July 10th 2018 (Nyamilepedia) – South Sudan’s former Chief of General Staff of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), Gen. Paul Malong Awan, said on Monday that the country is under despotism and will not accept peace that seek to divide power between elites in the country.
Malong’s remarks were compiled in a public statement to mark the country’s seventh independence anniversary on Monday.
The former Chief of Staff was responding to the ongoing face to face peace talks between the principles of the main warring parties, Mr. Salva Kiir and Dr. Riek Machar.
The two leaders and other opposition groups met last Saturday in Uganda’s Entebbe, a meeting in which Gen. Malong was excluded.
During the meeting president Yoweri Museveni and Sudan’s Al-Bashir unveiled a power sharing proposal that seeks to establish a government of national unity that would be led by Kiir as the President and deputized by Dr. Machar, Taban and Wani Igga.
“Any so-call peace based on dividing the cake between “our elites and neighbors” will be an unacceptable and intolerable reproduction of current failed state,” Malong said in the statement he issued on Monday.
The former army chief said in the statement that the collapse of the state, South Sudan, will not be addressed by what he refers as “avoidance of addressing the root causes” of the ongoing civil war.
“A state collapse will not be addressed by avoidance of the root causes and addressing structural and crippling weaknesses. And it does not matter where it is going to be signed and who will guarantee it. A failed state and reproduction of a failed state is not a choice for the people of south Sudan,” Malong said.
Malong’s briefing was followed by an unconfirmed reports on Tuesday that the former top SPLA General has been put under house arrest in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.
The report alleged that South Sudan’s National Security Service sealed a deal with their Kenyan counterparts to keep Malong indoors so as to prevent him from interrupting the ongoing peace process.
Malong said the massive injustice, the looting, the corruption and the carnage he mentioned above are caused by President Salva Kiir’s failed leadership.
“These [carnage, war, massive injustice, looting and corruption and tearing apart of the country] are the cause of Salva Kiir’s presidency. This is not the cause that the people of South Sudan will ever yield to nor accept,” he said in the statement.
Malong reiterated the commitment of his South Sudan United Front (SSUF) to the struggle so as to unseat the president whom he accused in March this year of looting the country into absolute bankruptcy.
