SPLA-IO denies agreeing to joint operation with SPLA in Raja
Colonel William Gatjiath Deng, the SPLM/A-IO military spokesmen, has denied that his organization has agreed to participate in joint operations with SPLA in the Raja area in South Sudan's northwest. SPLM/A-IO is a partner in the recently formed power-sharing government in Juba.
This comes after SPLA spokesman Brig-Gen. Lul Ruai said Wednesday that “SPLA-IO top military leadership agreed to fight alongside SPLA forces against anti-peace elements.” His statement was carried by Eye Radio, a US-funded radio station, without including any comment from the opposition as to the veracity of the claim. Lul Ruai is the former spokesman of SPLA-IO who defected to the SPLA last year and was made spokesman of the army. He was previously accused by the chief IGAD peace mediator of making “outrageous statements” that fueled the war and fanned ethnic hatred.
The peace mediator called on South Sudanese not to be influenced by “rumors and unhelpful rhetoric of hatred and vengeance.” Upon taking office as the new SPLA spokesman three months ago, after a period of running a government-aligned militia, Lul Ruai vowed to wage “media warfare until the last drop of blood.”
SPLA-IO responded to his new press release about the Raja events in a statement of their own on Sunday. “There was absolutely no such agreement between SPLA-IO and the SPLA-IG [SPLA-in-Government, aka SPLA-Juba] on fighting alongside each other against anyone and the SPLA-IO was not consulted on the content of the [press release] in which Mr Lul Ruai Koang assumed the SPLA-IO leadership had consented to.”
Gatjiath, the group's military spokesman, added that the SPLA-IO was not informed by their partner in government about “the nature of the attack on Raja.”
SPLA-IO referred to the cessation of hostilities agreement as the reason for declining to participate in such a joint operation.
However, it is also not clear how SPLA-IO would participate in such a joint operation, if government claims are to be believed that the group has no troops in Western Bahr al Ghazal or anywhere elsewhere outside of the Upper Nile region.
At least one senior official, meanwhile, has claimed that the attack itself was waged by a force that previously had pledged its allegiance to the SPLA-IO. If true, this could mean that whatever troops or allied forces the SPLA-IO did have in Raja have gone back into rebellion rather than accepting the peace deal signed last August.
No joint operations; call for JEM to withdraw from South Sudan
According to Gatjiath, the statement by Lul Ruai is akin to the op-ed piece published by The New York Times recently in that it misrepresents the SPLM/A-IO position and was not checked by media as to the claims it made supposedly on behalf of the entire unity government. The New York Times recently published an article in the name of both Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, though the latter says he never assented to the article. The newspaper admitted its error and said it should have sought confirmation from both sides before publishing the piece.
Gatjiath accused the SPLA spokesman of “misinforming the public, misleading and misrepresenting the position of SPLA-IO and the SPLM/A-IO leadership on the implementation of the Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCISS).”
In his press statement, SPLA spokesman Lul Ruai also had called the armed group that overran Raja last week “criminals” and “bandits,” though other sources speaking to Radio Tamazuj said the group's political objective was to repudiate the creation of Lol State, which Salva Kiir tried to create by decree late last year.
Military sources, meanwhile, informed Radio Tamazuj of the involvement of the Darfur JEM armed group in the recapture of Raja. JEM has been involved in joint operations with the SPLA in 2014 and is known to have had a military base in the Raja area, which positioned them to intervene quickly after the town was overrun by an unidentified armed group last week.
Gatjiath called the involvement of JEM a violation of the cessation of hostilities agreement. “We in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA-IO) were surprised to learn through Radio Tamazuj online publication that our partner to the Compromise Peace Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in the Republic of South Sudan (ARCISS) had not honored its commitment to 'a complete withdrawal of all non-state security actors including [the Sudanese rebels], the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)... from the territory of the Republic of South Sudan (RSS),” he said.
No group has come forward to accept responsibility for the attack on Raja. A senior state official yesterday was quoted as accusing militias allied to SPLA-IO itself of carrying out the attack, but SPLA-IO has not accepted responsibility and yesterday it condemned the attack.
“On behalf of the leadership of the SPLA-IO and on my own behalf, I would like to once again condemn the attack on Raja and convey our sincere condolences and sympathies to government and the people of Raja who lost their dear ones and whose properties were looted or destroyed in the attack,” said Gatjiath.
File photo: Brig-Gen. Lul Ruai, former SPLA-IO spokesman and current SPLA spokesman
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