On the night of July 7, seven American diplomats in Juba left a
farewell dinner early and were headed back to the U.S. Embassy, anxious
to avoid the city’s deepening chaos, when their two-car convoy was
ambushed by the South Sudanese presidential guard of Salva Kiir.
South Sudanese troops fired between 50 and 100 rounds at the two
armored SUVs as soon as they passed the presidential palace. No one in
either vehicle, which included James Donegan, the second-highest ranking
U.S. official in South Sudan, was hurt or killed in the attack, but it
wasn’t for a lack of trying: Three separate clusters of South Sudanese
soldiers unloaded on the unarmed diplomats’ vehicles. Eventually, a U.S.
Marine rapid response team from the embassy had to fetch three of the
waylaid Americans and their South Sudanese driver.
State Department officials provided Foreign Policy
with conflicting accounts of whether the department had conducted a
formal investigation into the incident, with one official saying it
hadn’t, and another saying it had carried out some form of
investigation. But both officials said they have demanded South Sudan
carry out an investigation and hold those responsible to account. The
State Department has also downplayed the role of the South Sudanese in
targeting U.S. diplomats, saying there was no way to know whether Kiir’s
presidential guard knew who they were shooting at.
“We do not believe our vehicles and personnel were specifically targeted,” a State Department official told FP.
“I think we can speak with certainty the people in the convoy did not
identify themselves necessarily to the soldiers or say that it was an
American convoy.”
The State Department’s view reflects deepening concern that South
Sudan’s government and rebel leaders may be losing control over their
own forces. But multiple sources with knowledge of the incident say the
target was crystal clear. The front windshields of the two armored SUVs
held laminated cards emblazoned with the American flag. In plain sight
were diplomatic license plates with the number 11, a well-known calling
card in Juba that proclaims the world’s reigning superpower is passing
through town. It was sheer good fortune, those sources said, that the
incident didn’t end in a bloody diplomatic tragedy.
The State Department’s reluctance to publicly finger Kiir’s forces
for targeting Americans came as the United States was seeking the South
Sudanese leader’s agreement for the deployment of 4,000 additional U.N.
peacekeepers to restore security in the capital. U.S. officials are
concerned that South Sudan’s warring rivals are increasingly losing
control over their own troops. Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, led a U.N. Security Council tour of Juba over the
weekend, which highlighted the attacks against U.N. peacekeepers and
civilians, including American aid workers, as well as the need for
accountability for human rights violators.
Power made no mention of the incident in her public remarks. But in a
face-to-face meeting over this past weekend with Kiir, “Ambassador
Power very forcefully raised the threat to U.S. citizens and the
specific incident in which U.S. diplomatic vehicles had been fired upon
by government military personnel, expressing her grave concern. There is
no justification for such an incident,” her spokesman, Kurtis Cooper,
said.
The world has long been a dangerous place for U.S. diplomats; the
deadly assault on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012
cost four Americans their lives and still reverberates in this year’s
presidential election.
But South Sudan was supposed to be different. It is a friendly
country whose birth Washington helped midwife, with no Islamist
terrorists and a president who has been to the White House and who cherishes
the Stetson cowboy hats that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and
George W. Bush gave him. What’s more, the United States has given more
than $1.7 billion in humanitarian assistance since South Sudan fell into civil war in December 2013, including $138 million just last month.
But the attack on the convoy coincided with a surge in anti-American
and anti-U.N. sentiment of late. Washington has pressed Kiir to accept a
power-sharing agreement with his bitter rival, former Vice President
Riek Machar. Government troops have rampaged against other foreign
diplomats, U.N. officials, and international aid workers, including one
especially brutal gang-raping of foreigners in July at the Terrain hotel facility.
“I think this is not accidental,” said Cameron Hudson, a former CIA
and State Department official who has advised three U.S. special envoys
to Sudan. Hudson, who currently runs the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s genocide prevention program, suspects Kiir and his supporters
want to drive prying Western eyes out of the country in order to better
prosecute the war against Machar. He said the recent attacks on
foreigners appear to be part of a concerted campaign.
“If you connect the dots — this is a way to signal, ‘We don’t want
you here, and you need to get out of our way so we can conduct whatever
sort of scorched-earth campaign we’d like against our political and
ethnic enemies,'” Hudson told FP. Indeed, several American diplomats withdrew from South Sudan in the days following the July 11 incident.
On Wednesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will hold an
inquiry into the recent violence in South Sudan, including the Terrain
assault. According to a report
by The Associated Press, which cited interviews with multiple witnesses
on the ground, uniformed South Sudanese troops singled out Americans
for abuse and beatings, shot and killed a local reporter, carried out
mock executions, and gang-raped several foreign women.
The assault on the American convoy occurred when tensions were
already running high in Juba. Troops loyal to the country’s warring
factions had been exchanging gunfire for days. Fighting broke out
between rival camps near the presidential palace. South Sudanese troops
fired on an unarmored U.N. vehicle transporting UNESCO’s top official,
Salah Khaled, was shot in his left thigh, his hand, and his arm while
driving in an unarmored vehicle.
Anxious that Juba was set to explode, Molly Phee, the U.S. ambassador
to South Sudan, phoned Donegan and six other American diplomats at the
restaurant and ordered them to cut short a farewell dinner for a
colleague over beer and Indian food. The Americans’ two armored SUVs
were passing by the palace when more than half a dozen presidential
guards stationed at a checkpoint pulled them to the side of the road.
Brandishing AK-47 assault rifles, they yelled at the Americans in a mix
of Arabic and Dinka, South Sudan’s main indigenous language. At one
point, the soldiers tried to force one of the car doors open, prompting
the South Sudanese driver in the lead vehicle to floor it.
The second car followed as the guards opened fire from behind at both
vehicles, forcing Donegan’s car to swerve into a parked car, which
happened to be owned by a senior South Sudanese national security
official. The trail car whizzed past, sideswiping Donegan’s vehicle as
it barreled down the main thoroughfare before turning onto CPA Road —
named after the U.S.-brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement — and racing
back to the U.S. Embassy. A second group of more than half a dozen
South Sudanese troops, dressed in government military uniforms,
unleashed a barrage of fire at the Americans. A third cluster of armed
soldiers farther along the escape route sprayed the speeding American
vehicles.
But Donegan’s vehicle had been badly crippled, temporarily stalling
as South Sudanese soldiers fired into its tinted windows. The driver got
the car restarted but could only hobble down the road, since two tires
had blown out. They made the turn at CPA Road before coming to a second
and final stop, fortunately out of sight of their would-be assailants.
Donegan and his colleagues waited on the suddenly quiet road for 10 to
15 minutes, before the Marines arrived and brought them back to the
embassy.
Following the attack, Phee phoned South Sudan’s top national security
officials, including the head of the presidential guard, to “ask them
what the hell was going on and to stop it,” according to a senior State
Department official. The next morning she went to site of the attack,
took a photo of the bullet marks on the passenger window of Donegan’s
vehicle, and called Kiir’s office to demand an immediate meeting. During
the meeting, Phee showed Kiir the photograph and warned him that the
attack marked a clear sign that “you’ve lost control” and “If you don’t
get it together it’s all going to fall apart.”
There is no evidence that Kiir personally ordered the attack on
American officials, and some observers note that South Sudan’s troops
are notoriously undisciplined. But Kiir and his top advisors have helped
fan the flames of anti-American and anti-U.N. sentiment through a
propaganda campaign that portrays Washington and the United Nations as
showing favoritism toward Machar, who leads the insurgency.
“I think South Sudan’s leadership, from the president on down,
generally thought the U.S. would support it in the civil war,” said John
Prendergast, the founder of the Enough Project, which promotes human
rights in Africa. As reality dawned on Kiir and his circle, rhetoric
turned uglier, and actions escalated. Prendergast says anti-U.S.
sentiment seems to be coming from the Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting and the press secretary’s office.
“In an environment of vilification of the U.S. and U.N., coupled with
total impunity for the actions of soldiers, incidents and escalation
were inevitable,” he said. “Some soldiers already predisposed to
paranoia about U.S. intentions might act more aggressively in a
proactive way, even if their actions weren’t approved from the top.”
It is not the first time that Kiir’s fighters have shot at an
American diplomat. In November 2014, a South Sudanese soldier fired at
an armored U.S. Embassy vehicle carrying Charles Twining, the then-U.S.
ambassador. Twining told a reporter at the time that he was grateful to be traveling in a vehicle with bulletproof glass.
The July 7 shooting coincided with an upsurge in government attacks
on foreigners, including American nationals. The previous month, forces
from South Sudan’s National Security Service fired on a Norwegian
delegation leaving its diplomatic compound. And the attack on the
Terrain hotel facility, in which American nationals were singled out for
abuse, came just four days after the convoy ambush.
The United States has for years been playing a central role in South
Sudan’s drive for independence and its quest for stability afterward.
Former President George W. Bush’s administration brokered a 2005 peace
deal that ended a two-decade civil war and which culminated in South
Sudan’s independence in July 2011. Susan Rice, then-U.S. ambassador to
the U.N., and former Secretary of State Colin Powell led the U.S.
delegation to Juba to celebrate independence.
But relations have grown increasingly strained since December 2013,
when Kiir’s presidential guards, drawn primarily from the Dinka ethnic
group, rampaged through the streets of Juba, slaughtering forces loyal
to Machar, who draws much of his backing from South Sudan’s ethnic Nuer.
The widespread killing of Nuer soldiers and civilians by organized
military personnel was carried out “in furtherance of a [state] policy,”
according to the findings
of the African Union Commission of Inquiry on South Sudan’s final
report. Machar’s forces retaliated by targeting ethnic Dinka in Bor and
other towns.
Under pressure from Washington and other countries, Kiir and Machar
signed a peace deal in August 2015, but the pact only set the stage for
some of the conflict’s worst violence. Machar returned to Juba in late
April this year along with many of his forces to form a transitional
government. But the peace process unraveled spectacularly on July 8, the
day after the convoy shooting, when rival forces began battling in
Juba, even as Kiir and Machar were meeting at the presidential palace.
Forces loyal to Kiir ultimately attacked U.N. installations housing
tens of thousands of civilians and carried out the Terrain hotel
facility rampage. Machar, meanwhile, fled South Sudan with the aid of
U.N. peacekeepers.
U.S. officials are struggling to prevent their South Sudan policy
from spinning off the rails. Over the weekend, Power cautiously welcomed
Kiir’s apparent commitment to support a U.S.-backed plan to deploy
4,000 additional U.N. peacekeepers in Juba to stem the violence.
But by Monday, the agreement was already in doubt. South
Sudan’s information minister, Michael Makuei Lu
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/06/dinner-drinks-and-a-near-fatal-ambush-for-u-s-diplomats/
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