Sudanese march, pray to remember Garang’s death

July 30, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — A few burnt-out cars and ruined buildings are the only visible reminders in Khartoum of the sectarian violence that ripped apart the capital one year ago when former southern rebel leader John Garang was killed.

In the worst riots the capital had seen, more than 100 people were murdered and shops and cars set on fire as gangs of people from the north and the south took to the streets convinced Garang’s death was no accident.

It came just three weeks after he became first vice president in a coalition government agreed under a peace deal to end Africa’s longest civil war.

“Whether this has increased tendencies towards separation between the north and south? Unfortunately yes it has,” said Pagan Amum, the secretary-general of Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) who counted himself among Garang’s close friends.

Garang was the architect of the January 2005 deal which ended a bloody north-south civil war that claimed 2 million lives and gave southerners the chance to choose in 2011 to separate from the north.

He survived a guerrilla war in Sudan’s wild south for more than 21 years but lasted just 21 days in office in Khartoum.

While a joint investigation concluded pilot error was to blame for accident in which the helicopter carrying him crashed into a cliff face near his stronghold in the south, his death brought north-south tensions to the surface.

On Sunday students will march to commemorate his death and his son will address a service in Khartoum. In Juba, the capital of southern Sudan where he was buried, his wife Rebecca Garang and his successor Salva Kiir Mayardit, now the only surviving founding member of the SPLM, will lead prayers.

The United Nations is on high alert expecting further violence and urging non-essential staff to stay at home.

But for most Sudanese anger and disbelief has with time tempered into sadness at the passing of the one man they believed could unite the Islamic north and mostly Christian or animist south.

“Garang was a man with a vision who really wanted to unite northern and southern Sudan and create a new Sudan,” said northern businessman Mohamed Abdelati. “I fear his death might result in the separation of south and north, and the end of the new Sudan that he was longing for.”

(Reuters)