Wrestling For Peace in South Sudan

South Sudan remains on the brink of war with Sudan; but it also struggles with internal fighting between tribal groups. So now one former Lost Boy, Peter Biar Ajak, is hoping to institutionalize the sport of wrestling to calm the violence. He speaks with anchor Aaron Schachter.

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Aaron Schachter : I am Aaron Schachter and this is The World. The two Sudanese are both making news at the Olympics. This week a runner from Sudan in the North, reportedly walked into a London Police station seeking asylum. South Sudan isn’t officially represented at the games. The country is only a year old and it doesn’t have a national Olympic committee yet. But South Sudanese runner Gorav Mariene has been given permission to compete as an independent athlete. Another big sport in South South Sudan is wrestling. Now one man there wants to use the traditional sport to try to reduce the violence flaring inside the new country, Peter Biar Ajak is on the line with us from Juba south Sudan. Mr Ajak you have a pretty stunning story of escaping the brutal civil war when you were a kid yeah?

Peter Biar Ajak: Absolutely, when the war intensified in South Sudan. the government of Sudan started to attacking civilians so a lot of the villages were destroyed and there was a huge displacement to civilians we went to Ethiopia, stayed in those camps for quite some time then we came back to Sudan and just walked around through Kenya, until we eventually arrived in the United States. I ended up in the United States as one of the lost boys of Sudan that came as part of a program in 2001.

Schachter: Right, and you not only ended up in the United States, but at Harvard University

Biar Ajak: That is correct indeed. I was very privileged to have that opportunity

Schachter: Since then you’ve also consulted for the World Bank and worked around the world with NGO’s now you are a major promoter of wrestling. How did than happen?

Biar Ajak: While we were in the US and looking at the things back home. There was and increasing in the tribal violence within South Sudan Amongst South Sudanese communities, and you see these things going beyond just the normal tradition of cattle raiding to attack on women and children that were quite devastating. So we thought of what can we do to sort of encourage peace. If you look on South Sudan specially in the rural areas there isn’t really much to do for those young man who are in the cattle camps. So the idea to bring wrestling in, we look at it as one skill that people already have and we think from the experience in the United States, being able to watch the different sports in the United States we thought we could form a league in which we could commercialize this innate talent and quite distinctive to our country

Schachter: In a way it’s an old story. You have a bunch of kids with time on their hands, who might otherwise get into trouble if they weren’t doing this. wrestling on this case

Biar Ajak: Absolutely, the best part about it is that they compensate for the opportunity cost, because we pay them while they come to wrestle and they get to meet each other which of course is quite unique in our country

Schachter: Now you talk about cattle wrestling as one problem, but there is also considerable violence beyond that, specially inter tribal, which as you say the wrestling is one way to prevent, because kids are meeting each other who wouldn’t otherwise get together. Can you talk a little bit about the nature of that problem

Biar Ajak: Well you see in general this is one of the consequences of our later civil war. You look before that era of civil war, there wasn’t much violence going on across the tribes of South Sudan, because they have lived there for quite some time. So with the civil war and even at the end of the war in 2005. The government of Sudan continued to promote these ethnic conflicts among different groups in south Sudan to discredit South Sudan. and to make an argument that South Sudan would be a country that couldn’t govern itself. At the same time the issues of economic opportunity and access are really issues, because most of these young man are unemployed, they don’t have any other skills that they could use to get job anywhere else. so these problem there is now mixed with politics and you see during 2007, 2008, 2009, the huge wave of violence that was going beyond cattle wrestling.

Schachter: And peter why wrestling?, is that kind of South Sudan’s National Sport, like baseball is in America for example

Biar Ajak: I think so, because the problem with south Sudan as you very well know, very little is developed here. But when you go all over around, even when you go up to Nuba Mountains you find kids and everybody wrestling, this is a traditional sport. And is actually founded in the culture of the people themselves it relates to basically the economic activity of many different tribes in South Sudan, which is cattle industry, people eat the meat, they drink the milk and they wrestle. And when you look at it also it is a sport that don’t need anything else to be added to it, For example with basketball, you need to build basketball courts. With wrestling you don’t really need to do anything because people just wrestle on the ground. So our main challenge was actually creating the rules, harmonizing the rules across many different tribal groups, and across many different states.

Schachter: You talk about paying wrestlers to participate. So this is obviously a business initiative of yours. Where is the money coming from?

Biar Ajak: Initially when we did it, we were raising this money ourselves, and the idea was that as we made this games. People would actually buy tickets to come and watch, but in our country one thing we realized early on was that people were not prepared to pay for entertainment. So it didn’t quite work that way, but the kind of result that came from it, how you really reunited different groups that were fighting each other, women whose husbands have been killed by rival communities, were cooking for those man from those rival communities, it was really touching. And now we are looking at possibly getting someone to sponsor us, so we are talking with some banks here in South Sudan and mobile companies.

Schachter: Now some of the drawn of this is like wrestling or any sport anywhere, is that you create this wonderful rivalries and from what i understand there is a great one going on now, between two man from different tribes right?

Biar Ajak: There is actually quite a number of them each one of the main different communities, have their main champions but Majok is the main wrestler from Jonglei State is about 6’5″ tall and probably more than 230 pounds, was also a soldier back in the days but have returned back and became a wrestler, he is also a Mechanic and has not been defeated since he started wrestling.

Schachter: Does he have a Wrestling name?

Biar Ajak: He is called The Commander

Schachter: And is that because of his military service or because he commands everyone in the ring?

Biar Ajak: He commands everybody in the ring indeed. and the guy from central Ecuador Gordon Rampat is also an undefeated champion and is a little younger than Majok, he is about the same height, although a little bit skinny compared to Majok, he calls himself The Governor, because he believes he governs the ring. We are actually planning a match on September 20th as part of the world peace day but the main tournament will start in November. And each one of these man are practicing, eating a lot of diet with meat and milk in it to get heavy and heavier so all of these communities, they are exchanging the sort of rivalry from fighting into raiding cattle to who can be the champion in this game of Wrestling.

Schachter: Peter Biar Adjok head the South Sudanese think tank, the centre for strategic analysis and research and he runs a new wrestling league. Peter thank you so much

Biar Ajak: Thank you very much it was a pleasure

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