Report 36 – The testimony of Stephen Matut Gatpan
Summary
What stands out about this week’s plaintiff’s testimony is, among other things, how detailed and precise it was. Throughout the whole hearing, Stephen confidently told the court what he had seen, where, and when. Specifically he remembered months and years well. Stephen did not budge when the defense tried to throw him off balance by confronting him with contradictory statements from the earlier interviews conducted by Swedish police in Nairobi in 2016. Additionally, he also offered important insights on these interviews which were conducted with him and other plaintiffs during the police investigation. He described the interviews as being rushed and the questions broad, not at all comparable to the detailed questioning here in court. Stephen’s testimony also corroborated many of the other plaintiffs’ stories, including his descriptions of ground troops and Antonov bomb planes targeting civilians and their villages.
Hearing with Stephen Matut Gatpan
Between the 22nd and 23rd of October 2024 the District Court in Stockholm heard testimony from Stephen Matut Gatpan in what is known as the Lundin Oil trial. Stephen testified about his experiences as a civilian in and near Block 5A during the years 1997 to 2003.
In the beginning of the first day Judge Thomas Zander introduced himself and the rest of the people in courtroom 34 in Stockholm to Stephen who was participating via video link from Kigali, Rwanda.
Stephen was born in 1978 in a village called Nyaw. His family was forced to flee Nyaw in 1984 because of fighting between the Sudanese regime and the SPLA. They fled to the village of Rubnyagai, and it was in Rubnyagai he attended his first years of school. When Stephen was a teenager, he moved to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to attend high school. He lived there for a time before moving home in 1999. It was his journey home and the situation in his home area after he arrived back in 1999 that he spoke most of during his time in court. Stephen later finished his high school education in Bentiu in 2002 and got a diploma in Juba in 2009.
The hearing started on Tuesday the 22nd of October with the prosecution thoroughly recounting Stephen’s life between 1997 to 2003 and asking follow up questions on the things they deemed valuable to the case. After the prosecution, the plaintiff’s counsel asked some additional questions, adding context to Stephen’s earlier testimony. On Wednesday the 23rd of October, Ian Lundin’s defense attorney cross-examined Stephen and pointed out discrepancies between his interview with police in Nairobi, Kenya in 2016 and the hearing in court.
Stephen’s journey from Khartoum to Rubnyagai
The prosecutor asking questions in this hearing was Ewa Marie Häggqvist. She started out by acknowledging the plaintiff’s interview with the Swedish police in Nairobi, Kenya in 2016, asking specifically about the translation of the interview. This might have been in response to last week’s plaintiff Lam Puak Triguar claiming that the interpreter in his interview did not translate his statements correctly. It is also part of a larger pattern in which the prosecutors have been trying to pre-empt questions from the defense about the earlier police interviews. Stephen said that he thought the interview went well and did not have any problems with the interpreter.
Stephen testified that he was 21 years old and studying in Khartoum when he suddenly got news from home that his mother was sick. He immediately got on a bus to travel back to his family in southern Sudan. His journey was intercepted not once but two times by armed men in the area looking to rob civilians. Once, his bus was stopped by unidentified armed men who demanded the passengers had to pay them for free passage. Stephen was among the people who did not have the means to pay. This led to them brutally assaulting him and torturing him by standing on his head and on his back, causing him serious injuries. After being left on the ground, he was luckily found by a family friend who helped nurse him back to health.
When he had recovered, he once again set out for his family in Rubnyagai, this time on foot. This time his journey was intercepted by militia soldiers who kidnapped him to use him and others for forced labor. When the job was done Stephen was supposed to be let go, but his captors refused to let him take his bag, which they had confiscated from him. Stephen argued with the armed men over the bag and during the argument he found out that they were soldiers of the regime-allied militia SSIM. To get his belongings back, Stephen was forced to take his bag and run from the soldiers. He ran and ran until suddenly the soldiers finally blocked his path and he fell to the ground. They beat him again with gun barrels and other weapons and he was once again grievously injured. This time Stephen was again lucky to receive help from others nearby to go to his uncle’s home in a village named Kalthielä where he could recover. Stephen stayed with his uncle for one month before he finally made it home to his dad and his siblings. By this time, his mother had already passed away. He returned to Rubnyagai in July of 1999 and for a time it was peaceful before trouble hit again.
Attack on Rubnyagai
In November 1999, fighting again broke out in the region after Peter Gadet left his alliance with militia leader and Sudanese army general Paulino Matiep. This meant that Peter Gadet, who up until this moment had been a general in the Sudanese army, and the Nuer troops loyal to him sided with the SPLA and took control of certain areas, resulting in an outbreak of violence throughout the region. According to Stephen, all the land between Bentiu and Wan Kem was now a warzone. At this time, Stephen and his family were forced to flee Rubnyagai.
Stephen described seeing boats loaded with military personnel and weapons traveling down a river close to Rubnyagai. He testified that he believed that these military boats were headed to fight Gadet’s troops further down the river in Wan Kem. Stephen also described how before coming to Rubnyagai the boats had already passed through and destroyed the villages of Tochrur and Tochrier. The military and their allies beat, killed, and raped the civilians living in these villages. All the villages along the river were targets of these deadly attacks.
It was Paulino Matiep’s militia troops that first arrived in Rubnyagai. Stephen knew the first troops were Matiep’s people since they were wearing the same uniform as the military, but they were speaking Nuer. In Nuer, they told the people still in the village not to run and then they would shoot at the people who ran anyway, Stephen testified. When the prosecutor asked if those that were shooting were aiming to kill civilians, it seemed like Stephen did not really understand the question. Instead, he repeated that there were many people who died in the attack; for example, one of his neighbors who was a spiritual leader in the village. According to Stephen there were SPLA troops present on the other side of the river, not inside Rubnyagai. In their mission to destroy the SPLA troops, Matiep’s militia shot civilians and burned the village to the ground.
The Sudanese army with their Antonov bomb planes and armed gunship helicopters only came later. They further destroyed the village of Rubnyagai by bombing, among other targets, a water well, also damaging a school close by.
During this part, the prosecutor was very adamant about asking Stephen to differentiate between what he himself had seen and what he had not seen. For example, the destruction in Rubnyagai was one of the things that both the prosecution and lates the defense asked Stephen repeatedly if he had seen or not seen. Later during his testimony, in response to a question from the defense, Stephen described his exact whereabouts during these events. When he and his family heard that soldiers were arriving at the outskirts of the village, they quickly decided to gather all their cattle to flee the village early in the morning before the soldiers came upon them. So ultimately, Stephen had not himself seen the soldiers shooting in the village and setting fire to houses, but he did see the destruction afterwards when he returned to Rubnyagai and heard about the shooting from other people who were present at the time.
Stephen’s father is killed in a helicopter attack
From Rubnyagai, Stephen, his family and their cattle went to a village called Kalthielä where one of his uncles lived. They were there for almost half a year, until April 2000 when they finally returned to Rubnyagai. This was when Stephen finally saw the state of his home village and discovered that all the houses and the water well were burned and destroyed. Although life was exceedingly difficult due to the state of the village, Stephen and his family continued to live there until July 2000. That was when government forces together with several allied militias, SSIM and SSUM among others, launched an attack on the town of Nhialdiu. This again spurred fighting in the area and Stephen and his family once again had to flee.
In October 2000, he and his father were in the forest area of Wanguar tending to their cattle, when gunships suddenly appeared in the sky. Stephen remembered that just before, he had been brushing his teeth and looking out to where his father stood among the cattle. Then suddenly, the sky was lit up by fire. In the beginning of the attack Stephen was hit in the head, making him fall unconscious. This meant that his firsthand testimony of the attack was limited to what happened before that. He testified that it was because the gunships were flying so low that he and his father didn’t see them in time. During the hearing it remained unclear how exactly he was hit – if he was hit directly by a bullet fired from the helicopter or if he was hit by shrapnel from the helicopter dropping some kind of explosive. In the attack Stephen’s father was hit and killed immediately. Stephen also testified that there were more people killed and injured in the same attack.
From Stephen’s understanding of what happened while he was unconscious, his family members carried him for two days on a sort of wheelbarrow to get to Nhialdiu to get treatment for him. From Nhialdiu, a UN plane flew him to a hospital in Lokichogio in Kenya, where he remained in intensive care for two months. After passing out in the attack, Stephen did not regain consciousness until he was in the hospital in Kenya. It was only then that he learned of his father’s death. Stephen was unable to attend his father’s funeral.
Stephen was in the hospital in Kenya until December 2000. He testified that when he returned to Sudan and tried to look for his family, there were practically no people left in the Nhialdiu area. Everyone had been displaced.
Additional testimony from Stephen
After returning from Kenya, Stephen finally found his family in Bentiu. In March 2001, he got a job working as an interpreter for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in Bentiu. He worked for them for five years, helping to translate for people coming into their hospitals and clinics. While he was doing this, Stephen heard many firsthand testimonies about what was happening to people in the area in and around Block 5A. This made him deeply knowledgeable about specific attacks and other events causing civilian displacement from 2001 and onward.
Stephen was living in Bentiu during this time. According to his testimony, he saw gunships flying over Bentiu several times in the direction of where Lundin Oil was constructing an all-weather road to Thar Jath, where they had just struck oil. He also testified that during the construction of the road, no civilians were allowed to use it. Everyone who came close to the construction of the road was in danger. Only after the construction was finished was it safe for civilians to use the road. Stephen is not the only plaintiff who has testified about the roads being dangerous for civilians, see for example the testimony from Cure Gatdet Dhor here.
Stephen was clear as to why he believes this conflict erupted. He explained that it was always the goal of the military to clear the land of civilians so that there was no obstacle to extracting the oil. In his words: as soon as the Arabs found out that there was oil in the ground, they wanted it for themselves. That is why they protected the companies extracting the oil.
Stephen testified that before he traveled to Rwanda for this trial, he felt uneasy many times because he felt like he was being followed. He had heard about former Lundin employees asking about people participating in this court case and knew that many of the plaintiffs had experienced this as a big problem. Stephen told the court about how when he was in the airport in South Sudan to fly to Rwanda, he constantly saw signs that people following him, and he had been questioned multiple times by strangers about where he was going and why. During these times he evaded the questions, saying he was travelling to Uganda, but he had to say he was flying to Rwanda in the passport queue, and he did not know who may have heard him then.
Cross-examination by Ian Lundin’s defense
On Wednesday, it was Ian Lundin’s defense attorney Torgny Wetterberg asking the questions. He started by repeating some of the testimony from the day before. During the questioning, Wetterberg continuously commented on inconsistencies between what Stephen said during his testimony and his statements during his police interview in Nairobi in 2016. One such inconsistency was about where he landed when he was flown back from Lokichogio in Kenya. In 2016, he said they flew him to Nhialdiu but yesterday he said Waak instead. As Stephen explained to the court, this had a natural explanation in that the airfield that was supposed to be in Nhialdiu was moved to Waak because of extreme fighting in the area. This made Wetterberg’s line of questioning, which had worked very well with other witnesses, seem more like pointless nitpicking. Another example of this was Wetterberg questioning the statement Stephen made about being in Bentiu for the entire five years he was working for MSF. During one period between 2004 and 2005, he lived in Khartoum because of an administrative issue, but he continued working for MSF and returned to Bentiu after 8 months.
After Wetterberg had asked about multiple inconsistencies between the police interview and the hearing in court. Stephen explained that the police interview was very rushed and not at all as detailed as the court hearing. The interview only lasted one hour, compared to the hearing which at that point had been going on for a day and a half. Stephen was consistently incredibly determined about the information he provided to the court, even if it did not match his statements from the police interview.
Next report
The next report will cover the testimony of Juma Puok Gatkek and his wife Nyakueh Dual Choul, the 29th and 30th plaintiffs in the case against Lundin Oil in Stockholm District Court.
