Playing Angry Birds with an Exiled Rebel

The South Sudanese militia leader General Johnson Oloyni on what’s next in the fight for Shilluk self-determination.

FEBRUARY 6, 2024

I said he would never come. I told my colleagues — a motley collection of fellow conflict researchers — that I would quit my job if General Johnson Olonyi came to Juba, despite his claims at the beginning of 2023 that he was indeed on his way to South Sudan’s capital. I felt confident about my wager, and not only because I don’t actually have a job.

Why would Olonyi, a man-mountain over seven feet tall, one of South Sudan’s most notorious rebels and the defender of his people, depart the safety of his encampment on the Sudanese border and come to Juba to sit awkwardly on the faux Louis XIV furniture beloved of its politicians — the very people who had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Olonyi’s Shilluk community? He would be walking into a prison, one veteran South Sudanese politician told me in March 2023, his eyes gleaming.

I began doing research in South Sudan in 2010, a year before the region voted to secede and become the world’s newest nation. For as long as I have worked in the country, Olonyi has been at war. In 2010, he and a few thousand men took up arms in protest against attacks on the Shilluk carried out by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) — South Sudan’s national army. Three years later, when the country plunged into civil war, Olonyi took the government’s side against the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Opposition (SPLA-IO) and cleared the rebels from Shilluk territory in his home state of Upper Nile. His success threatened politicians from the Dinka (South Sudan’s largest ethnic group), who conspired to push him out of government.

The war might have been officially over, but the peace agreement provided the lineaments for new forms of conflict

Forced into rebellion in 2015, Olonyi spent three years contending with attack helicopters and Dinka militias. Government assaults left as much as eighty per cent of the Shilluk population displaced. Olonyi became increasingly desperate. Sources in Upper Nile told me that he executed his captains on the parade ground for the slightest infractions. Olonyi, like the other SPLA-IO commanders, lacked both external support and materiel, and from 2015 to 2018, the government inflicted a series of decisive military defeats on the opposition, which sued for peace. The resulting agreement, brokered in 2018, was effectively a negotiated surrender that saw the leader of the SPLA-IO, Riek Machar, come to Juba to join a transitional administration of rebel fighters and government politicians. Olonyi was also called to Juba for a peace conference in December 2020, but instead chose to remain with his troops, distrustful of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), South Sudan’s ruling party, which had signed many such agreements before, without honoring any of their terms. 

The signing of the agreement should have begun a transitional five year period, leading to elections in 2023. The United Nations heralded the agreement as a great achievement that could bring an end to violence in South Sudan. According to one estimate, nearly 400,000 people had been killed during the civil war. Despite UN hopes, levels of violence in the country increased following the signing of the agreement. The SPLM maintained control of South Sudan by purchasing the loyalty of opposition commanders, who would then defect and fight against their former colleagues. South Sudan became a political marketplace in which violence was leveraged for power. The coterie of politicians around the South Sudanese President, Salva Kiir, ruled by sowing disorder and setting the country’s many commanders against each other. The war might have been officially over, but the peace agreement provided the lineaments for new forms of conflict. 

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The SPLA-IO’s remaining commanders, including Olonyi, were disgruntled. Machar was effectively a prisoner. Yes, he was one of four vice-presidents, but he lived a caged existence in Juba, unable to travel out of the capital, and he had no access to South Sudan’s lucrative oil funds. Machar and the SPLA-IO ministers in government were symbolic figureheads. While they remained in Juba, Kiir could claim the SPLM was committed to peace, while buying off the opposition elsewhere in the country. Olonyi, frustrated with Machar, split from the SPLA-IO in August 2021. Many thought his defection had been orchestrated by the government, and a subsequent agreement between Olonyi and Kiir in January 2022 seemed to prove the conspiracy theory.

Yet Olonyi’s place within the government coalition was unclear. His troops were almost entirely Shilluk, unintegrated into the national army, and for many politicians in Juba, Olonyi remained a threat. He was at once part of the government coalition and a rebel commander, acting independently. His double-life would prove useful to Kiir. While the agreement he had signed with Juba committed him to peace, Olonyi went to war, assaulting SPLA-IO positions during the second half of 2022. The government called these attacks an intra-opposition conflict, thus allowing it to rhetorically insist that it was not in breach of the 2018 peace agreement. This interpretation was a convenient fiction. Government soldiers loaded fuel for Olonyi’s barges at night and passed out weapons at airstrips. Kiir used Olonyi to wage a war against Machar, humiliating him in the capital by causing devastation in the peripheries, while claiming the government had nothing to do with the conflict.

In January 2023, it seemed Olonyi was ready to launch another assault on SPLA-IO forces in Upper Nile, and take back territory claimed by the Shilluk. If the government was instrumentalizing Olonyi, the Shilluk rebel hoped to instrumentalize Juba’s support, and use it to advance his community’s agenda. I was so certain of Olonyi’s impending attack that in March 2023, I wrote a piece about it, confidently titled: “Upper Nile prepares to return to war.” The attack failed to take place, and by April, I was receiving unlikely images of Olonyi draped in red, the color of Kiir’s SPLM. The images were part of a constant barrage of messages, rumors, and phone calls I receive from contacts in South Sudan, and which constitute the lifeblood of my work as a conflict researcher. Olonyi was photographed at his base on the Sudanese border, awkwardly wearing an SPLM baseball cap, behind a group of fighters, rocking red t-shirts, as if they were a stag party preparing for a drunken night in Amsterdam.

The t-shirts had arrived on the border with Jokino Fidele, once Olonyi’s advisor, but who, after betraying his boss, was in the midst of a flourishing second career as a government security operative, responsible for negotiations with the Shilluk rebel leader. Along with the t-shirts, Fidele had allegedly brought an offer from Juba. Doctor Lam Akol, one of Olonyi’s chief Shilluk rivals, was amongst those who had sent me images of the rebel commander. After a decade of rebellion, or so Akol claimed, Olonyi had finally given up his arms and sold out to the government: he was going to Juba to accept Kiir’s petrodollars, even if it meant abandoning the Shilluk to their enemies.

I was doubtful. Olonyi styled himself as the savior of the Shilluk. From 2015 to 2018, a Dinka group had forced the Shilluk from their ancestral land on the east bank of the White Nile. Only Olonyi and his militia had attempted to resist. By 2018, the only Shilluk remaining in Malakal, the capital of Upper Nile state, hunkered down in a UN-protected camp, looking out at their former properties, now occupied by Dinka settlers. The Shilluk residents of the camp had little in the way of possessions, but they cherished the songs they had composed in Olonyi’s honor. Here was a commander, or so they told me, who tried to protect his people. I found it hard to imagine Olonyi abandoning such support for a comfortable sinecure in the capital — even if one could be found. It had surely not escaped Olonyi’s notice that in March 2023, Kiir had appointed a new minister of defense, Chol Thon Balok, the very Dinka general who had led the campaign against the Shilluk. If Olonyi was going to Juba, it would be to sit down with his sworn enemies. 

At one time, I counted no less than forty-eight different armed militias in the country. Some were “briefcase rebels,” as my friend Bol Gatkuoth called them: aspiring young men who made great claims to military strength in the hope that they would boast their way to the negotiating table for future peace agreements.

In April and May 2023, my conversations were full of will-he, won’t-he speculations. On April 22, a senior UN officer sent me a confident message: “Olony [sic] will land in the next 10-15 min in Juba.” A plane did land, but Olonyi was not on it. His failure to arrive in the capital became a running joke amongst some of my South Sudanese friends. On May 13, Olonyi arrived in Malakal and headed to the airport. A plane left for Juba, once again sans Olonyi; the uniforms for his bodyguards had not arrived, and one could not, after all, turn up in the capital without the proper attire. The next day, I received a new batch of photographs. One showed Olonyi on the tarmac in Juba, a head taller than anyone, surrounded by a swirl of security officers and well-wishers. He announced that he was “here for peace,” but told journalists that after five days, he would return to Malakal. Olonyi had finally arrived in Juba; I was unconvinced that he would be allowed to leave.

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South Sudan is full of commanders. Each rebellion — and there have been many — produces a new group of rebel leaders, and many of these leaders appoint themselves as generals. The roots of this phenomenon lie in the long second Sudanese civil war, fought from 1983 to 2005, when Sudan was still one country. The principal opposition group in southern Sudan, the SPLM/A, was less a unified rebel force than a series of independent commanders who taxed and pillaged the populations under their control. To combat the rebels, the Sudanese government didn’t use the national army, but instead outsourced its counter-insurgency to ethnically-organized militia groups, which it supplied with money and materiel. These groups were largely drawn from the Nuer, southern Sudan’s second largest ethnic group, after the Dinka.

In 1983, at the beginning of the civil war, the SPLM released a manifesto, criticizing earlier southern rebel groups as ‘jobbists,’ eager to sell out to the Sudanese government for money or political positions. Those rebels, the SPLM held, simply wanted a piece of the pie, but the point was to bake a new cake: a new Sudan, in which political power was no longer purchased through violence. That was the hope when the second civil war ended in 2005, thanks to a peace agreement signed by the SPLM/A and the Sudanese government. In Juba, the SPLM/A’s commanders took control of the nascent southern Sudanese state. They supplemented pillage with more lucrative rewards derived from donor funds and oil revenues, but remained wedded to a civil-war-era model of politics in which military power could be leveraged for political advantage. In 2006, Kiir used his petrodollars to buy off the largely Nuer militias that Khartoum had used to fight the second civil war. The deal might have temporarily headed off a new conflict, but it consolidated southern Sudan’s status as a political marketplace in which guns bought power. Everyone, it turned out, was a jobbist.

In 2013, only two years after it voted to secede from the north, South Sudan lurched into its own civil war, which set the largely Dinka SPLM/A against the Nuer military leaders that Kiir had bought off only seven years earlier. The country quickly disintegrated, and more and more commanders rebelled. At one time, I counted no less than forty-eight different armed militias in the country. Some were “briefcase rebels,” as my friend Bol Gatkuoth called them: aspiring young men who made great claims to military strength in the hope that they would boast their way to the negotiating table for future peace agreements. The status acquired through their participation in such talks, or so the young men hoped, would enable them to recruit the soldiers they already claimed to have. Since 2018, and the signing of the peace agreement that brought an end to South Sudan’s civil war, other rebel groups, with real forces on the ground, have participated in the lucrative business of acting as the left-hand of the very government they ceaselessly critique as corrupt. Hypocrisy, in war as in politics, is a profitable affair.

You can tell a lot about commanders from where they are housed. Juba’s hotels are heaving with rebels recently bought off by the government, and there are precise hierarchies of habitation.

I had always thought Olonyi was different. While he had allied with both the SPLA and the SPLA-IO during his long tenure as a military leader, his interests always seemed resolutely communitarian: defend Shilluk territory against incursions and ensure Shilluk claims to their ancestral land were respected. Surely, he wasn’t also a jobbist, selling out the Shilluk people for a sinecure in Juba? It was a possibility I took personally. I was the first to chronicle the ethnic cleansing of the Shilluk, for which I was rewarded with death threats and detention. I needed Olonyi to be different. Over the thirteen years I had worked in South Sudan, I’d encountered many of Olonyi’s commanders, but never the man himself. This was my chance.

On a bright morning in August 2023, one of Olonyi’s representatives told me to drive to a Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) compound on the edge of Juba and await further instructions. As I drove out of the city, the shops thinned out, and I could see the Jebel Kujur, the mountain that dominates Juba’s skyline, squatting on the horizon. You can tell a lot about commanders from where they are housed. Juba’s hotels are heaving with rebels recently bought off by the government, and there are precise hierarchies of habitation. Commanders prized for their military forces stay at the suitably Pharaonic Pyramid Hotel. Others are offered less salubrious confines. In 2019, I met one minor rebel leader, Charlie Muong, in a flop house. He had recently defected to the government, and we sat squeezed onto his small bed as he told me about his dreams of power. Soon, he assured me, Kiir will get in touch. The phone stayed silent. All too often, Kiir would lure rebel commanders with promises of positions in Juba. These pied-piper calls would see leaders abandon their troops and sacrifice their local legitimacy as resistance fighters. Once they came to the capital, Kiir’s use for them came to an end, and they would be left to nurse hopes of influence and power that would never be fulfilled. As I drove to meet Olonyi, I wondered if this was to be his fate.

Olonyi’s house, which my sources told me was given to him by Kiir’s feared National Security Service, was at the very edge of Juba. It’s where you would house a commander you wanted to forget. Once I arrived at the SDA compound, I phoned Olonyi’s representative, who told me to take a left down a rough marram road and look out for green military tents next to a white-walled house. It wasn’t difficult to find. The tents felt like a fragment of the conflict in Upper Nile, teleported into Juba. His bodyguards sat on benches or else lolled in the tents, and I could smell the distinct odor of men who had recently woken.

His troops waved me through without so much as a pat-down — unusually lax security for a rebel leader. At the gate of the compound that contained Olonyi’s house I met his representative, an amiable young man known as Dr. Paul, who walked me through a series of grand tents, outfitted as if preparations for a wedding or a political rally were underway, though the compound was bereft of the hangers-on that usually throng the houses of Juba’s VIPs. No one, it seemed clear, was coming to see the general.  

Dr. Paul led me into a small room on the second floor, where Olonyi was spreadeagled on a leather couch, his enormous frame making it seem as if I were standing in a toy-house. Before him, on a glass table, was an empty beer, and another newly opened. We sat in silence for a moment before Dr. Paul, as if answering an unspoken question, said: “we are waiting for the minister to get back to us.” According to the agreement Olonyi had signed with the government in January 2022, his forces were to be integrated — paid wages and given rations — into the SPLA while Shilluk land claims in Upper Nile were to be respected. Yet since Olonyi had arrived in Juba three months earlier, nothing had happened. A U.N. official I had lunched with shortly after arriving in the capital had quietly recounted that Chol Thon Balok, the minister of defense, had told him that the government had no intention of integrating Olonyi’s men. “They have him right where they want him,” the official told me.

I wanted to ask Olonyi why he had walked into a trap. Olonyi, though, was playing Angry Birds on his phone and barely acknowledged my presence. Dr. Paul asked me whether I wanted a beer — a question that was really a statement. Olonyi ordered an attendant to bring me a six-pack and then began to tell me about Jebel Kujur, the mountain that loomed above us, where he had been posted as a child soldier, forty long years ago, while fighting for the SPLM/A. During the twenty-two years of the Sudanese civil war, he said, he had never betrayed the movement. In the 1990s, the SPLM/A had split, with its leading Shilluk commander, Lam Akol, joining a force backed by the Sudanese government. Olonyi declared he would never do such a thing . “In revolution,” he told me, “you must count the days… But some are impatient.”

He said that unlike many commanders, at the war’s end in 2005, he did not go to Juba to reap the spoils of oil revenues, but retired to Atar, his place of birth, in the south of Upper Nile. He farmed. “All I wanted was peace,” he said, as if he were the hero of a western, returning to the quiet he had long craved.

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Olonyi’s repose was interrupted in 2010, after contested elections led to a new wave of violence. Many Shilluk had been displaced during the second Sudanese civil war, and they had returned home to find their land occupied by Dinka settlers, who were intent on consolidating their gains. After the elections, which saw a strong showing for Lam Akol, who had formed his own political party, the SPLA launched punitive raids into Shilluk territory. In response to the assault, many Shilluk commanders rebelled, including Olonyi, who came out of retirement. “They burned my shops,” he said. “My farms. They killed my relatives. They took our land. I could not stand by while my community was attacked.”

Rumors circulated that Olonyi was receiving weapons from the Sudanese government, a story confirmed to me by several sources, including a Sudanese intelligence officer I interviewed in Khartoum in September 2021. “From the beginning,” the officer told me, “Olonyi was a creature of MI,” or Sudanese Military Intelligence. After the signing of the 2005 peace agreement, Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese dictator, had armed spoilers inside southern Sudan, such as Olonyi, who could create chaos and put pressure on Kiir in ongoing negotiations. That Olonyi was instrumentalized by Bashir didn’t lessen my admiration for the man. In war, all the contradictions are true. I believed Olonyi when he told me that he was fighting for the Shilluk people. I was just as certain he had received weapons from Khartoum, though Bashir was assuredly not interested in Shilluk self-determination. Bashir and Olonyi might have been waging the same war, but they were doing so for very different reasons.

In June 2013, under pressure from the Shilluk traditional leadership, Olonyi signed a ceasefire with the SPLM/A, which asked him to go to Juba. Olonyi demurred. “I knew,” he told me, now on his fourth beer, “that I would be arrested.” His force remained in an uneasy détente, stationed on the west bank of the White Nile, in the heart of Shilluk territory. “We didn’t trust them,” Olonyi said. “Fighting cannot be forgiven that easily.” Olonyi’s men spent six months in limbo, neither integrated into the SPLA nor actively fighting against it. Then South Sudan imploded.

Kiir had struggled to maintain control of his fractious coalition since the formation of the South Sudanese state. Increasingly worried about Machar, then his vice-president, in the first half of 2013, Kiir dismissed his entire cabinet. Clashes at the presidential palace in December triggered a conflict that rapidly spread across the country, and which pitted a largely Dinka SPLA against a nascent SPLA-IO, formed by Nuer rebel commanders who had once fought for Khartoum. The civil war that Kiir had effectively bought off in 2006, when he brought the Nuer commanders into the SPLA, was now underway.

Everyone waited to see what Olonyi would do. Both sides made overtures to him, but Olonyi joined the government. The Nuer soldiers who had pillaged Shilluk territory from 2010 to 2013 were doing so again, but now as part of the SPLA-IO. “We had fought them as the SPLA,” Olonyi told me, “and we would fight them as the opposition. I have always fought for the Shilluk people.”

The Nuer were quickly vanquished. Olonyi drove the SPLA-IO out of Shilluk land on the west bank of the White Nile and became a military hero. The only Shilluk areas not under his control were contested territories on the east bank of the White Nile, controlled by Dinka politicians that, sensing Olonyi’s threat, pushed him out of the government coalition. “They assassinated Bwogo,” Olonyi told me, referring to his deputy commander, “they attacked our villages and killed our people, while Juba remained silent.” After clashes between Olonyi’s forces and Dinka militias, Kiir demanded that Olonyi come to Juba, and once again, Olonyi refused. “They burned down my house and attacked my men. In Juba, I would have been arrested,” he said. Olonyi rebelled again shortly after the clashes, before joining his erstwhile enemies, the SPLA-IO.

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From 2015 to 2018, Olonyi fought a guerilla war against the government, but he was outgunned, and half of the Shilluk fled South Sudan for Sudan, as the Dinka militia commanders carried out a campaign of ethnic cleansing. With no regional support and little materiel, the SPLA-IO was routed from much of South Sudan. The 2018 peace agreement was an acknowledgment the opposition had lost. It offered the SPLA-IO sinecures in government, and rebel commanders jockeyed for the few positions available. Olonyi remained on the outside. Kiir demanded that he come to Juba, to swear fealty before receiving a position, but yet again, he refused. “Juba was a trap,” Olonyi said. In August 2021, frustrated with Machar, he split from the opposition. Some said that Olonyi had received a government payoff, while others claimed he had miscalculated. Both might be true. Olonyi withdrew to Khartoum, where South Sudanese rebels traditionally go to receive succor and materiel. He was not welcomed in Sudan’s capital, for regional dynamics had changed since he had fought using Khartoum’s guns. By 2021, Juba and Khartoum had formed a solid pact, based on shared oil revenues. Rebels like Olonyi, once useful to Sudan, were now only atavistic remnants of a prior era. 

Olonyi’s handlers in Sudanese military intelligence pushed him into an agreement with Juba. Its terms — integration for his forces and a guarantee of Shilluk land rights — were a smokescreen for the agreement’s more substantive consequences. The government again supplied Olonyi with money and materiel, enabling him to attack his former allies in the SPLA-IO, pushing them out of Shilluk territory. The opposition unexpectedly rallied, and thousands of young Nuer fighters counterattacked in October-December 2022, moving into the heart of Shilluk territory. Olonyi could do nothing to stem the incursion. It was left to government attack-helicopters to rout the Nuer youth.

For the government, this was the perfect end to the affair. The SPLA-IO had been weakened by Olonyi’s attacks, while the Shilluk commander was humiliated. Throughout the conflict, the government had claimed Olonyi had acted independently. Such rhetoric allowed the government to continue to attack the opposition, while denying any role in the affair. Olonyi had been the government’s invisible hand. Now, with Olonyi weakened and humiliated, he could be treated as invisible.

“And then?” I asked Olonyi, “after the Nuer youth were defeated?” “We were ready to go south and attack Tonga and Atar,” Olonyi told me, naming two ports in the south of Upper Nile under the control of the SPLA-IO. “But the government didn’t let me.” The SPLA occupied his barges, and his government handlers, Olonyi said, told him to go to Juba, “or else.” He didn’t need to say what “else” meant.

Olonyi had hoped to instrumentalize the South Sudanese government to fight for the Shilluk, just as he had used Khartoum. That the government would use him to wage war against the SPLA-IO was an acceptable cost for his victories. Olonyi had miscalculated. Whether or not he intended it, in the end, just like those SPLM politicians who had criticized earlier rebellions for taking pay-offs before accepting petrodollars themselves, Olonyi, too, turned out to be a jobbist. He accepted government money and a new house in Juba as the price for abandoning armed struggle in Upper Nile.

Over the course of our three-hour conversation, Olonyi did not once acknowledge the terms of his imprisonment. He insisted that the government would meet the terms of their agreement. By the end of our talk, he seemed tired of his own voice and frustrated by the small room in which he was entrapped. Olonyi had joined the small army of commanders whose loyalty had been bought by Kiir, and warehoused in Juba. In the rest of the country, disorder reigned, as commanders continued to fight for the government, displacing thousands, while the humanitarian situation careened from bad to worse. As a parting question, I asked Olonyi: “What are you going to do until your men are integrated?” But Olonyi didn’t hear me. The rebel general had opened another beer and returned to playing Angry Birds.

✺ Published in “Issue 13: Order” of The Dial