SPLM, the ruling party of South Sudan, has fractured since the start of a civil war in December 2013. The faction of the party based in Juba remains under the leadership of President Salva Kiir.

The SPLM-Juba faction controls the cabinet, a remnant of the SPLA, and several governorships. In a series of articles, Radio Tamazuj profiles some key party members who have remained loyal to Salva Kiir since the start of the crisis.

Factbox: Aleu Ayieny Aleu

Aleu Ayieny Aleu was born in 1954. He attended elementary and intermediate schools in Warrap and then secondary school in Rumbek. His university education was in Egypt.

He joined the SPLA in the mid-1980s and served in units in Nasser, Gogrial and Kapoeta, where he was wounded while serving as a brigade commander and taken to Nairobi for treatment.

After living for several years in Nairobi, Aleu was appointed as director of an SPLA-linked demining organization, Operation Save Innocent Lives, a position he held throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s.

After the signing of Sudan’s Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005, Aleu was appointed deputy minister of interior in the Government of National Unity in Khartoum. He served in this role from 2005 until 2007.

In February 2006, Aleu was elevated by decree of the new SPLM Chairman Salva Kiir into the interim SPLM Political Bureau. He had not been a member of the Political Bureau under Chairman John Garang.

Aleu was still deputy interior minister in Khartoum when a political crisis broke within Sudan’s Government of National Unity in October 2007, resulting in SPLM’s temporary withdrawal from the joint NCP-SPLM government.

He was summoned by an SPLM investigation committee from Khartoum to Juba the following month, in November 2007, along with the then-state minister at the presidency, Telar Deng.

After declining to answer the summons, Aleu and Telar were expelled from the SPLM Political Bureau and stripped of their party membership in December 2007, on orders of SPLM Chairman Salva Kiir.

In the same month, Deng Alor and Pagan Amum were advanced into ministerial positions vacated by Aleu and Telar in a cabinet reshuffle of the Government of National Unity in Khartoum.   

Aleu protested his expulsion from the party, calling it the result of a ‘political conspiracy.’ Eventually he was reinstated as a party member by the Political Bureau in a meeting in April 2009. He was not restored to his position in the Political Bureau.

In the Sudan General Elections of 2010, Aleu was elected MP to the legislature in Juba, representing Warrap Constituency 9, which includes Gogrial West County.

He served as chairman of the Sudan Sudanese parliament’s public security committee until his appointment as Minister of Interior in July 2013.

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