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FIRST RAISE A FLAG
PETER MARTELL
3
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by
publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison
Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
Map viii
Chronology ix
A Note on Names xi
Author’s Note xiii
Preface xv
1. Just Divorced 1
2. The Cattle Pen Commanders 17
3. The Bog Barons 37
4. A Postman and an Arrow 53
5. The Venom Rebellion 69
6. Tarzan and the Zebra Bus 79
7. The Men Too Tall for Tanks 99
8. The War of the Educated 119
9. The Man Who Fell to Earth 139
10. The Land of Kush 161
11. A Looter Continuer 181
12. The Brown Caterpillars 207
13. The Other City 231
14. The War Within Ourselves 245
15. Freedom Next Time 269
Notes 277
Acknowledgements 309
Index 311
vii
CHRONOLOGY
ix
CHRONOLOGY
1963 The First War. Anya-Nya rebellion.
1972 Peace. Addis Ababa agreement ends seventeen years of
war.
1979 Oil. Major finds announced around Bentiu. Jonglei
Canal begins.
1983 The Second War. Fighting breaks out in Bor on 16 May.
Rebels form the Sudan People’s Liberation Army,
SPLA.
1989 President Omar al-Bashir seizes power in military
coup.
1991 South–South War. Mengistu falls and SPLA flee
Ethiopia; the rebels splinter after Riek Machar launches
a coup. Khartoum advances.
2002 Talks. Khartoum and SPLA meet in Kenya. Riek
Machar rejoins SPLA. Meanwhile, war in Darfur
escalates.
2005 Peace. The 9 January deal ends 21 years of war.
2011 Referendum. 98.83 percent choose a separate nation.
2011 Independence of South Sudan declared on 9 July.
2012 Oil War. Juba stops production in January, fighting
erupts in March, with a deal signed in September.
2013 Civil War. Fighting breaks out in Juba on 15 December.
2014 War. Major towns swap hands multiple times.
2015 Peace ignored. An August peace deal is celebrated, and
broken.
2016 Collapse. Machar returns in April, but flees fighting in
July.
2017 Famine declared in February. Warnings of genocide.
2018 War continues. Peace efforts stall, again.
x
A NOTE ON NAMES
xi
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is the history of how a country was made, but I did not set out to
write that story. I came to South Sudan as a reporter, a bystander cov-
ering the end of one long war who became caught up in a new one.
Writing such a narrative history brings with it many challenges.
There is the obligation to record; I have seen how factual reports I
made just a few years ago have subsequently become twisted into new
and dangerous narratives. Memories are not fixed, but can change in
time as a consequence of the suffering people have endured.
But the story is also a personal one; I wanted to share what I saw and
heard. The stories told are selective and subjective. I recorded eye wit-
ness testimonies of key events—often for the first time—but there are
still so many voices missing. This is the story of what I witnessed and
the people I was privileged to meet.
Recording such stories meant including graphic violence of the most
brutal kind. Retelling them risks reliving the trauma for those who
have suffered. Yet to gloss over the details would be a betrayal of the
courage of those who came forward to entrust a stranger with the
darkest moments of their lives. To understand what has happened is the
only way there can be hope of solutions. Reconciliation requires for-
giveness, forgiveness an acknowledgement of what happened.
For South Sudan, the legacy of the last few years will echo far into
the future. The understanding of those years will define what the very
nature of the country means to its people.
xiii
PREFACE
In the dry season, when the grass grew yellow and thin and crackled
underfoot, the bones bleached under the sun poked through the under-
growth. Twisted creepers curled up between the eye sockets of the
skulls, some so small they must have been children.
It was July 2011, days before South Sudan would declare indepen-
dence as the world’s newest nation. I had come to the army barracks in
Juba, the capital-to-be, to see the place that for so many symbolised
why they voted overwhelmingly to split from Khartoum in the North,
to divide Sudan and form their own country.
People called the barracks the White House, and there were few
places in South Sudan that evoked as much terror. For over two
decades, this was the government in Khartoum’s main torture and
execution site in the South. It was where it dealt with those it believed
supported rebel forces: activists and aid workers, priests and nuns,
doctors and nurses, academics, students, civilians and soldiers. Security
officers would march them out of their work, homes, or off the streets.
They were removed without question, trial, or need to account for
them. Thousands vanished.
The bones were left where the bodies had been dragged and dumped.
You could see them from the edge of the dirt track that wound its way
along the gentle sloping hillside. Soldiers said there were more piles
deeper into the field, but you couldn’t go further, even if you wanted to.
Red skull and crossbones signs tied onto thin poles were pushed into the
hard earth. They warned of landmines once laid to defend the base, or
artillery and mortar shells which had failed to explode.
xv
PREFACE
‘That was the place of our nightmares,’ college student Mabil
William had told me before I visited the barracks, as we drank tea on
a roadside stall. ‘If you heard someone was taken there, you had said
goodbye to them already. They were not coming back.’ William’s father,
a teacher, had been accused of backing the rebels and was taken at night
by soldiers. He was bundled into a pickup truck that was last seen
heading towards the White House. He was never heard of again.
‘When I voted for separation, to say bye-bye to Khartoum, it was
places like that we were waving an end to,’ William added, a quiet and
shy young man. He wanted to be a teacher like his father had been.
Northern soldiers had left the White House only weeks before, the
last units to depart before the division of Africa’s biggest nation. For
the first time, Southern soldiers—and a journalist—accessed the com-
plex; I had spent several hot days persuading the men in black suits
from national security to allow me in.
The barracks are a scattered collection of low brick buildings with
tin roofs on a wide hillside a short walk from the University of Juba,
just south of the city centre. The official title of the barracks is Giada—
derived from the Arabic for ‘the commanders’—but the entirety of the
feared complex gained its popular name from the feature most visible
from the vantage point of the road, a couple of two-storey white-
painted hospital buildings. I was taken to a low, grass-covered bunker.
Our shoulders pushed the heavy metal door open, and I used my phone
to light the steep concrete steps down into the darkness. The air was
chokingly hot. It took time to see into the gloom, before someone
found the switch to turn on a bare hanging bulb, pulsing with the
erratic surge of electricity from a generator.
The soldiers and security men who supervised me were as grimly
interested in seeing these rooms as I was. As Southerners, they had not
been here during the torture, but had heard the stories. The air was
thick and intense, heavy with fuel fumes. The burly national security
minder rested his hand on my shoulder and peered over my head.
Large sacks of rubble lay in the corner. ‘These ones they used when you
were brought here,’ he said, prodding one of the bags with his shiny
long-pointed shoes. ‘They would lie you down, and then put this one
on your back, maybe two of them, maybe even three,’ he added, trying
to heave one up in his hand, but finding it too heavy.
xvi
PREFACE
‘The only time the door opened was when somebody was being
taken out to be killed,’ he said, turning to me with a strange grin. Then
he pointed upwards. A pair of handcuffs still dangled from the metal
girder in the roof, and he moved them open and closed like a jaw, with
a grating squeak. ‘They would hang you here for days,’ he said. ‘I doubt
if any other journalist has ever been down here before.’
His companion, silent until then, chipped in. ‘If they did, they didn’t
come out alive,’ he said.
We left minutes later, glad for the fresh air outside. Eyes adjusting
to the bright sunlight, we walked the short distance through the bar-
racks to another building, a whitewashed series of fetid storerooms,
now used as basic dormitories for soldiers, where grey mosquito nets
were draped over simple metal cots. The paint was peeling and smeared
with dark stains. When the North was in charge, prisoners dragged out
of the dungeon would be taken here and executed. For the soon-to-be
independent South Sudan, the torture chambers offered the starkest of
warnings that the future must not be like the past.
Major-General Marial Chanuong Yol Mangok was the new com-
mander of the barracks, a towering man with a shaved head, dressed
smartly in a scarlet beret and broad epaulettes with loops of gold wire
on his uniform. His fleshy hand gripped mine in welcome, and he con-
tinued to hold onto it as he guided my tour around the buildings. ‘In
the past, this place was a place of torture, of pain,’ Mangok said. ‘They
killed a lot of our people here.’
He looked straight at me, staring uncomfortably and holding my
gaze, saying the barracks should be set up as a memorial to remember
the crimes of the past. Hundreds if not thousands of bodies lay here,
too many for anyone to know, he said. ‘This is a graveyard—a mass
graveyard. We need it to be kept as a historical place in the future,’ he
said. ‘No more White Houses in the South, so that it will be a free
country, where justice and freedom is everywhere.’
I believed him. At the time, there was hope.You heard optimism at
every corner, a sense that change had come at last. The dead lying in the
grass around the White House might have had their names forgotten
and their deaths unmarked, but perhaps they had not suffered in vain.
* * *
xvii
PREFACE
Two and a half years later, I tried to visit the White House again.
Soldiers at a roadblock pointed guns at my motorbike long before I
could even reach the gates of the barracks. A stench of rotting flesh
drifted on the wind. Smoke rose above the buildings.
On 15 December 2013, after simmering arguments within the rul-
ing party erupted into fury, fighting broke out in the same barracks
between Dinka and Nuer members of the presidential guard. The
White House, where the torture that had blighted South Sudan was
meant to end, would be where the next round of war would start—
and this time it was a battle of Southerner against Southerner.
The battles kicked off a civil war of horrific proportions. Revenge
and retribution forced people to divide along ethnic lines. Scores were
shot in the streets, bodies lay scattered on the roads. Hundreds were
rounded up and forced into a room in a police station. The officers
opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles.
I’d also hear Mangok’s name again. Now head of the Presidential
Guard, a 4,000-man strong Special Forces unit known as the Tiger
Division with distinctive striped camouflage uniforms, he led Dinka
troops in massacres against Nuer comrades. ‘He executed orders to
disarm Nuer soldiers and then ordered the use of tanks to target politi-
cal figures in Juba,’ the United Nations Security Council wrote as they
ordered sanctions against him, including freezing his bank accounts and
a travel ban. ‘In the initial operations in Juba, by numerous and credible
accounts, Mangok’s Presidential Guard led the slaughter of Nuer civil-
ians in and around Juba, many who were buried in mass graves. One
such grave was purported to contain 200–300 civilians.’1
That was just the start. The people fled massacres, ethnic killings and
deliberate starvation. A man-made famine was declared. The UN
warned of the risk of genocide. It has become one of the most dramatic
failures of the international community’s efforts at state-building. Just
three years after independence, South Sudan was ranked worst in the
world in the list of failed states.2 The war would descend to levels of
depravity few could ever have imagined.
Independence was won but freedom was lost, for the new leaders
repeated the crimes of those they had ousted. The unity of purpose to
achieve separation broke down, and divisions and hatreds were
unleashed. Hope turned to disaster. Euphoric ideals collapsed with the
bloody, bitter reality of their implementation.
xviii
PREFACE
This is the history of a dream. Many have fought. South Sudan did
the impossible and won.
It is also the story of a nightmare. For countries are forged not born,
and making a nation takes more than unfurling a flag.
* * *
‘Khawaja!’ shouted Joseph Bading, calling out the Sudanese name for
foreigner as he beckoned me over, waving a carved ebony stick. An
elderly gentleman with thin white hair, the primary school teacher was
dressed in a ragged yet neatly pressed shirt.
The civil war that had begun in 2013 was raging, and I was lost. It
was three years after South Sudan had declared independence and the
world had celebrated. The memories of joining the crowds on the
streets dancing in delight at their new nation seemed so far away. Now
I stood filthy and knee-deep in the stinking sewage that washed down
a side street of the UN base in Bentiu, a camp city of thatch and plastic
shacks housing over 125,000 South Sudanese civilians. They were
crammed together, sheltering from the violence outside, protected by
high earth walls topped with razor wire. UN peacekeepers in watch-
towers stood guard with machine guns. It felt like a prison.
‘Khawaja,’ he called again. ‘Why do you write? You make the reports,
and then you go, but nothing changes,’ he said wearily. ‘We need more
food, more medicine. We need all this to end, so tell them that.’
I mumbled the foreign correspondent’s awkward mantra: that I had
no power to make change, but those who read the story would under-
stand the situation better, and that might help. He had already been in
the camp for more than a year, and he sighed with a deep seen-it-all-
before tiredness. ‘It is okay,’ he said, softening his speech. ‘The khawaja
are always writing, it is what they do. We need someone to write all
this down, so that what has happened is not forgotten.’
Sometimes the stories of suffering you are told can merge into one,
and past pains bleed into the present. The horrors done are recounted
with a sickening, resigned shrug of exhaustion: this has been done
before; now it has happened to me; it will happen again. Tales are told
as though in a cave crowded with echoes. Old histories reverberate in
the politics, psyche and power struggles of today.
Khawaja, as Joseph Bading dubbed me, is a word taken from the 19th
century Ottoman slave raiders for ‘master’.
xix
PREFACE
So much of the story of South Sudan has been one of violence. Far
into the past, great leaders rose and fell, as people migrated into new
lands and built communities, jostling against each other for control.
Then came waves of outsiders.
In the 19th century, foreign forces led large-scale slave raids, treating
the people of the South as a raw resource to exploit. The slave raiders
set up fortress camps from which to attack, and then to control. They
laid the groundwork for rule by a repressive minority whose power
was based on using the human capital of people, swapping slaves to
purchase loyalty and expand their personal empires of blood.
Next came British officers. They too used military force to break those
who opposed them. In speeches they spoke of offering protection, but
they subjugated the people to do their will for London’s imperial dreams,
and expand hardnosed geo-political ambitions to yoke Africa under their
control. The paternalistic colonial policies treated the South like a land
unchanged since time began, as though it were a living museum—or
more darkly, a human zoo—to be preserved.
The British handed power to an elite in Khartoum. In turn, they
built on that repressive state with staggering cruelty, developing a lead-
ership whose survival depended on using the people and land for their
narrow pursuit of power. Such dark history cannot simply be buried
and forgotten.
Yet at independence, international experts came bearing proposals
and plans to fix a land as though it was a blank slate to write upon,
swept up in the euphoria of hope for the future. A new round of for-
eign forces arrived, once again looking at the land either as a wilder-
ness to be explored and exploited, or the canvas upon which to paint
themselves as the heroes who saved it.
For while South Sudan was a new nation in name, the past cast a
long shadow. It struggled to make a fresh start, and the new leaders
followed in old footsteps. Generals who had led the long fight on slo-
gans of freedom bartered the future of the people for themselves. They
used them as pawns for their own goals.
Beneath the rhetoric of democracy, freedom, equality and justice,
there was no social contract between the government and the people.
Instead, there was a simple system where the military men in charge
bought the loyalties and services they needed from cash taken from oil.
xx
PREFACE
That money should have developed the nation for all. Instead, it funded
a brutal capitalist dictatorship of greed where the people’s dreams
were squandered for power. It was less of a government, more of a
business conglomerate.3
For a while, the system seemed to work. Yet appetites expanded as
the men gorged at the feast. The numbers of people to be paid off grew,
as did their expectations and demands. The system that once made
South Sudan’s leaders strong would also be their undoing. The
resources were finite, and when the cash ran out and people grew
angry, the house of cards collapsed. Those left outside the luxuries of
power rose up to take what they needed by force.
Today, leaders and rebels alike look to see what they can sell or loot
to fund their constituency and keep their power afloat.
* * *
For three years, in the run-up to separation in 2011, my sign-off went
out across the fledgling nation-to-be on crackly shortwave radios: ‘For
the BBC, this is Peter Martell in Juba, South Sudan.’ Technically, the
script sent to London was ‘south Sudan’—without a capital letter—to
ensure the BBC remained impartial in the independence referendum.
Yet such nuances are lost on radio, and Southerners who tuned in
heard it very differently. The BBC, they said, backed their dream of a
separate nation. In the newspaper debates on what the new nation
might be called—Azania, Juwama, Kush, Nile Republic and New
Sudan were all suggested—editorials said that if a BBC correspondent
called it South Sudan, then that name seemed a sound choice too.
In Juba, I first lived in an oven-like canvas tent that leaked in the
rain. Then I moved to a crumbling tin-roof bungalow without electric-
ity or running water, shared with a dozen others. In the day, it served
to amplify the hot sun beating down. In the sweats of the night, I’d
wake to the thump of plump mangoes hurtling onto the roof, thinking
it was gunfire.
I stayed in some of the dustier corners: decaying hotels, army tents,
hospitals, aid agency offices and thatch huts. I was sheltered from the
sun in mosques and churches. At times, I slept simply on the ground
beneath the moon, the curling smoke from cattle dung fires keeping
the mosquitoes away. I travelled by motorbike, truck and foot, by bat-
xxi
PREFACE
tered boat and canoe, barely-there airplanes and terrifying helicopters.
I met leaders and guerrillas, ate with rich and poor, stayed with fighters
and farmers. I heard how they saw this land, and how they dreamed it
could be.
Today, the foreigners who come to South Sudan stay for ever shorter
periods. Institutional knowledge and experience shrink. Even the aid
workers with their branded utility vest uniforms and flags have adopted
the language of the military and speak of being ‘on mission in the field’.
They cross days off the calendar until they jet back out on leave or the
next R&R (‘Rest and Recuperation’) holiday cycle. A rare few say they
actually live in South Sudan.
For outsiders, it can be hard to see where one round of violence
ends and another one starts. The seemingly endless cycle of violence
can make it appear that the problems of the South are unsolvable.
People call it a ‘tribal’ battle as a lazy shorthand explanation, as though
it were a primordial conflict from time immemorial. Yet the reliance
that people have on their community is not the cause of violence but,
rather, because of it. It is the only security network that is durable
enough to survive. Without a government who offer support, people
have to care for themselves.
Increasingly, security fears mean that many foreigners rarely venture
far beyond the bubble of guarded compounds, except for the briefest
of trips. When the UN peacekeepers emerge from their base in their
blue helmets and flak jackets, they peer out from the slits of armoured
combat vehicles. The visiting diplomatic envoys stepping out from air-
conditioned Land Cruisers come with analyses written by foreigners,
based on security reports of the previous few months. The technocrats
who make the decisions on policy and aid sit in Nairobi, Washington or
New York. The businessmen who buy the oil, the politicians who
pocket the money, or those who sell the guns drink the profits in far-
away luxury homes.
I am an outsider too, of course. Strict word limits or two minutes
on air meant my stories often provided simplistic summaries: a war
between tribes; a rivalry between two men; a conflict between an Arab
Muslim north and African south of traditional belief and Christianity,
fought over race, religion, land and oil.
Yet as a foreign reporter, I was also privileged with access many did
not have. I was able to cross front lines to interview those in power and
xxii
PREFACE
their victims, to travel both to war zones and the extravagant hotels of
peace talks. I could open the door to other foreigners, whose aid,
money, weapons and diplomacy—deliberately or not—helped sustain
the conflict. I gathered the stories of those who have not spoken of
them before.
Most of all I met ordinary people, the kind men and women who
shared their food, offered me shelter, and looked after an outsider in
their land. For the grim lists of statistics fail to mention that in the
midst of gloomy broad brushstroke assessments there are children who
grow up happy and live life with a smile, men who don’t kill, women
who die in peace. There is suffering, yes, but people also live. Parents
raise families, go to work, make love, drink and laugh.
The story of South Sudan is not only one of war. I have wanted to
show, through laying out the long history, that peace is possible. These are
horrifying times today, but there have been horrifying times in the past.
They too were overcome. This is not a definitive history; that must be
told by the South Sudanese themselves. It does, however, tell the story of
how a nation emerged, and of how, for a moment, there was hope.
xxiii
1
JUST DIVORCED
Freedom came at midnight and the people went wild. Tens of thou-
sands of people crammed the streets. Cars careered down potholed
tracks of the new capital Juba hooting horns, and arcs of flames spewed
out from aerosol cans. Gunfire rattled the hot night with shot after shot
aimed at the moon. ‘We are free! We are free!’ screamed mother-of-
four Mary Okach, waving a flag around her head, the material swirling.
She gave a high-pitched ululating cry of joy. It was 8 July 2011, and
rule imposed from Sudan’s faraway capital was coming to an end. ‘Bye-
bye Khartoum, hello happiness!’ she wailed. She danced holding hands
with her sister, spinning in the centre of the main road.
Next to them was soldier Daniel Bol, dressed in green army fatigues
and thumping a makeshift drum of an empty cooking oil can, leaping
from one foot to another. ‘Fifty years fighting for independence and if
this is freedom, then this is great,’ Bol said, a barrel-chested 30-year-
old captain who grew up fighting in war. He bent down to me, offering
a beer-soaked bear hug. Down the road came men carrying a giant flag
stitched out of bed-sheets in front of a convoy of buses blaring raucous
rumba music, the green, red and black rippling as they danced. ‘Junub
Sudan, oyee!’ they shouted. ‘South Sudan, oh yes!’
1
FIRST RAISE A FLAG
An electronic countdown sign mounted on a metal telegraph pole
on a roundabout in the city centre flashed out succinct but misspelled
messages in red lights: ‘CONGRATULATION. FREE AT LAST.
SOUTH SUDAN.’ One car dragged tin cans on strings, carrying a sign
on its back bumper that read: ‘Just divorced.’
Dancing at the base of the countdown clock, 67-year-old mechanic
Andrew Amum was breathless in the sweltering night, panting his
words out in euphoria, as cars hooted around him and people sang. ‘We
have struggled for so many years and this is our day,’ Anum said. ‘You
cannot imagine how good it feels.’ Like tens of thousands of the mil-
lions who had fled war, Amum had come back after decades abroad to
celebrate independence and rebuild his long destroyed home. He’d
returned from a Kenyan refugee camp in time to vote in the referen-
dum for independence, which saw a landslide 98.83 percent choose to
separate from Sudan. More and more joined the party on the street,
shouting in the darkness at the spreading trees above. ‘THANK YOU
FOR FREEDOM,’ the flickering screen now read, with a computer-
generated flag flapping alongside.
As the people danced, the faraway voice on the faint phone line I’d
hooked up via satellite dish to the BBC’s World Service radio could
hardly make out a word I said. The final minutes crept towards the first
strokes of 9 July when after the longest of wars, Africa’s biggest nation
would become two. Not since the age of empires had a new African
nation been so created—and none with such international goodwill.
‘What is the mood? Have celebrations begun?’ asked the calm BBC
presenter in London. There was only one possible answer; broadcasting
the screams of joy live to the world. I held my microphone up to the
crowd. The seconds edged towards the pips at midnight, and the count-
down clocked ticked to zero. The street exploded in cries.
‘Freedom!’ shouted a man in a military smock festooned with
ammunition pouches, clutching one-handed the back of a packed
pickup truck speeding past, a beer in his other fist. ‘South Sudan! South
Sudan!’ Midnight had come, and a new nation was made.
* * *
A few hours later, my motorbike’s weak headlights picked the way
home carefully through the capital’s Hai Malakal district, a series of
2
JUST DIVORCED
decrepit bungalows and occasional mud and thatch hut compounds.
Only the curious fox-like street dogs seemed awake, the road theirs for
now, padding quietly along, scavenging for scraps. I followed them on
my bike, bouncing down the bumpy, sandy backstreets to avoid the
worst of the drunken soldiers on the checkpoints posted on the main
roads. The night air was cooler, though it was still some time off dawn.
Formal independence would be later in the day, when the flag of Sudan
was lowered at a ceremony with heads of states, marching bands and
military parades.
Softly, in the darkness, the candle stubs flickered. Away from the
parties, each candle was lit in a spontaneous, unorganised memorial for
the millions who had died, placed outside homes on the edge of the
track. They offered a more sombre memory of the war’s cost. They
were a remembrance of the past, and prayers for the future.
South Sudan had been at war for as long as most people could
remember. With each round of conflict, the weaponry and devastation
it caused became more intense, from spears to rifles, to artillery, then
tanks, fighter jets and helicopter gunships. As I pushed my motorbike
into the sandy courtyard of my tin-roof home, the deserted street out-
side was marked by a line of glittering flames.
* * *
President Salva Kiir pushed his black cowboy hat up and rubbed his
forehead wearily when I asked about the challenges ahead. There was a
deep sigh, then a long pause. South Sudan’s first independent leader, an
ex-rebel general who had fought two civil wars to reach this point,
looked exhausted before the task of forging a nation had even begun.
Decades of war had left everything broken. He stared back at me from
the head of the enormous table of the Council of Ministers, deflecting
questions as to whether the land was ready to break free. ‘We are not
rebuilding this country,’ Kiir said, through his thick beard. ‘We are
building it from the beginning.’
The UN creates long lists of indicators of a country: health, eco-
nomic, education and development rankings. At freedom, South Sudan
shot straight to the bottom rung of almost all, with some of the worst
development indicators of any nation on earth. The wars had forced
millions of people into exile and left those who stayed destitute.
3
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Berliinissä, oli ystävyys valmis. Tämä hilpeä seura miellytti häntä
tavattomasti: tuskin oli hänet ja pieni kähertäjä kutsuttu istumaan
suureen pöytään, kun hän jo tilasi kaksi uutta pulloa sampanjaa ja
puoleksi sopertaen lisäsi suurkaupunkilaisella äänellä: "Hedwig —
laseja koko seuralle".
Rosa jäi. Seura suuren pyöreän pöydän ympärillä oli nyt aivan
yksikseen.
"Te, pikku mies, kyllä minä teille —! Mutta tulkaas tänne, saatte
toisenkin käden", lisäsi hän viihdyttävästi.
Rassmannin oli täytynyt olla ulkona yli puolen yön, sillä Schorn oli
seissyt sorvauspenkkinsä ääressä yhteen saakka valmistaen
muuatta kiireellistä työtä; ja Rassmann, joka oli "Kultaisesta
Leijonasta" tullessaan joka ilta poikennut hänen työhuoneeseensa,
jos sieltä näkyi tulta, ei ollut tällä kertaa tullut. Ei ollut tullut kello
yhteen mennessä.
Tästä hetkestä lähtien kantoi hän tätä niin usein kuin vain
taloustoimensa sen sallivat.
Oi, olisipa rouva Schorn vain tiennyt, kuka hänen lemmikilleen oli
yöllä antanut potkun!
Mutta koira, koira — "Se käyttäytyy aivan kuin sinä olisit meidän
pahin vihamiehemme etkä kotimme tervetullein vieras", oli Schorn
silloin sanonut enempää ajattelematta.
Kun he jäivät taas kahden kesken, alkoi hän: "On itsestään selvää,
että rahani ovat käytettävissänne mikäli riittävät. Tuleehan teillä
olemaan menoja yhteen ja toiseen — kentiesi tarvitset vielä
kirjoihinkin, muista silloin minua, mutta tee minulle mieliksi ja ole
varovainen. Minuun koskisi kovasti, jos joudut ikävyyksiin. Tiedäthän,
että teen puolueen hyväksi mitä voin. Kaikki aatteen puolesta!"
Rassmann oli taasen voittopuolella; hänen arvonsa ystävänsä
silmissä oli suurempi kuin koskaan.
VII