"Hatred will never cease by hatred."
-Maha Ghosananda
Reading of the continued tribal/ethnic violence that has been wracking the newly independent nation of South Sudan in the last weeks; marauding groups of heavily armed warriors, seeking "retribution" through the barrel of a gun, pillaging, killing, stealing. My immediate intellectual response is to investigate: whose interests are really being served by these actions? Are there greater manipulations occurring at the hands of elites? Who is benefiting and who is losing from these actions? Though this might seem straightforward, there are often hidden and deeply powerful motives being served by violence; I do not believe that this case is an exception.
What these motives are, I am not certain, my only sources of information are Al Jazeera and the BBC; their inherent biases must also be taken into consideration; their lack of contact with villagers, embedding with national army units and UN units who have their own interests in the conflict, whether that be in prolonging it for self-perpetuation, or in ending it in the name of national and international harmonization. Thus, we must analyze the motives, the elite and organizational interests at play in this new struggle, while be careful not to overlook the most obvious explanations, which, in the wise words of the past, are often correct.
What manifests here is multi-faceted; as a result of decades of war and Western/Chinese/Malaysian/Indian involvement (no guns are manufactured, to the best of my knowledge, in South Sudan) there is a proliferation of arms in this nation, where traditional tribal justice and conflict is historically consistent and significant, but has not resulted in the widespread death rates of the modern era due to the modern arms now involved. We have a new nation state, struggling to define its own international borders, facing an increasingly hostile Khartoum. We have widespread poverty, illiteracy, one of the poorest regions on the face of the earth. We have international interest in mineral resources that are found in multitude under the soils of this new nation state. But we also have a deeper ethos that needs to be examined, an ethos of violence, of the acceptance of violence as a legitimate means of conflict resolution, the vicious cycle of this violence, I am sure comprehended, but not heard, not heeded; this circle, this cycle of violence requires a definite end point, a clean break in the wheel, or it will continue to manifest, to perpetuate itself into the future, with devastating results for those who are always affected the most by conflict; the most vulnerable, the citizens caught in the crossfire.
What creates an ethos of violence, of violent, seemingly disproportionate, response? This is cultural, historical, as well as a factor that has been manipulated by outside players for centuries in their own vested interests; where this cycle stops, where visionary, non-violent leadership takes control of a situation and charts a new path into the future, is yet to be determined, obviously complicated by the fact that the national leader was, in fact, the rebel army commander, and that these messages of peace require information infrastructure to be disseminated, which is sorely lacking in this newborn nation.
What lies ahead is unknown.
-Maha Ghosananda
Reading of the continued tribal/ethnic violence that has been wracking the newly independent nation of South Sudan in the last weeks; marauding groups of heavily armed warriors, seeking "retribution" through the barrel of a gun, pillaging, killing, stealing. My immediate intellectual response is to investigate: whose interests are really being served by these actions? Are there greater manipulations occurring at the hands of elites? Who is benefiting and who is losing from these actions? Though this might seem straightforward, there are often hidden and deeply powerful motives being served by violence; I do not believe that this case is an exception.
What these motives are, I am not certain, my only sources of information are Al Jazeera and the BBC; their inherent biases must also be taken into consideration; their lack of contact with villagers, embedding with national army units and UN units who have their own interests in the conflict, whether that be in prolonging it for self-perpetuation, or in ending it in the name of national and international harmonization. Thus, we must analyze the motives, the elite and organizational interests at play in this new struggle, while be careful not to overlook the most obvious explanations, which, in the wise words of the past, are often correct.
What manifests here is multi-faceted; as a result of decades of war and Western/Chinese/Malaysian/Indian involvement (no guns are manufactured, to the best of my knowledge, in South Sudan) there is a proliferation of arms in this nation, where traditional tribal justice and conflict is historically consistent and significant, but has not resulted in the widespread death rates of the modern era due to the modern arms now involved. We have a new nation state, struggling to define its own international borders, facing an increasingly hostile Khartoum. We have widespread poverty, illiteracy, one of the poorest regions on the face of the earth. We have international interest in mineral resources that are found in multitude under the soils of this new nation state. But we also have a deeper ethos that needs to be examined, an ethos of violence, of the acceptance of violence as a legitimate means of conflict resolution, the vicious cycle of this violence, I am sure comprehended, but not heard, not heeded; this circle, this cycle of violence requires a definite end point, a clean break in the wheel, or it will continue to manifest, to perpetuate itself into the future, with devastating results for those who are always affected the most by conflict; the most vulnerable, the citizens caught in the crossfire.
What creates an ethos of violence, of violent, seemingly disproportionate, response? This is cultural, historical, as well as a factor that has been manipulated by outside players for centuries in their own vested interests; where this cycle stops, where visionary, non-violent leadership takes control of a situation and charts a new path into the future, is yet to be determined, obviously complicated by the fact that the national leader was, in fact, the rebel army commander, and that these messages of peace require information infrastructure to be disseminated, which is sorely lacking in this newborn nation.
