Why Riek Machar’s trial brings ‘existentially high’ stakes for South Sudan

The embattled first vice president and opposition leader of South Sudan, Riek Machar, was welcomed into a barred holding cell as he was led into a barred holding cell in a courtroom converted to an events hall in mid-October, betraying both the seriousness of the charges against him and the country’s immense stakes.

In September, Machar and 20 co-defendants from his Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army-in-Opposition (SPLM/A-IO) party were indicted on charges of terrorism, treason, and crimes against humanity for their alleged role in a March attack on a military garrison that the government says killed more than 250 soldiers.

The SPLM-IO has called the accusations “baseless” and “politically motivated,” while Machar has refuted them.

As more than 1, 000 people streamed into the venue to watch the proceedings – which began in late September and have been open to the public – several observers told Al Jazeera they were concerned by what they saw as the government’s weaponisation of the justice system to sideline President Salva Kiir’s chief political rival. They warned that the trial would exacerbate the violence already roiling rural communities across the nation and would cause the violence to grow even more severe.

“This is a political trial. Lincoln Simon, a 37-year-old nonprofit director who claims he has been to every session out of a sense of civic duty, claimed that the state is using the court to prosecute its opponents. He thinks Machar is being scapegoated to hide broader government failures, like spiralling inflation. Our leaders have failed, and they are now looking for someone to blame them.

William Tong, 62, a retired factory worker, is a longtime supporter of Machar’s opposition party who has also been attending the proceedings. He continued, “We are watching this trial to see whether or not this is a country run by the rule of law,” adding that he is keeping an open mind but hasn’t yet seen compelling evidence. “The people are eager to see evidence. We may be persuaded, but we are still in the process.

Others, like James Majok, support the trial. According to Makok, the trial’s proponents and opponents have been divided into their respective groups in his hometown of Aweil, which is located about 780 kilometers (500 miles) north of Juba. For Majok, it is a first step towards broader accountability for public officials.

The 37-year-old added that defendants should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, adding that “anyone that is accused should be tried should be tried.” “Our hope is that this is the first but not the last. Everyone should be subject to the law.

The three men, like other members of the public who spoke to Al Jazeera about the trial, provided a pseudonym out of fear for their safety. Joseph Geng Akech, the justice minister, has warned that making a statement about Machar’s and his accusers’ ongoing trial could result in court contempt.

While Machar, 73, cannot legally face the death penalty – the constitution bars capital punishment for individuals older than 70 – many of his co-defendants are eligible, and Machar faces life in prison and disqualification from holding political office.

However, according to analysts, the wider implications are likely to extend far beyond the court.

In many ways, the trial marks the end of Machar and Kiir’s decades of mistrust as they led opposing armies during a civil war that reportedly resulted in the deaths of 400, 000 people. A peace agreement brought the two men into a unity government, but its provisions have gone largely unimplemented while economic and humanitarian crises have expanded in the years since.

Many people believe that the trial has had ethnical significance, just like that war. Kiir and much of his inner circle are Dinka, the largest of the country’s 60-plus ethnic groups, while all 21 of the accused are Nuer, the second largest ethnic group. Simon thinks the trial will “divide the country along ethnic lines” in the wake of recent bloody intercommunal conflict.

The trial also comes amid renewed fighting between an array of armed groups, including Machar’s forces, government soldiers, and community-based militias across the country, prompting warnings from the United Nations and conflict monitors that the 2018 peace deal is collapsing.

According to Daniel Akech, an expert on South Sudan for the International Crisis Group, “the stakes of this trial are existentially high for South Sudan.” “If the process is not managed with extreme political care, the fallout could shatter the country’s fragile cohesion and trigger a collapse of the state”.

a conflicting character

Through decades of armed rebellion and reconciliation, Machar has become both a political institution and one of South Sudan’s most divisive figures.

Before Sudan’s independence from Sudan, Machar served as a senior commander in the rebel movement known as the charismatic US-educated economist John Garang, who had waged decades-long civil war against the country’s government.

In 1991, at 38 years old, Machar split from the SPLM and formed his own faction. He turned to Khartoum for military assistance and called Garang a “dictator,” asserting that the Dinka ethnic group dominated the movement. Garang, a Dinka, said Machar would “go down in history as the man who stabbed the movement in Southern Sudan in the back”, and many of his critics still regard him as such.

At least 2, 000 civilians were massacred in the town of Bor, a population center of Dinka close to Garang’s birthplace, in the same year. This atrocity has continued to afflict Machar’s reputation despite public reprimands.

After more than a decade, Machar reconciled with Garang – who died in a helicopter crash in 2005 – rejoined the movement, and became South Sudan’s&nbsp, vice president in 2011, the year the country gained its independence.

Two years later, the SPLM engaged in a power struggle that turned into a war. After Machar was sacked and government troops massacred more than 10, 000 Nuer civilians in Juba, Machar rebelled under the banner of a new group, the SPLM-IO, that fought a five-year war against the government. In that conflict, both sides committed numerous atrocities, often along ethnic lines. Machar framed his movement as a fight for more inclusive governance.

Machar resuming his role as the most senior vice president under the 2018 peace agreement to join a unity government.

The agreement – named the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan, or R-ARCSS – set out benchmarks intended to shepherd the country to national elections.

According to analysts and supporters of the opposition, Machar maintained what support he had left by casting himself as a democratizer and bulwark against Dinka nationalism as Juba’s politicians lost legitimacy amid persistent insecurity, economic crisis, and virtually noexistent service provision after the war.

“Machar represents the face of resistance”, said Paul Bayoch, a cultural historian and community leader from Akobo, an opposition stronghold about 550km (350 miles) from the capital. He appears to be a victim of the Juba regime today. The same suffering that people are feeling, now they see Machar being victimised in the same way”.

Although Machar’s popularity has declined over the past few years as a result of what some perceive as his abandoning the grassroots in order to pursue personal political objectives, he is still widely regarded as the face of Nuer in South Sudan and the only opposition leader with the necessary political stoke to put into action the peace agreement. His prosecution, some analysts say, has buoyed his support once again.

According to independent South Sudanese researcher Joshua Craze, Machar’s arrest has in some ways renewed his legitimacy. “I say to some extent because many people might not be willing to fight over the fact that he’s been detained. However, it could spark more extensive fighting if something bad happened to him.

A peace agreement on trial

Questions about the viability of the 2018 agreement, which is widely regarded as the glue holding the state together, are at the center of the trial.

Analysts have long criticised the peace deal for sidelining grassroots institutions and consolidating power within a small class of armed elites. Although crucial provisions, such as the formation of forces into a national army, have not been implemented, it’s supporters assert that it has slowed down conflict between the main signatories and continues to be the best path to stability.

During early sessions, Machar’s defence argued that the trial was unlawful under conditions in the peace agreement and should be stopped. According to them, the attack on the garrison was a ceasefire violation that needed to be investigated by a neutral monitoring body run by an East African bloc, as stipulated in the agreement.

According to the government, domestic law provides that the special court has jurisdiction over the alleged crimes. It says it plans to present forensic and financial evidence and call more than two dozen witnesses to show how the defendants incited and aided the attack.

However, according to several attorneys, civil society representatives, and trial observers who spoke to Al Jazeera, President Kiir is abrogating the agreement by trying Machar in a South Sudanese court.

“It is not just the defendants that are on trial, but the entire peace agreement”, said a lawyer working on Machar’s defence team, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

According to Remember Miamingi, a South Sudanese legal scholar and former advisor to the African Union’s political affairs, peace, and security department, charging Machar while he is still occupying his constitutionally recognized office of first vice president violates the agreement’s fundamental equilibrium.

He added that the effect of the government’s unilateral action could also deter opposition groups from participating in future peace talks. He said, “If former insurgents understand that participating in government exposes them to prosecution by institutions controlled by their rivals, they will rationally choose to continue fighting.”

But even as observers debate whether the peace agreement is alive or dead, relations between the government and opposition have already deteriorated into open conflict across at least half of South Sudan’s 10 states.

According to the UN, there were 59 percent more deaths from conflict between January and September than during the same time last year. Approximately 321, 000 people have been displaced by violence this year, it said, including more than 100, 000 into war-ravaged Sudan. Food security experts have warned about famine in areas that have been cut off from humanitarian aid by aerial bombardments, putting tens of thousands of people in danger of starvation.

Analysts say it’s unclear whether a guilty verdict would translate immediately to an uptick in fighting. Many of the Machar-linked opposition forces, which have recently been weakened, are already engaged in multiple fronts and may not have enough resources to commit. Yet such a verdict could still drive greater antigovernment sentiment, spur opportunistic pacts and push aggrieved community militias into the opposition fold.

New alliances between long-distance adversaries show how unpredictable South Sudan’s front lines have changed. In September, forces loyal to Machar – now under the interim leadership of deputy SPLM-IO chairman Nathaniel Oyet – entered a military alliance with the National Salvation Front, a rebel movement that rejected the 2018 peace deal and has been waging a guerrilla rebellion ever since. The two organizations have launched coordinated hit-and-run attacks on government buildings and equipment in recent months.

This month, a prominent member of the ruling SPLM, Nhial Deng Nhial, defected to form his own party, the South Sudan Salvation Movement, saying the party had “betrayed its founding ideals”. His departure may indicate that the SPLM itself is fracturing.

“The best case scenario is for the parties to restart dialogue”, said Edmund Yakani, a prominent civil society leader, in a call that has been echoed by regional leaders. In the worst case scenario, he continued, referring to the conflict that broke out between South Sudan’s northern neighbors in April 2023.

messages that are contradictory

Government officials have framed Machar’s trial as the beginning of a new chapter in South Sudan’s history, one in which no individual is above the law.

At a recent news briefing, Akech, the justice minister, stated that “this case sends a clear message.” “Those who commit atrocities against the people of South Sudan, our armed forces, or humanitarian workers will be held accountable, regardless of their position or political influence”.

Given that a large portion of South Sudan’s political elite has been implicated in the theft of billions of dollars in public funds, as well as a number of other human rights violations, as documented by UN commissions and advocacy groups, that claim seems hollow to many South Sudanese.

Others point to the long-promised but never-established hybrid court set out in the 2018 peace agreement. The African Union-led body was created to look into and punish atrocities committed during and after the war, including those committed by elected officials. Government and AU officials have blamed the delay in its formation on procedural and financial obstacles, often pointing fingers at one another.

In a report released in 2022, the UN stated that nearly universal impunity existed for sexually violent perpetrators during the civil war. A more recent UN report alleged that $1.7bn allocated for the construction of roads was unaccounted for, likely funnelled into companies linked to Second Vice President Benjamin Bol Mel, a close ally of the president.

Civil society leader Yakani remarked that the trial of Machar is “deeply hypocritical” while other officials, including the president, have never been tried in court.

“If a hybrid court is established, it will not be the]first] vice president alone who will go there”, said Simon, one of the court observers. The entire leadership will be involved.

Miamingi, the former AU adviser, called the trial “weaponised justice” and warned that it could become a motor for future ethnic strife. Without adequate accountability for Dinka political and military figures, Riek Machar’s trial runs the risk of being interpreted as ethnic reprisal through law, he said. “The result is not accountability but renewed confrontation under a legal guise”.

Succession politics

Many people interpret the trial as a political score-settling exercise that advances President Kiir, 74,’s succession plan, whose rumored health is in decline.

If Machar is convicted, he will be a felon and barred from holding political office, as stipulated by the country’s provisional constitution. Many in his camp think the trial is intended to prevent him from running in the first round of national elections to be held in the nation in 2026.

Late in 2024, Kiir began dismissing powerful officials in what some saw as an effort to clear the way for Bol Mel, a US-sanctioned businessman with close ties to the president, to assume more powerful roles in the government.

Bol Mel received his third promotion in less than a year by the president to the position of general in the national intelligence service in September.

Bol Mel, in his 40s, is also a Dinka and hails from the same region of the country as the president. Some view his swift ascendancy within the SPLM party as evidence of Kiir’s ethnic group’s power consolidation.

His rise has also divided the party itself. According to analysts, he is widely perceived as an undeserving upstart without any military experience, a trait that even the president’s camp holds holds for those who support the independence struggle and who regard themselves as the party’s legitimate heirs. Several high-ranking officials were notably absent from his swearing-in as party deputy, local media outlet Radio Tamazuj reported.

The fear of a Bol Mel presidency extends far beyond one community, according to South Sudan expert Akech. “A majority of Dinka elites, in particular, would rather not see Machar defeated if it means Bol Mel becomes president”.

Given Kiir’s track record of growing and then abruptly sacking close allies, Bol Mel may not ultimately win the presidency. Yet any course of succession runs the risk of fracturing the SPLM and triggering more widespread fighting, including in the capital.

Source: Aljazeera