Civil War
During the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) Paulino Matiep Nhial became an Anyanya II leader in the Western Upper Nile (now Unity) state, supported by the Sudan Government against the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Based in the garrison town of Mayom, Paulino held a strategic position, preventing SPLA from Bahr el Ghazal to the west from attacking the oilfields. In September 1988 Riek Machar's SPLA forces captured Mayom. In cooperation with army officer Omar al Bashir (soon to lead a coup and become President of Sudan) Paulino recaptured Mayom from the SPLA early in 1989. A report on refugees fleeing northward from Mayom and other communities in April 1993 described how they were robbed on their few belongings by Arab militias. One man was killed from trying to keep his remaining money, about US$200.
Mayom was the base for the South Sudan Unity Army (SSUA) that Matiep formed early in 1998, incorporating his former Anyanya II and South Sudan Defense Force (SSDN) Bul Nuer forces. The SSUA was supported by the Government of Sudan. In September 1999 commander Peter Gadet Yak of the SSDN mutinied, going over to the SPLA, and on 29 September shelled Mayom, causing further flight of civilians to Block 5A in the east of the state. A report from 2000 described Mayom as "a decimated village within the Talisman oil concession" and said that the government of Sudan was no longer allowing humanitarian aid flights to land.
Read more about this topic: Mayoum
Famous quotes by civil war:
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)