ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the post-war status of Red Army veterans and the continued recruitment of underaged soldiers by the SPLA, despite disarmament, demilitarisation, and reintegration (DDR) programmes supported by the United Nations. Parallel to this building of national security forces, senior officials continued to represent the war-time Red Army as having been a non-military initiative aimed at providing education. The chapter also revisits the so-called Lost Boys, the Red Army veterans who fled to northwestern Kenya following the overthrow of the Ethiopian president, Mengistu Haile Mariam, in 1991 and the loss of the SPLA’s bases in Ethiopia. Recent legal cases have seen South Sudanese former child soldiers who emigrated to the United States denied citizenship on the grounds that they fought with a ‘terrorist organisation,’ the SPLA. These rulings are despite acknowledgement that the individuals were taken by force as children by the SPLA. It also would appear to run counter to U.S. foreign policy which, over several administrations, supported the SPLA in its war against northern Sudan and, following Col. John Garang’s death in 2005, South Sudan’s quest for independence.
