Ahistorical Rhetoric: Oil, Ethnicity and Genocide in South Sudan

Summary If one analyses the genocide in South Sudan from the definition by Travis (2008: 01), according to which genocide is “often the outcome acts designed to enrich a dominant racial, ethnic, religious or political group at the expense of smaller, weaker, or supposedly ‘inferior’ groups that possess valuable lands, monies, labour, or other resources”, it is possible to argue that the current genocide in South Sudan cannot be simplistically reduced to the failure of the newest state on the African continent to establish a functional bureaucracy or reduce it simply to ethnic conflict between the Dinka and Nuer. The genocide in South Sudan is a product of a process that has a long and complex history but one which has been ignored because those who can take meaningful action are benefiting from the mass murder as an economic policy. This article rejects the current media agenda which downplays the oil factor as a key contributor to the ongoing genocide, while amplifying the ethnicity card as an escapist way of exonerating the international failure to deal with and recognise a catastrophic genocide executed purely for economic reasons.