After South Sudan formally seceded in July 2011, the 14-Mile Area, which had been composed of grazing, state, and district boundaries, became the area in which an international boundary would be delimited. This change has affected grazing agreements along the Northern Bahr el Ghazal–East Darfur boundary in two major ways.
The first effect is largely rhetorical, but not unimportant. The Rizeigat are hamstrung by the fact that they are not a state, and yet not simply a group.
The Malual Dinka know the Rizeigat cannot be thought of as equivalent to the NCP. During a migration conference in Gokk Machar, the MP for Aweil East, Luach Lino Nyal, said: ‘The NCP is not solving the problem of the Rizeigat, that is why you are here. If you don’t want to stay in North Sudan, you should move here, to South Sudan’.70
Though the Malual Dinka realize the Rizeigat are in a precarious situation, and not coming to migration conferences under the auspices of the NCP, they also blame them for actions carried out by the GoS and SAF. In times of ten-sion—as in December 2010 when Kiir Adem was bombed—Rizeigat herders tend to withdraw, in case they are held accountable for the actions of the GoS.71 This tendency to blame the Rizeigat for the actions of GoS dates from the second
civil war when Rizeigat militias killed and stole for the NCP. Anger among the Malual Dinka over these events was constantly referred to during grazing negotiations attended by the author.
Underlying Malual Dinka suspicions is their fear that the second civil war will be repeated. This is not just an existential fear, but also a real fear of dis-placement. This fear was evident in a Sudan Tribune op-ed on 3 December 2012, which accused ‘Arab Rizeigat sponsored by Sudanese intelligence agents’ of planting fake graves in Kiir Adem, to allow the NCP to reinforce its historical claim to the area (Sudan Tribune, 2012r). The claim itself cannot be verified, and seems highly unlikely, but the sentiments expressed in the newspaper reveal how angry the Malual Dinka still are with Sudan, and the Rizeigat.
This anger was evident in concerns over naming that were echoed all along the Southern Sudanese side of the border in 2012. Because the Malual Dinka experienced the second civil war as a dispossession of their own land, they are acutely aware of the power of names. A constant refrain from Malual Dinka leaders was that the Rizeigat had begun naming their land using Arabic words. In the grazing agreement signed in Aweil town on 20–22 January 2012, the Rizeigat are asked not to name territories inside South Sudan. Following independence, and after 50 years of feeling inferior, self-determination is also linguistic, and involves reclaiming the names of the areas of which one was dispossessed.
As elsewhere along the border, the way the Rizeigat are treated is partly determined by a powerful swell of nationalist sentiment following South Sudan’s independence. During a migration conference in Gokk Machar on 29–30 June 2012, SPLA motivational songs from the second civil war were played during breaks between negotiating rounds. Current South Sudanese nationalism has its roots in the SPLM/A civil war narrative, but is also now swelled by a feeling that what was fought over for so long has finally been achieved. The deputy governor of Northern Bahr el Ghazal, Madut Dut Yel, gave the closing speech at the conference, and addressed the international community, the Rizeigat, and the Malual Dinka.72 To the Rizeigat he said: ‘We are now a nation, whether you believe it or not and now you are foreigners, who must accept our rules’.
This was a reference to Northern hostility to Southern independence. Dut Yel then explicitly asked why the Rizeigat could not come amongst the Malual Dinka as the Kenyans and Ugandans do, without problems. In the context of
the grazing agreement, this comparison was designed to impress upon the Rizeigat the contingency of their presence in South Sudan, but it also indicated the extent to which national- and state-based understandings of foreignness have the capacity to displace what were previously inter-group understandings of the relationship between the Rizeigat and the Malual Dinka. The danger, as shall be shown below, lies in the disastrous effects this transformation could have on Malual Dinka–Rizeigat coexistence.73
This rhetorical shift towards nationalist understandings of territory has its correlation in a changing set of institutional arrangements governing Malual Dinka–Rizeigat interaction.
Since 2009, as NCP pressure on the Rizeigat has grown, attendance at migra-tion meetings has declined. The principle problem with migramigra-tion meetings, as noted by organizers,74 is that few of the Rizeigat actually turn up. The par-ticular local dynamics of these meetings will be explored below. For now, what is important to note is that this partial attendance leads to a correspond-ing lack of trust on the side of the Malual Dinka; the agreements worked out at such incomplete meetings are almost never respected.
The Rizeigat are doubly punished by the NCP: for many, it is too danger-ous, or politically impossible, to attend migration meetings in South Sudan.
On the other hand, within South Sudan, the Malual Dinka fear every Rizeigat could be a militia member or NCP agent. In this context, grazing agreements are especially fragile because what is simply an end-of-dry-season cattle raid could be interpreted as a militia attack, and a satellite phone used to commu-nicate with relatives in Southern Darfur could be thought of as a device for communicating SPLA positions to SAF.
National politics and pastoral grazing also overlap on the South Sudanese side of the border. The key institutional framework for guaranteeing grazing agreements is no longer group meetings, but gatherings of the Rizeigat and state-level political and military structures. As several MPs told the Rizeigat during the June 2012 migration meeting, the most important set of meetings before the migration season should be with the governor’s office. Then, the most fundamental determinant of grazing routes is which areas are thought of as security risks by the SPLA. Finally, Rizeigat traders say that, in addition to any fees one might pay to local and state-based government, the SPLA also levy a series of taxes when pastoralists enter South Sudan.75
The central axis on which negotiations about Rizeigat movement into South Sudan now turn is state-level security issues. This has several knock-on effects.
It means that a successful migration is less a question of delicate inter-communal arrangements, and more a function of national politics. But it also means that the Rizeigat are less formally beholden to their host communities, and that the local dynamics that previously underwrote the migratory season have been destabilized.
However, it would be incorrect to see this shift simply as a function of the imposition of a national border post-2011. Along the Northern Bahr el Ghazal–
Southern Darfur border, the move towards a SPLA-dominated set of migra-tion arrangements occurred during the second civil war.76 The framework for agreeing grazing rights since South Sudan’s independence gives a formal char-acter to this shift towards the centrality of military considerations in determining pastoralists’ routes through Northern Bahr el Ghazal.
The central role of the military is also seen in the question of disarmament.
Along the border, politicians interviewed by the author all agreed that migrants coming into Northern Bahr el Ghazal state must be disarmed. This reflects a reorientation towards ensuring that the army and police services in South Sudan have a monopoly of violence in the territory. It applies equally to civilians within South Sudanese territory.77 However, the emphasis on disarmament is particularly difficult in relation to the Rizeigat, who feel that their security cannot be guaranteed by the SPLA, which is responsible for some of the worst infrac-tions against them. While migrants entering Northern Bahr el Ghazal are checked for weapons, this is not effective.78 The complicated status of armed Rizeigat in Northern Bahr el Ghazal is made more uncertain by the accepted presence of Rizeigat members of both SPLM-N and JEM inside Northern Bahr el Ghazal, almost all of whom are armed.79