Next time they'll come to count the dead: war and survival in South Sudan

162 Pages·2016·5.158 MB·English

by  Turse, Nick

Reporting from the front lines of an unfolding tragedy, award-winning journal- N For six weeks in the spring of 2015, award-
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ist Nick Turse recounts the dramatic, true stories of men and women trapped winning journalist Nick Turse traveled on
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in the grip of South Sudan’s ongoing civil war. T foot as well as by car, SUV, and helicopter

T around war-torn South Sudan talking to mili-
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Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead isn’t about combat; it’s about M tary officers and child soldiers, U.N. officials
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the human condition, about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary cir- E and humanitarian workers, civil servants, civ-

cumstances, and about life, death, and the crimes of war in the newest T il society activists, and internally displaced
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nation on earth. persons—people whose lives had been
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Y blown apart by a ceaseless conflict there. In
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L fast-paced and dramatic fashion, Turse re-
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“A vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced with rays of hope and cour- veals the harsh reality of modern warfare in
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age and dignity amidst the horrors.” O the developing world and the ways people
—Noam Chomsky M manage to survive the unimaginable.
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“Nick Turse, alone among war reporters, is the wandering scribe of war T “Nick Turse’s searing reporting in this book
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NICK TURSE is the managing editor of Tom- crimes. Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down. In South Su- War and Survival in South Sudan brings alive the suffering of a country that

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Dispatch.com, a contributing writer report- dan, troops run amok, desperate civilians shelter in squalid U.N. camps, the United States, midwife to its birth, has
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ing on national security and foreign policy and international officials fail to record evidence of atrocities, while military U largely forgotten.”
for the Intercept, and a fellow at the Nation and political bigwigs battle for power at the cost of their country. There’s no N —Adam Hochschild,
Institute. His previous books include Tomor- glory here in Turse’s pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in this T author of King Leopold’s Ghost

row’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves.” T
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Ops in Africa and Kill Anything That Moves: —Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers E
The Real American War in Vietnam. His writ- D
ing has appeared in the New York Times, Los “Turse gives a sobering account of the horrific crimes against ordinary peo- E
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Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, the ple that define South Sudan’s conflict. He shows how efforts to count the
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Nation, Village Voice, and many other publi- dead, investigate the crimes, and bring perpetrators to justice have so
cations. He has received a Ridenhour Prize far failed. His compelling account reminds us why accountability is both
for Investigative Reporting, a James Aronson urgent and necessary.”
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Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a —Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch ic
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Guggenheim Fellowship. T
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Current Affairs & Politics NICK TURSE
$15.95
Dispatch Books
A Dispatch Books project
Haymarket Books
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Next Time They’ll Come
to Count the Dead
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Next Time They’ll Come
to Count the Dead
War and Survival in South Sudan
Nick Turse
Dispatch Books
Haymarket Books
Chicago, Illinois
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© 2016 Nick Turse
Published in 2016 by
Haymarket Books
P.O. Box 180165
Chicago, IL 60618
773-583-7884
www.haymarketbooks.org
[email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-60846-648-1
Trade distribution:
In the US, Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com
In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca
In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com
All other countries, Publishers Group Worldwide, www.pgw.com
This book was published with the generous support of Lannan Foundation
and Wallace Action Fund.
Cover design by Eric Kerl. Cover image of a tank encountered on the side
of the road between Juba and Bor, South Sudan, February 26, 2015. Photo
by and courtesy of Nick Turse.
Printed in Canada by union labor.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.
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Contents
A More Personal War 1
Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead:
War and Survival in South Sudan 9
Afterword 117
Acknowledgments 125
Notes 129
Index 143
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A More Personal War
Their voices, sharp and angry, shook me from my slumber. I
didn’t know the language, but I instantly knew the translation. So
I groped for the opening in the mosquito net, shuffled from my
downy white bed to the window, threw back the stained tan cur-
tain, and squinted into the light of a new day breaking in South
Sudan. Below, in front of my guest house, one man was getting his
ass kicked by another. A flurry of blows connected with his face
and suddenly he was crumpled on the ground. Three or four men
were watching.
The victor, still standing, appeared strong and confident. His
sinewy arms seemed to have been carved from obsidian. Having
won in decisive fashion, he turned his back and began walking
away with a self-satisfied swagger. The other man staggered to his
feet, his face contorted with a ragged, wounded-animal look—the
one that seems to begin as an electric ache at the back of your
jaw, drawing your lips back into a grimace as tears well up in
your eyes. And what he did next seemed straight out of a movie.
I couldn’t believe I was seeing it.
The vast, rutted dirt field below me was filled with trash: half-
burned water bottles, empty soda cans—and glass. And that furious
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2 Nick Turse
man promptly did what I had previously only seen on screen. He
grabbed a bottle by the neck—it might already have been broken or
he might have shattered off the bottom with a quick rap on a rock—
and in an instant he had himself an equalizer.
The ass-kicker spun around to find the tables turned and he
knew it. The man with the bottle knew it, too. He was shouting
and jabbing, though he wasn’t actually close enough to do any
damage. Nonetheless, with fear spreading across his face, the ass-
kicker backpedaled, still talking loud but unmistakably in retreat.
It seemed clear enough that the man with the bottle didn’t
really have it in him to punch that jagged glass through the other’s
taut skin. His fury seemed to fade fast and he didn’t press his ad-
vantage. Or maybe he was just afraid of what might happen if
he were disarmed. Whatever the reason, cooler heads prevailed.
The onlookers got him to drop his weapon and the combatants
walked off in opposite directions. It was over, even if nothing else
was in South Sudan.
At one point, as the two fought, I glanced back at the bed
where my cell phone lay and nearly fetched it. The impulse to
shoot a few pictures or some video footage of the unfolding scene
was powerful and hardly surprising since I come from a culture
now built around documenting and sharing even the most mun-
dane happenings.
I didn’t move, in part because I had no idea what was going
on. If I recorded it, what then? What accompanying story could
I tell? I knew that, short of one man killing the other, it was un-
likely that anyone would be around by the time I threw on my
clothes and got downstairs. Real-life fights rarely last long. And
what, even if they spoke English, were these men going to tell me?
Would I write about a personal skirmish over money or a woman
or some drunken insult?
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A More Personal War 3
Thinking about it later, I came to see the episode as a meta-
phor for my situation. It was the summer of 2014 and the dawn
of my first full day on my initial trip to South Sudan. I was there
to get an on-the-ground look at a failing nation in the midst of
a months-old civil war; a complex, partly tribal conflict that, in
some ways, boiled down to a backyard fight between two men.
And frankly, as with the morning struggle I had just witnessed, I
had little idea of what was going on. Sure, I’d talked to humanitar-
ian experts and South Sudanese in the United States. I’d read news
articles and substantive reports by the United Nations, Human
Rights Watch, and others. On the flight over, I’d finished a very
good book on the country and a couple marginally useful ones
before that, but I couldn’t have been more of a neophyte stand-
ing there in the capital of a new nation, convulsed by a conflict
that had already killed more than 10,000 people and left millions
homeless or displaced.
Still, I came with a history that seemed suited to the situ-
ation. I’d spent parts of the previous decade wandering around
post-conflict countries in Southeast Asia, unearthing evidence of
horrendous crimes committed by the United States and its allies.
I had traveled to remote Vietnamese villages no American had
visited since my country’s combat there ended in 1973, hamlets
where the villagers might never have met an unarmed Western-
er. I talked to people about rapes and murders and massacres,
largely by American troops. I interviewed them about living for
years under bombs and artillery shells and helicopter gunships
that hunted humans from the sky. I spoke with women and men
who saw their families cut down by American teenagers with
automatic rifles. I talked with those who had lost limbs or eyes
or were scorched by napalm or white phosphorous—incendiary
weapons that melted faces or left the victims with imperfectly
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