Abducted When a Child, She Now Seeks to Spur Unity among South Sudanese

By Okech Francis

Rebecca Agau Deng was plucked from her father’s house one night about 3 decades ago and became a victim of abduction and trafficking.

A group of armed youths stormed her village in Jonglei, snatching her from her mother’s hands, killing some members of her family, and running off to Pibor with both her and cattle seized from her home.

The woman who witnessed such a gross traumatic experience at that tender age is now the ambassador of tolerance, working towards peaceful co-existence among all communities in South Sudan.

Agau is the founder and chief executive officer of “Out of Chronic Hatred,” a new local national organization seeking to ensure South Sudanese from all ethnicities live peacefully together.

“Mine is just a voluntary voice to call on the people of South Sudan to live their day to day lives free of hatred in whatever they do, in their individual lives, in services, they should embrace a spirit of harmony in their day to day lives,” Agau told The Dawn in an interview.

Her plan is a long call for intervention in a country coming out of many years of crisis which has caused disunity among the people.

In the first instance, the 22 year old war for the independence of South Sudan and the political crisis which began in 2013 both created cracks among communities, spreading hatred and divisions between families, neighbors, communities and destroying social and cultural fabrics built by the communities in South Sudan for centuries.

Acts of intercommunal violence through child abductions, cattle raiding and revenge killings replaced the traditions of harmony and peaceful coexistence among communities over the crisis periods.

South Sudan however is currently implementing a peace agreement which was reached in 2018 and helped pacify the country.

It is expected to yield elections this year and culminate into a peaceful democratic transfer of governance when it ends in February 2025.

Agau is using her “Out Of Chronic Hatred” organization to bring together all communities in South Sudan in the embrace of unity that cuts across tribes and instill a united sense of nationalism in developing the country.

“A country free of hatred can only be achieved with instilling tolerance,” Agau said.

“The wars have instilled a lot of hatred in us. There is need to transit from the war thoughts, the war environment,” she said.

“To achieve a hatred free South Sudan we must build tolerance, patience, empathy, and respect for race, gender and in any other way. Even in our conflict we need to apply patience, in our dialogues we just have to look at tolerance.”

“The war has led to loss of cultural identity, people went out of the country as refugees and came up with different cultures and these cultures were not harmonized,” she said.

Wars have been destabilizing factors since immemorial and all over the world, statements of intent for peace have been made through efforts of people who prioritized unity of all people, like Agau.

In China for instance, the developing country we see today also suffered a major war, World War 2 like the rest of the world.

But it’s developing so much more economically, the success which has been the result of more than four decades of opening up to the outside world and reforming domestically. The initial economic reforms were fundamentally designed to unlock China’s potential and there was a domestic economy policy closely tied to its foreign policy which is the “the search for a peaceful environment for China’s modernization.”

Unity was the key in all the undertaking both domestically and internationally.  After the war, under Mao Zedong, the country’s leaders set about modernizing and industrializing China. But this modernity had to have a flavor of unity and trust among everyone. This took the shape of rural land reform, collectivizing agriculture, and investments in urban industries. By mid- century, some of these efforts had improved the standard of living for the average Chinese person. Poverty declined, literacy rates rose, and educational opportunities increased.

And according to Agau, South Sudan can partake of unity which comes through tolerance to ensure peace and prosperity.

“In this aspect we need to come out of that war and into a humble way of life and we can get this only through tolerance were we will all respect ourselves,” Agau said.

“South Sudan must create another identity and we can only achieve that through tolerance.”