Sudan coming to terms with Vice-President’s death in crash
By STEPHANIE NOLEN, AFRICA BUREAU CHIEF, GlobeAndMail.
Aug 24, 2005 (Johannesburg) — When Sudanese rebel leader and newly named vice-president John Garang was killed in a helicopter crash last month, the news prompted vicious rioting in both the north and the south of the country. At least 130 people died as accusations flew that the crash was no accident. There were real fears that Sudan’s hard won peace deal, which so recently ended the world’s longest-running war, could not survive.
But as the dust settles in Sudan, the predominant feeling among most Sudanese and outside observers is that it was, in this case, just a helicopter accident, and it appears that peace will outlive Mr. Garang and the rumours of an assassination.
And although no one likes to say so publicly these days, there is also a feeling that the incredibly complex power-sharing steps to be taken in the months to come may be just a little easier without the arrogant and often dictatorial Mr. Garang at the helm.
He has been replaced by his deputy in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, Salva Kiir — a man of whom few people outside southern Sudan had heard, because Mr. Garang was himself so personally identified with the 30-year fight against the Islamist government in Khartoum.
But Mr. Kiir has won admiration in his first month in the job. He has taken up office in Khartoum, kept the SPLM unified, helped bring calm to the south, and made strong statements about the need for unity, both among the often-divided rebels and in the country as a whole.
“Kiir is less antagonistic, more democratic, more inclusive, and he has much better relations with the militias,” said David Mozersky, who monitors Sudan for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based conflict prevention organization.
“In some ways, Garang’s death makes a lot of things easier.”
Mr. Kiir elevated Riek Machar, a Nuer and a bitter enemy of Mr. Garang, to the No. 2 position in the SPLM, which provides some antidote to the violent Dinka-Nuer conflict that has raged for through the last decade.
Sudan is pressing on with implementation of the peace deal struck with the SPLM, which had been at war with the Islamist government in Khartoum for most of the past 30 years. The poor and isolated people of the south — who are black Africans and who practise Christian and animist faiths — were largely victims in the fight against the far better equipped Arabs of the north, who were determined not to lose control of territory that includes vast oil, gold and uranium reserves. More than 1.7 million people died in the war, but the SPLM, which Mr. Garang led since its founding 21 years ago, kept up the fight for so long that the government was finally forced into a historic power-sharing agreement, which saw Mr. Garang sworn in as vice-president before jubilant crowds in Khartoum on July 9. Three weeks later he was dead.
Despite optimism for Mr. Kiir, Mr. Mozersky warned that Mr. Garang’s death complicates some key issues. “Not only have they lost a brilliant politician who had succeeded in engaging the whole country and transcending Muslim-Christian and northern-southern lines,” he said. “But Garang had credibility as a unionist and may have been able to sell the belief in the north that unity is possible — Salva Kiir and any one else will have a much harder time doing it.”
While there is considerable speculation that Mr. Kiir has private secessionist sympathies, he has been quick to reiterate Mr. Garang’s position that the country will fare best united.
Under the terms of the peace deal, a referendum on secession will be held in the south six years from now. But the Khartum government agreed to the deal only because Mr. Garang was able to persuade President Omar al-Bashir and his colleagues that he believed, and would make his people believe, that a united Sudan was the best way forward.
“This emboldens spoilers in the north to undermine the agreement, based on the assumption that secession is now a done deal,” the Crisis Group analyst said. Many in Khartoum oppose the deal because it will dilute the supremacy of sharia (Islamic) law in the country; others because their unfettered access to oil profits is threatened by the wealth-sharing agreement.
Mr. Garang, meanwhile, left no strong leadership structure in his movement. There are almost no technocrats or administrators in desperately poor south Sudan, yet the SPLM is expected to put a government together in the next few months.
Hussein Solomon, director of the Center for International Political Studies in Pretoria, speculated that Mr. Kiir might have trouble holding the tribes together. Perhaps more urgently, he said, it is not clear how well he will play the role of regional statesman so long filled by Mr. Garang.
Prof. Solomon cited the war in Darfur, in western Sudan, where more than 2.5 million people have been displaced after the government armed militias against local rebel movements — movements seeking the same kind of autonomy the SPLM won for the south.
Mr. Garang was talking to the rebels in an effort to bring peace to that region, Mr. Solomon noted. “They respected him,” he said. “But to what extent Kiir will make that a priority, what he will do with regard to the others [regional conflicts], those are still a question.”