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What it means to liberate a country
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By Zechariah Manyok Biar
July 2, 2011 — The formal announcement of the Republic of South Sudan
is less than a week away from now. It is generating both the feeling
of triumph and the feeling of the upcoming challenges. The upcoming
challenges would need the change of our mindset if we are to overcome
them and govern this country in a way that will satisfy its citizens.
Misconceptions about the meaning of liberation will have to be
corrected.
Those of us who participated in the arms liberation of South Sudan
seem to believe that we are entitled to everything even what does not
fall in our legally defined ownership. Some people use the name of
liberation as a tool for silencing voices that do not support their
individual interests. The question they are supposed to ask themselves
is what it really means to liberate a county?
The real liberation means that people will have freedom to kick you,
the liberator, out of their constitutionally defined property if they
can legally prove that they own it. The real liberation means that
people will have the freedom to question you when you try to force
them do what they think is not appropriate to do. The real liberation
means that people will have the right to determine how they want to be
governed—that is, they will reject and condemn a behavior that the law
defines as illegal.
Today, South Sudanese who express the above mentioned principles of
freedom are seen as traitors. Some people question other citizens to
clarify where they were during the liberation war. Of course, not
everybody participated in the war, but that does not mean they would
not know what their legal rights is. Respect for liberators is one
thing and legal ownership of property and the rights to determine how
one should be governed is quite another. A respect is not something
that one demands; it is a voluntary choice of those who want to
respect you.
The irony of intimidating people into respecting you as a liberator is
this: people who cannot say no to what they do not like are not really
liberated. People feel liberated when they can freely debate issues to
prove their points right or wrong. People feel liberated when they can
go to court and get their justice done convincingly. If a liberator
silences people in the name of liberation, then he or she is telling
them that they need a second liberation.
It could be true that liberators should be given special respect, but
that does not mean they should coerce people who never participated in
the liberation. These are the people that they liberated.
If the liberators were just entitled to anything they put their hands
on, then why don’t we think today about those who lost their lives
because of the liberation of this country? Do we even care how their
children live? Who is the real hero between the living liberator and
the dead one? Is it not the one who died for the freedom of those who
are enjoying freedom while still alive?
The only way of rewarding the dead liberators, I think, is to let the
living (who might not even have bothered to participate in the arms
liberation) enjoy the freedom achieved through arms liberation.
In the Republic of South Sudan, personal interest must be separated
from national pride because it soils it. We must follow the law and
its definition of what our rights are. Being a liberator is not a
right, it is a duty.
In my next article, I will take on those who mistreat others in the
name of property ownership when in the real sense they are also
thieves. Area belonging does not give one the right to claim
everything. Those who do such things are not different from those who
use liberation as a tool for achieving their selfish individual
interests.
Zechariah Manyok Biar, BA. Edu., MACM, MSSW. He can be reached at
[email protected]
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