Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
By Nick Turse
Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/ ;
Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one of
the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of
generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly
wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in (it's
generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for
us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed an
act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war
zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with
dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or
for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with
them.
I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of Nick
Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and
Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its memorable initial
paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read it all over again:
"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 curtain, 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 on the ground. Three or four men were watching."
Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to
small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had
experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his second
trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he
found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war
crimes were being committed right then and there in a commonplace way, where
violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were almost
guaranteed to be around the next corner. In his new book, he brings us with
him into such a world in a way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author
of They Were Soldiers, calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And
she adds, "Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's
no glory here in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in
this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition of an
act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip to South
Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing brutalities and
incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
Donald Trump in South Sudan
What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
By Nick Turse
LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white
sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is a relief
since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I'm
thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people I
spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down, the woman whose teenage
daughter was shot and killed, the woman with 10 mouths to feed and no money,
the glassy-eyed soldier with the AK-47.
Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the traditional
wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral footprints of homes set
aflame by armed raiders who swept through in successive waves, the remnants
of a town that has ceased to exist.
And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered skulls
and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make sense of
it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to jump into if
the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in the world,"
someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, for this
hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by the name of
Leer.
A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid worker,
an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to fetch his
dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about the men who
torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered civilians,
abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted and pillaged and
stole.
Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to tell me
everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how Trump is
tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the things Trump
says about women and immigrants.
Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at any
time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape. ("They
could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll hear the
women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the day.) Here,
where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs -- to know if Donald
Trump could actually be elected president of the United States. "I'm really
afraid," he says of the prospect without a hint of irony.
Of Midwifery and Militias
After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth" of the
Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now Secretary of State
John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to win their independence it
took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the first of which raged from 1955 to
1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005, leaving millions dead and displaced.
Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in
Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as the new
nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in aid,
including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security
assistance.
The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011 and
just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an
estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting
President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's largest tribe, the Dinka,
against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in July
2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the
current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's forces
in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas
and other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread,
splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
return to the government has been unable to halt.
The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of local
populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the wholesale
destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled with
noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015. Militias
allied with the government, in coordination with Kiir's troops -- the Sudan
People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the town and nearby villages
again and again. Rebel forces fled in the face of the government onslaught.
Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring for
children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that they
would be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes that
were then set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken away as sex
slaves. Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby
swamps, tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps, eating
water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted yet again
by pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager belongings they had
left, sometimes the very clothes off children's backs.
This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet here in
Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get away from Donald
Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans, Canadians, Europeans -- seemed
to want to talk about him. Even in this ruined shell of a town, Trump was
big news.
The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World
Back in Juba, I settle down in the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday
morning to read the Daily Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about
the dire economic straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's
breeding, as well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then
there's this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
Men."
A fair number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him. "He
mixes it up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At least he
speaks his mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do not want to
hear," said another. I heard such comments in Juba and beyond. It leaves
you with the impression that if his campaign hits rough shoals in the U.S.,
Trump might still have a political future in South Sudan. After all, this
is a country currently led by a brash, cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla
who mixes it up and is certainly not afraid to speak his mind even when it
comes to threatening members of the press with death.
Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war crimes,
Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only threatened to
weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it easier to sue, not
kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem like-minded on a number of
issues. Kiir's government, for example, is implicated in all manner of
atrocities, including torture, which Trump has shown an eagerness to employ
as a punishment in Washington's war on terror. Trump has also expressed a
willingness to target not only those deemed terrorists, but also their
families. Kiir's forces have done just that, attacking noncombatants
suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, as they did during the sack of
Leer.
So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported that
Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the official
statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the U.S.
presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working, no-nonsense
American who, when he becomes president, will support South Sudan in its
democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the world newest nations [sic],
is also looking forward to Donald Trump's support and investment in almost
all the sectors." Trump, said the Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the
endorsement and said he will send his top aides to the country to discuss
further the investment opportunities."
It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a local
satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose tagline is
"Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune was fooled by the
story is not as strange as it might first seem. As journalist Jason
Patinkin observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is such that many Africa
watchers and journalists found the story plausible."
I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The title
told me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I almost
wondered what had taken him so long to reach out. But South Sudan's foreign
ministry assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the story] whatsoever."
For now, at least.
Will He Win?
There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan. The
conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again and
again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and alliances
have formed while others broke down. Commanders switch sides, militias
change allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang,
the rebel army's spokesman, called out the SPLA for "committing crimes
against humanity." Kiir, he said, had lost control of his forces and had
become little more than a puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul
split from Machar to form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an
organization that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job,
as the spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to
defend SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote in a
Facebook post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar himself has
just recently returned to Juba to serve as first vice-president to Kiir.
In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly surprising
that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a
peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one of the spots where
atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the conflict.
More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it's spawned,
along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously peaceful areas
of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now
supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven
increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled
across the border into Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's
Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid
worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and
the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that, like many other
foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an American
take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the
larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan, has
the ability to suck the air out of any room.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath an
obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not authorized
by his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds incredulously,
"He says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president?
Really?!"
A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long,
sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for
answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute hunger
ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that
are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses
that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay her hands on a
sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best
to explain seething white male anger in America over "economic
disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left behind," over Donald
Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage." I'm disgusted even
articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people
whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America's wealth is
unimaginable here.
Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when
armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into such
a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child's
hand as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep
for her to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented,
spinning in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's
slipped beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.
And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters
"that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense of
it or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and
so enthralled with Donald Trump.
The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he says
those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
candidate?"
How to respond? I'm at a loss.
"If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's had," he
says.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
influence would be good for the world.
It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even as
I'm revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors of Leer,
I'm still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point. I'm
talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean
for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to be out in the thick of it, in
this or some other desperate place, and he's obviously worried about what
the foreign policy of Donald Trump's America is going to mean for him, for
Africa, for the world.
I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So is he
going to win?" he asks me.
I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was going
to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk Trump
anymore. I don't have any answers.
My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't happen, can
it?"
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for the
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a contributing
writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to
Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is
NickTurse.com. Reporting for this story was made possible through the
generous support of Lannan Foundation.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
Tomgram: Nick Turse, It Can't Happen Here, Can It?
By Nick Turse
Posted on May 3, 2016, Printed on May 4, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135/ ;
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: The newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's
riveting reportorial trip into a war-crimes zone, Next Time They'll Come to
Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan, is now officially out. I
can't tell you how proud I am that we're publishing such a personal and
unsettling work. It's powerful and -- believe me -- unforgettable. Noam
Chomsky writes of it: "A vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced
with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors." Adam
Hochschild calls it "searing reporting." I simply call it moving and
horrifying. As always, with Nick's books, for a contribution of $100 or more
($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy
and in the process help ensure that more Dispatch Books appear in the world.
Check our donation page for the details. Above all, I urge every TomDispatch
reader to buy a copy, if not for yourself, then for someone else (maybe that
college student you know who might someday be the next great investigative
reporter). Help make the latest Dispatch Book a genuine success.
With that in mind, I've asked Haymarket Books, the fantastic publisher of
our imprint, to offer TD readers a discount on it. Here's all you have to
do: click on this link, which will take you to the Haymarket website. Then
click "add to cart," select the number of books you want, and click on
"checkout." After you've filled out your shipping and billing information,
you will be asked to enter a "coupon code." To purchase one book, enter
TURSE25 and you'll get 25% off the cover price; for five or more books,
enter TURSE40 and you'll get 40% off. Tom]
Every now and then, I teach a class to young would-be journalists and one of
the first things I talk about is why I consider writing an act of
generosity. As they are usually just beginning to stretch their writerly
wings, their task, as I see it, is to enter the world we're already in (it's
generally the only place they can afford to go) and somehow decode it for
us, make us see it in a new way. And who can deny that doing so is indeed an
act of generosity? But for the foreign correspondent, especially in war
zones, the generosity lies in the very act of entering a world filled with
dangers, a world that the rest of us might not be capable of entering, or
for that matter brave enough to enter, and somehow bringing us along with
them.
I thought about this recently when I had in my hands the first copy of Nick
Turse's new Dispatch Book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and
Survival in South Sudan, and flipped it open to its memorable initial
paragraph, one I already new well, and began to read it all over again:
"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 curtain, 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 on the ground. Three or four men were watching."
Nick, TomDispatch's managing editor and a superb historian as well as
reporter, spent years in a war-crimes zone of the past to produce his
award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in
Vietnam. It was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to
small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had
experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his second
trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he
found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war
crimes were being committed right then and there in a commonplace way, where
violence was the coin of the realm, and horrors of various sorts were almost
guaranteed to be around the next corner. In his new book, he brings us with
him into such a world in a way that is deeply memorable. Ann Jones, author
of They Were Soldiers, calls him "the wandering scribe of war crimes." And
she adds, "Reading Turse will turn your view of war upside down... There's
no glory here in Turse's pages, but the clear voices of people caught up in
this fruitless cruelty, speaking for themselves."
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead is, I think, the definition of an
act of generosity. Nick has just returned from his latest trip to South
Sudan and today's post gives you a sense of the ongoing brutalities and
incongruities of life there (and here as well). Tom
Donald Trump in South Sudan
What Trumps the Horrors of a Hellscape? The Donald!
By Nick Turse
LEER, South Sudan -- I'm sitting in the dark, sweating. The blinding white
sun has long since set, but it's still in the high 90s, which is a relief
since it was above 110 earlier. Slumped in a blue plastic chair, I'm
thinking back on the day, trying to process everything I saw, the people I
spoke with: the woman whose home was burned down, the woman whose teenage
daughter was shot and killed, the woman with 10 mouths to feed and no money,
the glassy-eyed soldier with the AK-47.
Then there were the scorched ruins: the wrecked houses, the traditional
wattle-and-daub tukuls without roofs, the spectral footprints of homes set
aflame by armed raiders who swept through in successive waves, the remnants
of a town that has ceased to exist.
And, of course, there were the human remains: a field of scattered skulls
and femurs and ribs and pelvises and spinal columns.
And I'm sitting here -- spent, sweaty, stinking -- trying to make sense of
it all about 10 feet from a sandbagged bunker I'm supposed to jump into if
the shooting starts again. "It's one of the worse places in the world,"
someone had assured me before I left South Sudan's capital, Juba, for this
hellscape of burnt-out buildings and unburied bones that goes by the name of
Leer.
A lantern on a nearby table casts a dim glow on an approaching aid worker,
an African with a deep knowledge of this place. He's come to fetch his
dinner. I'm hoping to corral him and pick his brain about the men who
torched this town, burned people alive, beat and murdered civilians,
abducted, raped, and enslaved women and children, looted and pillaged and
stole.
Before I can say a word, he beats me to the punch with his own set of
rapid-fire questions: "This man called Trump -- what's going on with him?
Who's voting for him? Are you voting for him?" He then proceeds to tell me
everything he's heard about the Republican frontrunner -- how Trump is
tarnishing America's global image, how he can't believe the things Trump
says about women and immigrants.
Here, where catastrophic food insecurity may tip into starvation at any
time, where armed men still arrive in the night to steal and rape. ("They
could come any night. You might even hear them tonight. You'll hear the
women screaming," another aid worker told me earlier in the day.) Here,
where horrors abound, this man wants -- seemingly needs -- to know if Donald
Trump could actually be elected president of the United States. "I'm really
afraid," he says of the prospect without a hint of irony.
Of Midwifery and Militias
After decades of effort, the United States "helped midwife the birth" of the
Republic of South Sudan, according to then-Senator, now Secretary of State
John Kerry. In reality, for the South Sudanese to win their independence it
took two brutal conflicts with Sudan, the first of which raged from 1955 to
1972, and the second from 1983 to 2005, leaving millions dead and displaced.
Still, it is true that for more than 20 years, a bipartisan coalition in
Washington and beyond championed the southern rebels, and that, as the new
nation broke away from Sudan, the U.S. poured in billions of dollars in aid,
including hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security
assistance.
The world's youngest nation, South Sudan gained its independence in 2011 and
just two and a half years later plunged into civil war. Since then, an
estimated 50,000 to 300,000 people have been killed in a conflict pitting
President Salva Kiir, a member of the country's largest tribe, the Dinka,
against Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer and the vice president he sacked in July
2013. That December, a fight between Dinka and Nuer troops set off the
current crisis, which then turned into a slaughter of Nuers by Kiir's forces
in Juba. Reprisals followed as Machar's men took their revenge on Dinkas and
other non-Nuers in towns like Bor and Bentiu. The conflict soon spread,
splintering into local wars within the larger war and birthing other
violence that even a peace deal signed last August and Machar's recent
return to the government has been unable to halt.
The signature feature of this civil war has been its preferred target:
civilians. It has been marked by massacres, mass rape, sexual slavery,
assaults of every sort, extrajudicial killings, forced displacement of local
populations, disappearances, abductions, torture, mutilations, the wholesale
destruction of villages, pillaging, looting, and a host of other crimes.
Again and again, armed men have fallen upon towns and villages filled with
noncombatants. That's exactly what happened to Leer in 2015. Militias allied
with the government, in coordination with Kiir's troops -- the Sudan
People's Liberation Army, or SPLA -- attacked the town and nearby villages
again and again. Rebel forces fled in the face of the government onslaught.
Fearing execution, many men fled as well. Women stayed behind, caring for
children, the sick, and the elderly. There was an assumption that they would
be spared. They weren't. Old men were killed in their homes that were then
set ablaze. Women were gang raped. Others were taken away as sex slaves.
Whole villages were razed. Survivors were chased into the nearby swamps,
tracked down, and executed. Children drowned in the chaos.
Those who lived through it spent months in those waterlogged swamps, eating
water lily bulbs. When they returned home, they were confronted yet again by
pitiless armed men who, at gunpoint, took what meager belongings they had
left, sometimes the very clothes off children's backs.
This is a story that ought to be told and told and retold. And yet here in
Leer, like everywhere I went in South Sudan, I couldn't get away from Donald
Trump. So many -- South Sudanese, Americans, Canadians, Europeans -- seemed
to want to talk about him. Even in this ruined shell of a town, Trump was
big news.
The "Endorsement" Heard Round the World
Back in Juba, I settle down in the shade of my hotel's bar on a Saturday
morning to read the Daily Vision. In that newspaper, there's a story about
the dire economic straits the country finds itself in and the violence it's
breeding, as well as one about violations of the 2015 peace pact. And then
there's this gem of a headline: "Nobody Likes Donald Trump. Not Even White
Men."
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20A fair
number of South Sudanese men I ran into, however, did like him. "He mixes it
up," one told me, lauding Trump's business acumen. "At least he speaks his
mind. He's not afraid to say things that people do not want to hear," said
another. I heard such comments in Juba and beyond. It leaves you with the
impression that if his campaign hits rough shoals in the U.S., Trump might
still have a political future in South Sudan. After all, this is a country
currently led by a brash, cowboy-hat-wearing former guerrilla who mixes it
up and is certainly not afraid to speak his mind even when it comes to
threatening members of the press with death.
Compared to Kiir, who stands accused by the United Nations of war crimes,
Trump looks tame indeed. The Republican candidate has only threatened to
weaken First Amendment protections in order to make it easier to sue, not
kill, reporters. Still, the two leaders do seem like-minded on a number of
issues. Kiir's government, for example, is implicated in all manner of
atrocities, including torture, which Trump has shown an eagerness to employ
as a punishment in Washington's war on terror. Trump has also expressed a
willingness to target not only those deemed terrorists, but also their
families. Kiir's forces have done just that, attacking noncombatants
suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, as they did during the sack of
Leer.
So it didn't come as a surprise when, in March, the Sudan Tribune -- a
popular Paris-based website covering South Sudan and Sudan -- reported that
Salva Kiir had endorsed Trump. It even provided readers with the official
statement issued by Kiir's office after his phone call with the U.S.
presidential candidate: "Donald Trump is a true, hard-working, no-nonsense
American who, when he becomes president, will support South Sudan in its
democratic path and stability. South Sudan, the world newest nations [sic],
is also looking forward to Donald Trump's support and investment in almost
all the sectors." Trump, said the Tribune, "expressed his thanks for the
endorsement and said he will send his top aides to the country to discuss
further the investment opportunities."
It turned out, however, that the Tribune had been taken in by a local
satirical news site, Saakam -- the Onion of South Sudan -- whose tagline is
"Breaking news like it never happened." That the Tribune was fooled by the
story is not as strange as it might first seem. As journalist Jason Patinkin
observed in Quartz, "Kiir's reputation is such that many Africa watchers and
journalists found the story plausible."
I, for one, hadn't even bothered to read the Tribune article. The title told
me all I needed to know. It sounded like classic Kiir. I almost wondered
what had taken him so long to reach out. But South Sudan's foreign ministry
assured Patinkin, "There is no truth to [the story] whatsoever."
For now, at least.
Will He Win?
There's a fever-dream, schizophrenic quality to the war in South Sudan. The
conflict began in an orgy of violence, then ebbed, only to flare again and
again. As the war has ground on, new groups have emerged, and alliances have
formed while others broke down. Commanders switch sides, militias change
allegiances. In 2014, for example, Brigadier General Lul Ruai Koang, the
rebel army's spokesman, called out the SPLA for "committing crimes against
humanity." Kiir, he said, had lost control of his forces and had become
little more than a puppet of his Ugandan backers. Last year, Lul split from
Machar to form the "South Sudan Resistance Movement/Army" -- an organization
that attracted few followers. This year, he found a new job, as the
spokesman for the military he once cast as criminal. "I promise to defend
SPLA in Media Warfare until the last drop of blood," he wrote in a Facebook
post after being tapped by Kiir. Of course, Machar himself has just recently
returned to Juba to serve as first vice-president to Kiir.
In a country like this, enmeshed in a war like this, it's hardly surprising
that ceasefires have meant little and violence has ground on even after a
peace deal was signed last August. Leer was just one of the spots where
atrocities continued despite the pact that "ended" the conflict.
More recently, the war -- or rather the various sub-conflicts it's spawned,
along with other armed violence -- has spread to previously peaceful areas
of the country. Cattle-raiding, a long-standing cultural practice, now
supercharged by modern weaponry and military-style tactics, has proven
increasingly lethal to communities nationwide, and has recently even bled
across the border into Ethiopia. A South Sudanese raid into that country's
Gambela region last month killed 208 Ethiopians, and the attackers abducted
108 women and children while stealing more than 2,000 head of cattle.
While in Leer, I do end up talking at length with the Trump-intrigued aid
worker about local cattle-raiding, as well as the killings, the rapes, and
the widespread looting. I was always, however, aware that, like many other
foreign aid workers and locals I meet, what he really wanted was an American
take on the man presently dominating U.S. politics, an explanation of the
larger-than-life and stranger-than-life figure who, even in South Sudan, has
the ability to suck the air out of any room.
"This Trump. He's a crazy man!" he tells me as we sit together beneath an
obsidian sky now thick with stars. He reminds me that he's not authorized by
his employer to speak on the record. I nod. Then he adds incredulously, "He
says some things and you wonder: Are you going to be president? Really?!"
A couple of other people are around us now, eating dinner after a long,
sweltering day. They, too, join in the conversation, looking to me for
answers. I find myself at a loss. Here, in this place of acute hunger
ever-teetering on the brink of famine, here, a short walk from homes that
are little more than hovels, where children go naked, women wear dresses
that are essentially rags, and a mother's dream is to lay her hands on a
sheet of plastic to provide protection from the coming rains, I do my best
to explain seething white male anger in America over "economic
disenfranchisement," "losing out," and being "left behind," over Donald
Trump's channeling of "America's economic rage." I'm disgusted even
articulating these sentiments after spending the day speaking to people
whose suffering is as unfathomable in America as America's wealth is
unimaginable here.
Some of Leer's women fled with their children into the nearby swamps when
armed men swept in. Imagine running blind, in the black of night, into such
a swamp. Imagine tripping, falling, losing your grip on a small child's hand
as shots ring out. Imagine that child stumbling into water too deep for her
to stand. Imagine slapping frantically at that water, disoriented, spinning
in the darkness, desperate to find a child who can't swim, who's slipped
beneath the surface, who is suddenly gone.
And now imagine me trying to talk about the worries of Trump supporters
"that their kids won't have a chance to get ahead."
I really don't want to say any more. I don't want to try to make sense of it
or try to explain why so many Americans are so enraged at their lot and so
enthralled with Donald Trump.
The aid worker lets me off the hook with another assessment of the
Republican candidate. "Things he says, they are very awkward. When he says
those things, you think: He's crazy. How can he be a presidential
candidate?"
How to respond? I'm at a loss.
"If he wins the election, America will not have the influence it's had," he
says.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing, I counter. Maybe not having such
influence would be good for the world.
It's the truth. It also completely misses the point. Even here, even as I'm
revolted by talking about America's "problems" amid the horrors of Leer, I'm
still looking at things from a distinctly American vantage point. I'm
talking about theoretically diminished U.S. power and what that might mean
for the planet, but come 2017 he's going to be out in the thick of it, in
this or some other desperate place, and he's obviously worried about what
the foreign policy of Donald Trump's America is going to mean for him, for
Africa, for the world.
I go silent. He goes silent. Another aid worker has been listening in,
piping up intermittently between mouthfuls of rice and goat meat. "So is he
going to win?" he asks me.
I look over at him and half-shrug. Everyone, I say, thought Trump was going
to flame out long ago. And I stop there. I'm too spent to talk Trump
anymore. I don't have any answers.
My companion looks back at me and breaks his silence. "It can't happen, can
it?"
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has written for the
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation, and is a contributing
writer for the Intercept. His latest book is Next Time They'll Come to Count
the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com.
Reporting for this story was made possible through the generous support of
Lannan Foundation.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Nick Turse
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176135
