06/11/16 – Nick Turse – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing Nick Terse, and he is a very important American journalist, a very unique one.
Really doing as much work as everyone else combined, basically, on America's somewhat clandestine invasion of Africa.
His previous book is Tomorrow's Battlefield, and the brand new one is called Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, War and Survival in South Sudan.
He is a managing editor at Tom Englehart's site, tomdispatch.com, and is a contributing writer to The Intercept.
Welcome back to the show, Nick.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Very happy to have you back here.
You do really great work.
I really appreciate your time.
And this article, man, I guess, go ahead and give us the background to your stay, your time in South Sudan, and in writing this book and all that, and then, I guess, by way of telling that story, you know, provide us a little bit of the background of the civil war there and how South Sudan was broken away from the North and the development since then, just in a general kind of catch-us-up sort of sense, if you could.
Sure.
I'll do my best.
You know, South Sudan, the southern part of the nation of Sudan, has been trying to break away from the North since the 1950s, and there were two brutal civil wars, one from 1955 to 1972.
That cost about half a million lives.
And then that civil war sort of reignited in 1983 and lasted until 2005.
You know, over those 20-plus years, I think another 2 million or so people died.
No one knows exactly how many.
So, you know, on the ground, there was a battle by southern Sudanese to break free of the North.
Now, this was seen in the United States in many ways as a fight of Christians against Muslims, and there is a large amount of truth to that.
So because of that, there was a sort of bipartisan coalition in the United States that developed to support the southern Sudanese.
One major part of it was evangelical Christians.
In fact, George W. Bush's church in Midland, Texas, was a real driver in this.
And then there were also, you know, some people in the Carter administration, actually, who were also, for their own reasons, behind the creation of an independent state of South Sudan.
So, you know, for more than two decades, people in America were agitating for this new country while the southern Sudanese were fighting for their independence.
And it all came to fruition in 2011, when South Sudan, as a result of a peace deal and a referendum, became its own independent nation.
And it still is the youngest, the newest country on earth.
And you know, there was a lot of optimism in 2011.
A lot of people in the United States thought that this new nation could stand on its own.
And in South Sudan, a lot of people hoped that, you know, 50 years of war was behind them.
And I wasn't watching very closely, but, you know, I sort of kept an eye on South Sudan.
And then I watched in 2013, as this country basically fell apart, collapsed in the Civil War.
And, you know, I wondered what happened.
I knew this was America's nation-building effort in Africa.
I'd seen what happened at nation-building efforts elsewhere, in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this was a very different situation.
I knew the United States had poured billions of dollars in, put a lot of time and effort into keeping the young nation afloat.
And I wanted to figure out what went wrong.
I couldn't really find good reports on it, so I decided that I'd go take a look myself.
So I went, you know, the country collapsed in the Civil War in December 2013.
I went in 2014, spent a couple weeks there, and realized that, you know, I started to get a sense of what happened, but I knew I needed more time there.
So in 2015, I spent a couple of months on the ground, going around interviewing, trying to figure out what had happened and what might happen going forward.
I went to write a few articles, but sort of what poured out of me was this new book, Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead.
Right on.
Well, I can't wait to read it.
I'm sorry.
I haven't got my hands on it yet.
But, and I'm sorry, I forgot to say the name of the newest article here at The Intercept.
It's Hillary Clinton's State Department gave South Sudan's military a pass for its child soldiers.
So I guess we can get to that part in a minute there.
But I want to go back over a couple of things you mentioned.
First of all, did you say that the religious identification of we should support Christians over there, that a big hotbed of that political activism is coming out of Midland, Texas?
Did I hear you right about that?
That's right.
Because, of course, that's an oil town, which raises a question whether that's just cover.
But are there even American oil companies involved over there?
I know oil is part of the strategy of geopolitics and whatever.
But as far as Texan corporate economic interests, are they even at play?
Or that's really, you meant what you said there?
Well, I mean, the Christian aspect was a main driver of it.
But there always has been an oil component to it.
It's not that shocking when it comes to the United States and foreign policy that there's oil involved.
Back in the 1970s, after the first civil war between the Southerners and the government in Khartoum in the north of Sudan, once they had come to a peace deal that temporarily ended that war, it was actually George H.W. Bush, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, who traveled to Sudan to let them know that U.S. satellites showed there was a major deposit of oil sitting underneath Sudan.
But the problem for the north was they had just concluded a peace deal with the south that said the south would have more autonomy, remain part of Sudan, but they would have the mineral rights to what was beneath their soil.
When George H.W. came to town and told them, you know, good news, we found oil, but the bad news was it was beneath the south of Sudan.
That meant the Southerners would benefit from that oil.
And the northern government of Khartoum wasn't that happy about that and decided they would redraw the map so that the oil deposit was back underneath their territory.
And this is what really inflamed tensions and led to the second civil war that started in 1983.
So the United States' oil interests, they all had their fingerprints on this war from the get-go.
It was Chevron that actually went in and started working the oil fields there.
But once that second civil war started in the 1980s, you know, Chevron's oil interests there sort of fell apart.
And once the United States helped secure South Sudan's independence in the 2000s, it looked like U.S. oil companies might get in there.
But it turned out that it was Chinese companies that ended up getting the oil concessions there.
As has happened before, the United States poured in a lot of money and assistance, and this has happened elsewhere in the world, that the Chinese were savvy enough to figure out how to actually get the mineral concessions.
And this is what ultimately happened in South Sudan.
Well, you know, I guess I had the mythology all wrong.
I thought the story went that the Chinese were developing the oil resources under agreement with the government of the north.
And that was such a big part of the reason why the CIA wanted to break off the south in the first place was to kick the Chinese out and make sure that, you know, if not, if not, you know, Texas companies, at least, you know, Western companies were there for the Pentagon's strategic purposes, that in the event of a crisis, we can cut the Chinese off from their oil, that kind of thing.
But you're saying, well, what exactly?
That either backfired or I had that wrong in the first place?
Well, it was Chevron that went in first, after after Chevron decided to pull out because of the instability, then Chinese firms had moved in and overtook those concessions.
And, you know, so so that's how it went.
It was it was ended up seeming too unstable for the Western companies.
So I think that's why.
And where's the actual secession in that timeline, though, is what I'm asking.
Yeah, you know, Chevron basically gave up on this in the in the 1980s.
And while the Civil War was was raging, then that war ended in 2005.
And the Chinese came in after that.
I see.
And then but they're still there, even though the US succeeded in breaking off South Sudan from North Sudan or other Sudan or whatever.
And in the last few years, the Chinese never left.
The Chinese didn't leave.
And the Chinese have been very savvy about figuring out a way to protect their oil interest there.
Again, they've sort of put one over on the United States during the last or the current civil war, depending on how you want to call it, the one that began in 2013.
You know, this, of course, was that was a threat to Chinese oil companies, and they were able to expand the United Nations mandate for protection in South Sudan.
The UN was obliged to protect civilians, protect some various sites around the country.
And the Chinese worked the oil fields into that deal.
They inserted language in the UN resolutions that allowed protection of the oil interests there.
And then the Chinese sent their own infantry battalion under the auspices of the United Nations, you know, wearing basically blue helmets to protect those installations.
Now, the United States pays about 25 to 30 percent of the UN peacekeeping budget.
So in effect, the Chinese were able to get the United States to underwrite a Chinese infantry battalion going in to protect Chinese oil interests, doing it under the auspices of the United Nations.
Unbelievable.
All right.
So tell us more about this civil war then.
Who's who in South Sudan and why are they hating each other so bad?
Well, you know, the civil war that that raged from 1983 to 2005, at that time, the southern Sudanese were led by a leader named John Garang, who was an American educated Ph.
D. who hailed from southern Sudan and a military officer there.
And he was killed just after the end of that civil war in a helicopter crash, still very murky.
And the two men that were the highest ranking subordinates underneath him were Salva Kheer, who's currently the president of South Sudan, and Riek Machar, who was Kheer's vice president.
Kheer fired him from that job, and these two men were the ones who, you know, were the primary drivers of the civil war that began in 2013.
It was Kheer's presidential guard tried to disarm guard soldiers who were loyal to Riek Machar.
Kheer is from the largest tribe in the country, the Dinka, and Machar is from the second largest tribe, the Nuer.
And it began as a battle between Dinka soldiers and Nuer soldiers.
And then these Dinka troops that are loyal to Kheer went out to the streets of the capital, South Sudan, Juba, and started killing not only Nuer troops, but also Nuer civilians, massacring them in the streets.
And from there, the civil war spread throughout the country.
You had sort of tit-for-tat massacres elsewhere, Nuer troops loyal to Machar killing Dinka civilians elsewhere in the country.
And from December 2013 until August 2015, the civil war raged.
Then a peace deal went into effect.
And just recently, in the last couple months, they formed a unity government, which again has Kheer still holding the presidency, and Machar back as his vice president.
Now, the peace deal is holding, I think, basically because neither of these men could afford to fight anymore, at least for the moment.
But, you know, none of the underlying causes of the civil war, the ethnic tensions, the personal animus between Kheer and Machar, none of that has gone away.
Basically, all that's changed is somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 people were killed.
Many atrocities were committed.
And the government went from, you know, having very little economic stability to none at all.
They're basically broke.
Even the future earnings on oil have been mortgaged away to pay for the civil war.
So the country's in much worse shape than it was before.
None of the underlying issues of the civil war have been addressed.
But these two men are back, you know, sort of tied together in this unity government that I don't think anyone expects to be a long-term solution.
That's amazing.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's incredible that they went back to the old status quo with the old vice president coming back and everything.
So what could be done then to heal over the differences?
I mean, obviously, we're talking about two major, you know, they at least consider ethnic or tribal distinctions here.
Maybe back when the British or the Dutch or whoever drew those lines should have drawn them in different places, whatever it is.
But could they, I don't know, pump enough oil out of the ground to make everybody rich enough that they kind of quit hating each other or any?
Do you see any real basis of future negotiation here?
You know, it's very difficult.
You know, you mentioned that that oil wealth and this was this was the great hope when at the time of independence in 2011, you know, South Sudan is a small country.
And a lot of people thought that this finally was an African nation that wouldn't fall to the resource curse, that they had seen this play out enough times in Africa to know that you need to hold on to your, you know, oil wealth, your mineral wealth.
And that, you know, because oil prices were so high at the time, and just headed upwards from there, that the country would be able to sort of pay its way to a real lasting peace and independence.
You know, now, oil prices have fallen to the point that, you know, for South Sudan to pump oil out of the ground, and then send it by pipeline north, because they don't have their own refining facilities, it has to go to, to the north to the nation of Sudan.
It's actually costing them money to do that.
They're losing money on every barrel that they're sending out now.
So oil is no longer a solution for the country.
And, you know, I think there is a chance that, you know, lasting peace, but only if there's real accountability in South Sudan, only if there's a legitimate peace and reconciliation process that also holds people accountable.
You have two men at the top of the government who are, you know, by any stretch of the imagination, at least would be tried for war crimes.
And, you know, if you read the United Nations reports, it spells it out pretty clearly that they'd likely be found guilty of these crimes.
I think, you know, most of the people I talked to in South Sudan said they needed accountability.
If that didn't exist, there'd always be people in the country who are looking for revenge.
And it's a country with a lot of weaponry and a lot of men who all they know is guerrilla warfare.
So, you know, most people told me that if there wasn't real accountability, if leaders weren't held responsible for the crimes they've committed, there was going to be war.
So having these two men in the top spots, I don't think there's any chance for peace.
There is, you know, if you can get a new generation of leaders and you can assuage some of this desire for revenge.
Well, but it would have to be not just war crimes trials for those guys, but for our side too.
That's where the real rub comes in, right?
Where if it was, like you say, a real fair and honest truth and reconciliation type of thing, where war criminals on all sides were held accountable.
But sounds like it could just instead be a step to further, you know, motives for revenge down the line, so to speak, you know, victor's justice and that kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's the real danger.
You know, you'd really have to, you know, I think you'd have to be completely, you know, honest and upfront about this.
And this has never been a strong suit of South Sudan, nor the countries, including the United States that have, you know, backed the country or various sides in the civil war.
Well, and, and speaking of the bad blood, how many hundreds of thousands of people did you say were killed in this thing?
Yeah, no one knows for sure.
You know, some of the aid agencies said 50,000 had been killed and sort of stopped counting.
And that was back in 2014.
But one another year after that, at least, right?
Yeah, the estimates go up to as many as 300,000.
The problem is, there's really, there just hasn't been any good way to try and keep count.
A lot of the fighting went on far from, you know, any outside observers.
And it's been very difficult, you know, in a country where there are no birth records, no death records, to keep, you know, any sort of count on what's gone on.
There's, there's one little civil society group there called Remembering the Ones We've Lost, which is doing some heroic work in trying to count the numbers of dead, you know, by name, through press reports, and then going out and interviewing people, and trying to corroborate stories, you know, person by person during the Civil War.
It's, it's some amazing work.
And, you know, they're, I've never seen anything quite like that.
They only have 5000 people, I say only, but, you know, on their list right now.
But, you know, they said they're committed to this, whether it's 50,000, or 300,000, to try and name every person that's been killed in this war.
But of course, that'll take many years, decades, you know, if they're ever able to get to those high levels.
Yeah, well, you know, I read all your stuff at Tom Dispatch, and the Intercept, and wherever, and I read some of these about, you know, the story of the guy hiding in the swamp, and some of this other stuff that you've reported out of there.
It sounds like just an absolute nightmare, worst kind of, you know, nothing like a battlefield, right?
Just massacres, unending, huh?
Yeah, that's really been the hallmark of that war.
Of course, modern warfare is often like this, where it's civilians that pay the ultimate price.
But in South Sudan, there were very few battles between armed troops.
It's really been, you know, the story of the Civil War, either side of it has been, you know, armed, men armed with AK-47s descending on villages, just packed with civilians, and carrying out killings, you know, sometimes razing the whole village to the ground, massacres, gang rapes.
It's really just a horrendous war that's been targeted only at civilians.
You know, on this, I came back from South Sudan, well, I guess, about a month and a half, two months ago now, and I went to a town called Leer, or I should say what's left of the town.
Most of it is just ruins now.
Just these little rectangles or circles of mud, you know, waddle walls where homes used to be.
Last year, from April until November, militias that were allied to the government just fell upon Leer in waves again and again, and razed the entire community to the ground, sent many people from there fleeing into rebel territory for safety.
And those who weren't, most of them were killed.
A lot of the women were taken away as sex slaves, where they were, you know, gang raped, and then just left to try and fend for themselves in nearby swamps.
A lot of people ran there for safety, and they lived basically, you know, all day long, you know, up to their chests or their neck in water, you know, deep inside the swamp, and then they would try and come out at night and forage for food.
You know, I found some of the survivors there who were dressed in rags because soldiers had taken everything that they had, all their belongings, and they were still coming at night, these armed militiamen, to steal anything they had left.
Often that was only clothes that were on their children's backs.
So a lot of the children I saw had no clothes left.
Soldiers had come in the night and even taken children's clothes.
I mean, this is what, you know, the population there was reduced to.
They were eating water lily bulbs.
That was the only food that they had left, and they were, you know, desperate for any kind of sustenance to be brought in.
When I was there, aid groups, international NGOs were just starting to come back to Lierre because their compounds had also been attacked and looted by these militiamen.
It was, you know, one of the worst scenes I ever saw, just to see this town completely wiped out, and, you know, I even walked down into a field where there were just human remains just left out.
You know, South Sudanese generally bury their dead, but, you know, these were the people that were abducted by the government and killed and dumped there, and people didn't even want to go and try and reclaim the bodies for fear that they would run afoul of government troops.
So it was just a field of spinal columns and femurs and skulls just out in the open.
I'd never come across anything like that.
Just, you know, just a horrific scene all around.
All right, so where's Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the CIA in all this?
Well, you mentioned that new story of mine over at The Intercept, and this was, you know, it's sort of a microcosm of how things have gone for the United States and South Sudan.
You know, the U.S., you know, through intermediaries, had pumped a lot of money and also a lot of weapons into South Sudan during the Civil War from 1983 to 2005 as they championed the Southern Cause.
And then in the time before independence in the 2000s and then afterwards in 2011 until the Civil War in 2013, the United States poured a lot of money into South Sudan, billions of dollars, including hundreds of millions into the military there known as the SPLA, the Sudan People's Liberation Army.
And, you know, the U.S. supported this army in South Sudan even though they knew that the army carried out atrocities on a regular basis.
The State Department's own reports said that year after year.
And even though they employed child soldiers, there's a law in the United States, the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, which bars the U.S. from providing military assistance to foreign armies that employ child soldiers.
But U.S. used a technicality in 2011 to keep the flow of money to the SPLA going.
And then in 2012 and 2013, it was Hillary Clinton's State Department that drafted waivers to President Obama.
And President Obama sent these waivers on to Congress, and it allowed USAID to keep flowing into the SPLA, the military that would go on to a massacre, you know, who knows how many civilians during this current civil war and employ somewhere around 10,000 to 15,000 child soldiers during the war.
This was the, you know, this was our creation.
We spent hundreds of million dollars building up this military, supposedly professionalizing it.
And this is what happened.
And now, so there was controversy at the time about the legalization of the child soldiers and American NGOs complaining and things like that, right?
That made no difference, huh?
Right.
You know, the NGOs that track this, Human Rights Watch and others, you know, they kept putting pressure on the Obama administration, kept saying that, you know, by providing these waivers, all you're doing is entrenching the use of child soldiers and, you know, you're setting a bad example for other countries, and you're letting this military off the hook.
The United States had leverage.
It was giving all this money.
It could have twisted some arms there.
And, you know, it seemed to make the South Sudanese demobilize children.
The United States said that it was doing this because they wanted to keep supporting South Sudan's military, and that the only way to, you know, to help it become a modern professionalized force was through engagement.
You know, this is what they say all over the world.
But if you look at the other places that we provided waivers, Yemen, Libya, you know, all these countries ended up collapsing into civil war.
Each of their militaries is consistently cited for human rights abuses.
You know, this type of engagement and looking the other way doesn't work over and over again.
We see that in action.
But, you know, this is how the U.S. government operates.
You know, it picks those militaries that it wants to support, and it won't be constrained by anything, not even U.S. law.
Yeah, man, and I'm looking at these pictures here, Nick, and at theintercept.com.
These are not 17-year-olds who really want to be in the army.
These are 10- and 11-year-old boys here.
Yeah, you know, I went up in 2015 on that trip.
I went and interviewed child soldiers.
I recounted, and next time they'll come to count the dead, and you know, I'd go up to these kids and ask them what it was like to be a soldier or, you know, what it's like to be a veteran, because I said, you know, I've never served in the military.
And I'm saying this to a boy who's 15 and just finished a three-year stint.
So he was in from the age of 12.
You have, you know, 9, 10, 11-year-olds fighting for the government, for the opposition forces, or from other various militias that operate in the country.
So very young boys, often with little choice but to join up.
A lot of these boys told me that, you know, they didn't want to be soldiers, but government soldiers came and attacked their village.
So they wanted protection.
They wanted to protect their village.
They wanted to protect their village.
So they went to a local militia, joined up.
That militia eventually made peace with the government, and they became government soldiers.
So they were still fighting.
Now they were fighting in the force that was the one they were trying to escape from in the first place.
It's a very messy situation.
And now you have, you know, during this civil war, somewhere around 15,000 brand-new child soldiers from this war.
And, you know, somehow these boys have to be demobilized and, you know, brought back into the civilian fold.
And it's not easy for them.
You know, they spent years as soldiers.
This is what they know.
They told me that they wanted to, they were hopeful for education.
They wanted to go to school, but a lot of them couldn't afford it.
They have to pay money in South Sudan for that.
And money is in short supply.
You do great work, Nick.
I really appreciate it.
Well, thank you, Scott.
I appreciate the work you do and your support of my work all these years.
Yeah, well, you certainly deserve it.
Unparalleled stuff here.
The great Nick Terse, everybody.
The latest book is called Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, War and Survival in South Sudan.
Before that, of course, is Tomorrow's Battlefield, U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa.
You've got to read that thing.
And before that, Kill Anything That Moves, The Real American War in Vietnam, which, okay, yeah, that's an old war, but that's a groundbreaking book on the subject of American war crimes in that war.
You really need to read it.
Check them out at TomDispatch.com and TheIntercept.com.
Thanks, y'all.
Hey, and that's The Scott Horton Show.
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