. Calling the country’s existing 10 states “defunct” in his broadcast, Kiir said he’d replaced them with 28 new ones. He had already appointed 28 new governors to run them, he said — all conveniently loyal to him. They were sworn in five days later.

The subdivision of South Sudan’s states was a blatant power play by Kiir, whose newly designed borders ensure powerful majorities for his Dinka tribe in strategic locations. It also imperils the peace deal his government reached with Machar’s rebels back in August, which called for a transitional government of national unity based on the existing 10 states.

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