South Sudan has experienced conflict for the better part of the past 60 years. This is a place that has been at war with the north, obviously, for a long time, but even internally it has had lots of intercommunal fighting, often cattle raiding or wife raiding, and lots of cultural practices that have contributed, to an extent, to the current situation we're in. Conflicts between farmers and herders are also part of the history of this place.
In the current context, where you have a president, in this case Salva Kiir, who is a Dinka and who has surrounded himself with a largely Dinka group of advisers, and you have an opposition leader, on the other hand, who is a Nuer and who has managed to create some form of a multitribal coalition for now, you obviously find yourself in the context of a tribal conflict. The tribe plays a role in how people see themselves as actors in this war. The tribe will play a role when it comes to meeting a soldier in the street. We've had several cases of Nuer people who have had to pretend that they spoke Dinka in order not to be killed by Dinka soldiers, and the reverse has been true as well.
In the Equatorias, right now we see largely Dinka troops coming from the regions where the president and his chief of general staff originate, carrying the bulk of abuses as part of this counter-insurgency against people they see as potentially opposition supporters. Those would be people from Equatoria: the Bari, the Kakwa, or the Kuku. Those are the people who are being targeted, on the basis of their origin being from this or that area.
Not recognizing the ethnic dimension to this conflict would be a grave mistake. It may not have started as an ethnic conflict—as I said, it was a political conflict between two men who were trying to get to power—but unfortunately with time passing and with the conflict expanding, what we see now is more and more narratives emerging, and a lot of those narratives have to do with ethnicity. The government, unfortunately, has been encouraging this kind of perception through its actions, but also through its public declarations.
Hopefully, that answers your question.