Clash of Tyranny and Justice

Clash of Justice and Tyranny is a detailed account of an unparalleled miscarriage of justice that involved an arbitrary arrest and the lengthy incarceration of eighteen people in the Northern Bahr el Ghazal State in South Sudan. The circumstances and details of what transpired as narrated in this book are rare; it is hard to believe that something this heinous could be inflicted on innocent individuals. Readers may find it incredulous how brutality and tyranny could be so callously deployed to destroy personalities on false charges. The book is about eighteen government officials who ended up being framed for embezzlement and arrested by the South Sudan strongman General Paul Malong Awan, who was at the time the governor of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State. Malong was well known for his brutality and absolute disregard for the rule of law. He led Northern Bahr el Ghazal State with an iron fist, turning it into a police state. Fourteen of the eighteen officials were thrown into prison on his orders and locked up in a tiny disciplinary room of death. It was by the grace of God that they survived the harsh conditions of the infamous room 11 that had already claimed the lives of many inmates. All eighteen were denied bail, and the government rejected their request to transfer the case to court. The government effectively became the judge and plaintiff at the same time. The ironic aspect of the case was that thirteen of the eighteen officials had provided loan to the government, which was in dire financial straits. The government defaulted on the loans and had the men arrested. It was a case of the guilty punishing the innocent in an unprecedented display of abuse of power. The conclusion of the case was unbelievably anomalous; detainees were told to go without a proper explanation for their confinement in prison. The eighteen were not publicly cleared or apologized to for the crimes committed against them. They were not compensated for the serious damages they incurred in terms of physical pain, emotional torture, and material loss. The whole case ended as it had begun-surprisingly abnormally.