Abstract
Reviewed by : Colin McCullough (colinemccullough@gmail.com ), Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
The Republic of South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, has seen a civil war take the lives of somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000 people since it began in December, 2013. The United Nations (UN) cannot provide firm numbers of those who have been killed in this conflict because it has been denied access to areas where violence and massacres have occurred. Another disturbing effect of this ongoing conflict is that, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly four million people, out of a population of 12 million, have been driven from their homes, including more than two million people who have fled to neighbouring countries.
This crisis atmosphere provides the central narrative of Nicholas Coghlan’s book. Coghlan was a long-serving member of Canada’s diplomatic community, arriving in Sudan in 2000 as the head of Canada’s first permanent diplomatic presence in Khartoum. The book provides a roughly chronological account of the author’s time in South Sudan across sixteen chapters and an epilogue, through to his departure in 2016. Coghlan provides insights into what has been happening in South Sudan, and what role Canada has been playing—and can play—in trying to assist there. This work also details the shortfalls that the international community has faced through a lack of coordinated effort, and the challenges caused by South Sudanese ethnic rivalries, their willingness to incorporate armed militias and strongmen into the government and the armed forces when it suits those groups, and the collapse of international oil prices.
Both the beginning and end of Coghlan’s work include direct comparisons between South Sudan’s civil war and Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. The foreword to the book is by retired lieutenant general Roméo Dallaire and Dr Shelly Whitman. They visited Coghlan in May 2015 to help arrange for the release of a group of 300 child soldiers. Dallaire’s presence in the book foregrounds the danger of continued international indifference and unhelpful meddling because Rwanda’s genocide remains the most powerful East African reference point for many Canadians. The book ends by recalling Dallaire’s comment that something is amiss in South Sudan, as it was in Rwanda: “This place smells bad” (247).
Coghlan’s descriptions of his job are insightful and draw the reader into his world. In one of the many glimpses Coghlan provides into life as a diplomat, he describes the process by which in 2012 he became the head of office in Juba, South Sudan, not the ambassador. The ambassadorial title was to be consolidated into the person of the Canadian ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Somalia—who was based in Nairobi, Kenya; not South Sudan—so that no new physical offices would appear on the ledgers at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, a cost that the austerity-minded government of then-prime minister Stephen Harper would not have allowed (25). Coghlan’s book is full of such head-shaking examples of bureaucratic practices gone afoul. His insistence that more could be done with practices and processes that respond to the needs of Canada’s various embassies overseas provides some of the most stirring content of the book.
The book is at its strongest in Coghlan’s astute and acerbic descriptions of life in South Sudan. At the start of chapter four, for example, there is a delightful description of why Juba International Airport should be considered the world’s worst (52). In this and other descriptions, Coghlan is able to capture the smells and sights of the locales, which helps ground the work in South Sudan. The characters he describes—an endless series of policemen, most of whom are bad-tempered, or baggage handlers who are interested in finding only the most intimate of items—are vivid and accessible. Coghlan’s anecdotes about standing around in the mid-day heat waiting for speeches from political figures who may or may not ever come provide an absurdist, tragicomic tone that makes them a pleasure to read as well. In these passages, one gets a sense of how Coghlan was able to continue working on Canada’s behalf: by doing his best while expecting the worst.
The greatest challenge most readers are likely to face is in tracking the story of South Sudan’s political and military factions. While president Salva Kiir and on-again-off-again vice-president Riek Machar feature prominently, there is a cast of hundreds to this story. Adding more difficulty are the various manifestations of conflict among South Sudan’s Nuer, Dinka, and Shillook peoples. More confusing still are the multiple Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) iterations as groups joined, left, and were reintegrated or expelled as political events unfolded. Coghlan and his editors have attempted to keep all the players and the map of South Sudan they influenced named and appropriately placed, but it is easy to get lost. Readers who are looking to keep these events in better order would be well advised to read the two appendices, a chronology of events in Sudan and a list of acronyms, before wading into Coghlan’s narrative. It would have been more helpful to include these at the start of the work, rather than leaving them as appendices.
Another sour note comes from the lack of detail regarding how the account itself was crafted. Coghlan quotes freely from those who were in South Sudan with him. It would have been useful to know whether all of these quotations came from written correspondence, or if they are based on the author’s recollections. If the latter, was it the case that he kept a journal, or did these remain in his memory years later, when this manuscript was being written? A brief description of the writer’s process in an introduction would have done all that was necessary to solve this shortcoming.
Despite these issues, Coghlan’s work is a useful and often-engaging account of South Sudan’s first traumatic years. The work of Canada’s diplomats in places like South Sudan deserves more attention, and hopefully books like this will continue to shed light on the good, bad, and ugly sides of this world.