NEWSMAKER-Sudanese rebel led fighters to peace deal.
KHARTOUM, Jan 9 (Reuters) – After more than two decades of bloody guerrilla warfare, John Garang led his rebel army from the battlefield to a peace deal sealed on Sunday with the northern Islamic government of Sudan.
Along the way, he allied himself with communists, courted U.S. Christian groups and juggled tribal rivalries to hold on to power even when infighting threatened his grip on the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).
Garang, in his late 50s, will become Sudan’s first vice-president under the deal hammered out in Kenya and signed at a ceremony in Nairobi.
Having secured a role in government for the south, some southern leaders say he must share decision-making fairly among southerners themselves to avoid a flare-up in factional rivalries.
Some analysts say Garang kept control of the estimated 60,000-strong SPLA through a powerful personality and a determination to give the dirt-poor and mainly Christian and animist south an equal voice in Africa’s largest country.
Others say his genial demeanour and academic credentials mask opportunism and ruthless treatment of potential rivals.
The peace deal Garang negotiated in Kenya ends a 21-year war in the south, but does not cover a separate conflict in Darfur in western Sudan that began in 2003 and has made 1.6 million people homeless.
Garang has said that, once in government, he would not allow the Darfur conflict to go on. “There’s no way you can make peace for southern Sudan while you also make war in Darfur,” he told Reuters in July.
Garang has said the central government will have to work hard to develop the south to prevent southerners choosing to secede after a six-year interim period that follows the deal.
“The onus is on the central government to make unity attractive, because if it is not attractive nobody is going to marry on to unity,” Garang told Reuters in June.
GARANG DEFIED ORDERS
An army colonel, Garang joined a southern army unit in his home town of Bor that defied orders to relocate to the north – orders they saw as violating a deal that ended Sudan’s first civil war in 1972 with a promise of southern autonomy.
It was 1983, the year the government tried to impose Islamic sharia law and civil war broke out, inflaming religious and ethnic divisions. The war has cost the lives of some two million people, many through famine and disease.
Oil has fuelled the fire, with southerners laying claim to the oil fields that provide the government with vital revenues. The peace deal gives roughly half the oil wealth to the south.
Garang’s SPLA says it controls most of the south, a vast but undeveloped region of swamp, savannah and bush with few roads, electricity, schools or hospitals outside a few garrison towns.
Critics say Garang and senior leaders of his movement’s political wing, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), spend much of their lives away from the war-torn region in the comfort of Nairobi, Kampala, Cairo, Toronto and Washington D.C.
The SPLA once drew support from a communist government in Ethiopia, but later courted American Christians for funds.
“When he felt that to get the support of America he had to win the Christian fundamentalists, his statements and utterances shifted to Christianity to gain support. He is an opportunist, there is no doubt about that,” said Joseph Lagu, former Sudanese vice-president and rebel leader in the war that ended in 1972.
Garang returned from the United States with an economics degree from Grinnell College, Iowa, and in 1970 joined Lagu’s southern “Anya Nya” rebels, whose name means “stinking poison”.
After the 1972 peace deal, he joined the army and received training in the United States. He gained an economics doctorate and President Jaafar Nimeiri promoted him to colonel in 1982, but he turned against Nimeiri when he tried to impose sharia law a year later.
Garang does not drink or smoke. He is married with six children.