The Sudan Handbook

tWEntiEth-CEntuRy CiVil WaRs 215

were growing contacts between the Anyanya II and former Anyanya

officers in the army. As political tensions rose in the Southern Region

over Nimeiri’s move toward abrogating the Addis Ababa Agreement and

imposing sharia law, the links between the ex-Anyanya in the army and

the new Anyanya II became stronger. The flash point came at Bor, where

the garrison was composed entirely of ex-Anyanya soldiers in Battalion

105. A confrontation between the battalion and the army began in January
     1983 when the battalion refused orders to be transferred north. When
     the garrison was finally attacked by other units of the Sudanese army
     on 16 May it repulsed its attackers and then withdrew into the bush
     where, by pre-arrangement, it met up with Anyanya II and headed for
     Ethiopia. Other mutinies soon followed in other parts of the south and
     desertions accelerated. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army
     (SPLM/A) was founded in July out of the amalgamation of the Anyanya
     II and the new mutineers in Ethiopia. There was an immediate conflict
     over leadership, and more senior officers, veterans of the first Anyanya,
     such as Samuel Gai Tut and Akuot Atem, were pushed aside by a group of
     younger Anyanya veterans that included John Garang, Kerubino Kuanyin
     Bol, Salva Kiir Mayardit and William Nyuon Bany. This split was exacer-
     bated by a disagreement over the movement’s aims: the old guard wanted
     independence for the south, while the Young Turks advocated a more
     revolutionary transformation for the whole Sudan. This latter goal was
     supported (some say instigated) by the Ethiopian government, which
     was fighting its own secessionists in Eritrea, and the creation of a ‘New
     Sudan’ became the official platform of the SPLM/A.
     This split at the foundation of the SPLA had two broad consequences.
     The first was that it failed to create a united southern movement, and
     fighting broke out between the main camp of the SPLA and the mainly
     Nuer adherents of Samuel Gai Tut. The SPLA was never, as some suggested,
     simply a Dinka army, but the proximity of the Nuer to the Ethiopian
     border meant that fighting quickly degenerated into a fight between the
     frontier Nuer and the SPLA, and this gave Khartoum the opportunity to
     support the disaffected Anyanya II remnants and transform them into the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors first of the tribal militias it deployed to counter the SPLA’s infiltration of

(www.riftvalley.net).