Juba — The leadership of the 15-month old nation, South Sudan, has announced its plan to organise a first-ever comprehensive peace and national reconciliation conference to try and heal the mental wounds that have visibly divided some of the communities over the years.
The conference which is planned to convene in April 2013 in the national capital, Juba, will draw together hundreds of participants from the top leaderships in the national capital, Juba, as well as from the ten states in the country.
President Salva Kiir Mayardit will address the leaders on this daunting task to forgo the past and focus on the future, which has been a challenging situation still facing the underdeveloped country 15 months after independence.
Vice President, Riek Machar Teny, on Saturday explained the prevalence of trauma which he said is still haunting leaders and communities in the country, locking them in mental wars in their minds.
In the first consultative preparatory meeting for the planned the conference on Saturday, which he chaired and involved relevant government institutions and international NGOs, the second powerful man in the new state expressed the burning need to address the trauma and divisions.
“South Sudan has gone through a violent past which has caused mental barriers with some still fighting wars in their minds,” he told the preparatory meeting in the Council of Ministers hall on Saturday, adding that “the country should reconcile with its own past.”
“People should accept the past even if not necessarily forgetting it and come to terms with it,” he further advised.
Political differences among politicians in South Sudan dating back to early 1980s and during the North-South war with its current neighbour Sudan have had played part in inter-communal conflicts particularly when such political differences were misunderstood and generated into tribal conflicts fitting some highly illiterate rural communities from which such political rivals hailed.
Machar in August last year became the first senior political leader to initiate the post-independence reconciliation process by voluntarily apologizing to the Dinka Bor community for his past political differences with the late founder of the SPLM/A, John Garang de Mabior, in a split in 1991, which also violently affected the neighbouring Bor-Dinka and Lou-Nuer communities in particular and the wider Dinka and Nuer communities in general.