South Sudan: Rebel Leader Did Not Return Because He Tried to Bring Laser Missiles With Him

For two days, reporters have crowded outside the airport in Juba, South Sudan, waiting for the country’s former vice president-turned-rebel leader Riek Machar to return to the capital.

Now, for the second day in a row, rebel spokesman William Ezekiel had bad news for them. Machar would not be arriving due to “issues relating to logistics,” he said Tuesday morning. According to a long-awaited peace deal both he and his rival, President Salva Kiir, signed in August, Machar must return to the capital to claim his seat as first vice president.

Ezekiel did not elaborate, but South Sudan’s Ministry of Information said in a written statement that Machar had “called off his arrival indefinitely.”

According to the ministry, the rebel’s flight was blocked because Machar insisted on bringing back “an arsenal of arms…anti-tanks, laser-guided missiles, and heavy machine guns.”

The statement went on to say that a large contingent of rebel forces loyal to Machar have been slowly trickling back into the capital over the past few weeks, and that he “does not need any additional armed forces or arms in Juba.” (The deal allows Machar’s troops to come back to the capital, but Machar has still expressed concern that his forces will not be enough to protect him if Kiir’s forces revolt.)

It was not immediately clear where Machar would be coming from this week, although he has spent some of South Sudan’s bloody two-year civil war in Ethiopia and was expected to fly in from Gambella, on the Ethiopian border.

More than 50,000 people have been killed and millions more forced from their homes since fighting broke out in the young country in December 2013, just two years after Washington helped it successfully break away from Sudan to establish itself as an independent state in 2011. The fighting, which was based partially on rumors that Machar was plotting a coup against Kiir, pitted the two governmental leaders, who hail from different ethnic groups, against each other. Large-scale fighting between Kiir’s native Dinka and Machar’s native Nuer ensued, and it took extensive negotiations and countless peace deals to even reach August’s shaky agreement, which would restore Machar to the first vice presidency and force the two to work side-by-side.

After months of back-and-forth talks, Machar announced this month that he would finally return to the capital on April 18. But he has also repeatedly cited security concerns as a reason not to return to Juba, where he fears that Kiir’s sympathizers could target him. In an October visit to Washington, Machar told Foreign Policy that he was under intense pressure from the United States to return to the capital, and that to do so would be to return to a “killing ground.”

“He wants me to be slaughtered by Salva, then I would be a good person,” he said, referencing a conversation he had with Donald Booth, the American envoy to South Sudan, who he said urged him to follow through with the deal and make his way to Juba.

Now, two days after his expected arrival, the South Sudanese government is skeptical he ever intended to follow through with the promise he would be be back this month.

“I will only believe it when I see him at Juba airport,” Information Minister Michael Makuei told reporters on Tuesday.

Photo credit: ZACHARIAS ABUBEKER/AFP/Getty Images