Two dozen Dinka officials were massacred by White Army men, along with two Indian UN peacekeepers, on December 19th in Akobo, a remote outpost in Jonglei state.
From his shelter under a sheet in the UN base in Juba, Cornelius Khan, a Nuer, describes how Dinka soldiers came to his district, searching "house to house" for Nuer to kill.Tit-for-tat killings then spread across a country the size of France.
Mr Kiir has lately been accused of cementing his tribe's hold on power, while smaller communities resent what they see as Dinka domination.
As things stand, South Sudan may face a long civil war.What began as a political power struggle within the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the ruling party, soon took on a lethally ethnic character, pitting the country's two largest communities against each other: Mr Kiir's Dinka, the largest of South Sudan's tribes, versus Mr Machar's Nuer.
The culprits were the traditional enemies of the Dinka people, the armed militias of the Arab Misseriya tribe.
Asked if he was disappointed at the tardiness of the polls, one Dinka tribesman in Juba sagely replied that he was confident they would open eventually, on "African time".The late openings will, however, further complicate an already dangerously cumbersome exercise.
While soldiers from the country's largest ethnic group, the Dinka, went door-to-door in the capital, Juba, flushing out and executing members of the Nuer, the country' second-biggest group, journalists reporting this were routinely accused of incitement.
Some politicians argued that they needed their weapons for protection, not only from each other, but also from cross-border cattle raids by well-armed groups, such as the Turkana of Kenya or Dinka of Sudan.
It is access to land that has always been the more combustible issue in this part of the world.The Misseriya people, who are Arab pastoralists, had hoped the ruling would give them the right to run their cattle freely through Abyei, as they have long done, often in violent opposition to the sedentary Dinka people.
His successor, Salva Kiir, like Garang from the majority Dinka people, is a lesser prophet.Free at last, free at last.
Mr Kiir will contest only the presidency of south Sudan, which has a semi-autonomous government as agreed under the 2005 peace deal.Mr Arman should appeal more, perhaps, to northern Muslim Sudanese voters than Mr Kiir, a Christian from the African Dinka tribe.
