The Origin And Politics Of The Mathiang Anyoor Dates Back to 1982 – new report

October 10, 2019 AU, IGAD, Newsbeat

SPLA Troops Chanting SPLA OYEE!! Slogan In Military Parades( File/Supplied/SSNN).

Oct 10th, 2019 (SSNN)-A new analysis released recently by the Small Arms Survey’s Human Security Baseline Assessment (HSBA) has revealed the origins of the Mathiang Anyoor, a paramilitary group that emerged in 2013 following the outbreak of the country’s brutal conflict.

The report identified the Muthiang Anyoor as mere armed cattle keepers, originally from Northern Bahr el Ghazal and whose existence can be traced back to 1983 during the second Sudanese civil war.

“The Mathiang Anyoor has its roots in the historical links between the SPLA and the Gelweng (a loose term for armed cattle keepers7) of Northern Bahr el Ghazal. During the second Sudanese civil war (1983–2005), Northern Bahr el Ghazal, which is located on the border between northern and southern Sudan was severely devastated. Consequently, large numbers of people from the heavily populated Greater Aweil area joined the then-rebel SPLA.”

In 2015, the African Union (AU) Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan (AUCISS) identified Mathiang Anyoor as one of the deadliest ethnic militia groups responsible for carrying out door-to-door ethnic cleansing against the Nuer tribe in the capital Juba and other major cities in the country.

The same AU report accused a high-ranking military officer, Paul Malong Awan of being a ringleader behind the massacre of the Nuer tribe.

Former Chief of General Staff, Paul Malong Awan.

The following statements from the Small Arms Survey outline and summarize historical links between the SPLA, Muthiang Anyoor and another infamous militia group called Gelweng.

When security deteriorated from the late 1980s into the early 1990s, the SPLA forged close ties with the gelweng, who acted as regional auxiliaries and arms carriers for the SPLA in exchange for ammunition. In part these ties were forged to coordinate defence against raids by Khartoum-armed nomadic Arabs—the ‘Murahaleen’—from across the old colonial border between northern and southern Sudan.
SPLA ties with the gelweng continued throughout the war and after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement amid ongoing tension between Juba and Khartoum. These ties included informal training of the gelweng by the SPLA at Pantit, an SPLA garrison west of Aweil on the road between Nyamlell and Marial Bai. Pantit had long been a training ground for the SPLA and for gelweng that the SPLA used informally for border security. According to several former trainees, the gelweng would bring their guns to Pantit for several weeks of basic military training and then return to their cattle camps afterwards.
This informal programme provided the SPLA with useful links to a trained community force that could act as proxies and scouts along the Sudanese border as they had during the second civil war. The true origins of the Mathiang Anyoor are unclear. One former senior military official has claimed that the Mathiang Anyoor arose out of secret negotiations within a regional security committee in Bahr el Ghazal that determined that Bahr el Ghazal needed to strengthen its position inside the SPLA.
Irrespective of the time and place of its origin, clandestine training for gelweng expanded into the training of an informal border guard force amid the border crisis over Mile 14 and South Sudan’s pending secession. This was followed by greater mobilization in Bahr el Ghazal on the heels of the brief Sudan–South Sudan border war over the disputed Heglig region. As power disputes escalated inside South Sudan’s ruling SPLM in 2013, Kiir, Malong, and other Bahr el Ghazal elites instrumentalized this force to defend Kiir’s presidency.
Mile 14 is a disputed border between Northern Bahr el Ghazal and East Darfur in Sudan; it has been a point of contention between the two countries for many years (HSBA, 2014a). Khartoum views Mile 14 as a strategic logistics corridor that the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a Darfuri opposition group benefiting from South Sudan support, uses to move across the River Kiir and into Darfur. Following clashes along Mile 14 in 2010–12, this border area remains one of the most politically sensitive among the several still-unresolved border disputes between the two countries.
The 2010–12 Mile 14 border conflict thus sparked a mobilization drive by local community elders in Northern Bahr el Ghazal. They were motivated by a desire to protect themselves from attacks by the Sudanese—or to fight for themselves in a border dispute, even without support from Juba. Recruitment centred on ‘idle’—that is, unemployed and poor— youth in Aweil, which had received many urban returnees from Khartoum upon South Sudan’s independence in July2011.13 According to several former Mathiang Anyoor fighters, these new recruits received training at Pantit (some even claimed to have been at Pantit since 2010).
In urban areas, the state authorities coerced idle youth into service, whereas in rural areas, recruitment was primarily channelled through local chiefs and community elders.