‘We must divide everything equally or we would all die’ – a former child soldier on food insecurity and the ETR

South Sudanese lawyer Ajak Mayol Bior can be easily located these days. He spends most of his time at his apartment or his chambers, or at the courts of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, whether that’s the High Court, the Court of Appeals or, on rare and dignified occasion, the Supreme Court.

As child however, Bior was much harder to locate. He was taken from his remote village in the early nineties and became an itinerant child soldier; one of the famed Lost Boys of Sudan. Ajak Bior was born sometime late in the seventies or early eighties (he, like most South Sudanese men born in that era, has no birth certificate) in a remote village in Bor State near the White Nile River. Born into a Dinka family, Bior’s family lived traditionally, with the river, river delta and pastoral land of the famed Dinka cows being sacred ground; the wellsprings from which all Dinka life flowed.

Access to the river and pastoral land was highly regulated by traditional law, expressing the ideal relationship with the people, the river and the cows. Although not codified, traditional Dinka law was highly complex and systemic, with marriage protocols, land and property disputes, food and water distribution, and other important parts of Dinka life strictly regulated.  These traditional laws remain in common use in South Sudan today, and even now when Bior is in court in Juba he sometimes uses a mix of statutory, common and traditional law, which is accommodated by the South Sudanese courts.

In Ajak Mayol Bior’s childhood however, all law was eventually usurped by a brutal war partially fought about law. On one side was the northern federal army of Sudan, commanded mostly by Muslims and hoped to bring sharia to the south. On the other was the militias of the south, who were mostly Dinka and Nuer tribesmen who wanted to keep their traditional system of law.

In the nineties the war was total, pushing communities from their rivers, pastoral lands and traditional homes, killing hundreds of thousands of people and sending children into combat.

Ajak Mayol Bior estimates he was perhaps ten or eleven years of age when he was conscripted. Bior fought as part of the Jesh al Ahmr or Red Army, a liberationist force of predominantly child soldiers fighting alongside the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army or SPLA, now the most significant and influential element in the South Sudanese government.

It is estimated that at its peak the Red Army numbered tens of thousands of boys, and that thousands of these conscripts died during the war. Bior says that many of these deaths were due to malnutrition or starvation, and that hunger was a significant driver for the conscripts, who were detached from traditional food chains and often left to try to find their own sustenance.

‘That was a major part of our existence,’ says Bior. ‘We’d be in the bush and we would be starving and sometimes we had to go to an enemy town and attack to survive. We had to fend for ourselves and it was very hard. We had to protect ourselves and band together and work together,’ he says. ‘We must divide everything equally or we would all die.’

One of the key findings from the Ecological Threat Report 2021 was that a scarcity of resources combined with food insecurity can form a vicious cycle in which the depletion of resources and violent disputes reinforce one another.