SR_493-Conflict and Crisis in South Sudan’s Equatoria Cover

Without Equatorian involvement in the negotiations, the peace talks merely mediated the power struggle between the government and the SPLM/A-IO and neglected to address the deeper national crisis.5 This structure funneled the political process toward a centralized power-sharing model between elites and individuals rather than among regions or communities. [...] Atrocities committed by government forces and Mathiang Anyoor on the one side, and road- side ambushes targeting Dinka civilians on the other, sharpened the stark ethnic nature of the conflict.13 The government’s extreme violence, whether as a top-down tactic or a product of Kiir’s ill-trained youth recruits, laid the groundwork for the ongoing insurgency by deeply polarizing the community against. [...] The structure of the talks largely replicated the same power-sharing formula found in the failed 2015 peace deal, which Cirillo had criticized for failing to address the root causes of the conflict. [...] (See the box on page 10 for a discussion of the parallels between South Sudan’s Kokora peri- od and the contemporary crisis.) However, the need for a national political alliance has forced many Equatorians to promote less disruptive variants of decentralization and devolution instead.29 These demands for federalism, in general, equate to less power in the hands of a central govern- ment, and more. [...] The Equatorian armed forces of the SPLM/A-IO are now just a fraction of the forces that mo- bilized at the peak of the crisis.