Garang begins journey to final resting place

NEW SITE, Sudan, Aug 4 (AFP) — A small white aircraft took off from this southern Sudanese town Thursday carrying the body of guerrilla chief-turned-statesman John Garang on the journey to his final resting place.

Catholic priests and nuns arrive for a religious ceremony for late John Garang in New Site village in Southern Sudan August 2, 2005. (Reuters).

A priest offered prayers and comfort to Garang’s widow Rebecca and one of her daughters, reading passages from the Bible as the coffin was loaded on to the plane on the first leg of a somber airborne funeral procession through his southern Sudan stronghold.

Heavily-armed uniformed fighters from Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) looked on as the plane took off, heading for five towns symbolic in the group’s 21-year war with Khartoum.

“Fear not, it is me who was dead but now I am alive,” Father Bahjat Batarseh intoned before urging Garang’s former rebel movement to remain united behind his vision for southern Sudan.

Garang died in a helicopter crash on Saturday less than a month after becoming Sudan’s new first vice president under a landmark peace deal signed with Khartoum that ended 21 years of north-south war.

“If you are divided you will be destroyed but if you are united you will stand,” the priest said, noting that Garang would never again see his beloved home region. “This is the last time John Garang will be in this part of Sudan.”

The funeral procession, which will culminate in a memorial service and burial on Saturday in southern Sudan’s largest town of Juba, heads first to Kurmuk in the northernmost part of the south from which the SPLM/A drove out government forces in 1997.

Garang’s coffin will be unloaded and placed on a bier at the dirt airstrip in Kurmuk where it will remain for a short period before the body is put back on the plane for the short flight to Kauda.

It will remain in Kauda, where Khartoum’s troops were accused of massacring teachers and students in a 2000 raid, overnight, SPLM/A officials said.

The tour will then continue on Friday when the body will move to Rumbek, which is serving as the temporary capital of autonomous southern Sudan pending the withdrawal of government troops from Juba, which will serve as the seat of the government of south Sudan, they said.

On Friday, the procession will move to Yei and then to Bor, the town where Garang was born 60 years ago and where the SPLA/M was created in 1983, they said.

The burial and funeral are set for Saturday in Juba, where some 50,000 mourners are expected to attend the ceremony.