Sudan set to bury Garang amid questions over death

JUBA, Sudan, Aug 6 (AFP) — Sudan prepared Saturday to bury the late vice president and ex-rebel chief John Garang who led southern Sudanese in a 21-year war against the government in Khartoum before sealing a historic peace deal in January.

A woman soldier of SPLA/M holds a portrait of former rebel leader John Garang in Yei, Southern Sudan August 5, 2005. (Reuters)..

Under extremely tight security following deadly clashes in the wake of his death and questions about the July 30 helicopter crash in which he was killed, thousands of Sudanese awaited the arrival of Garang’s coffin here for his funeral.

Heavily armed Sudanese troops deployed throughout southern Sudan’s main city of Juba amid fears the peace accord will unravel in the absence of Garang, a US-educated agronomist who died at age 60, just three weeks after being sworn in as first vice president.

Soldiers and elite presidential guardsmen, toting assault rifles and grenade launchers, lined key roads at 10-metre (10-yard) intervals while others patrolled the town in pick-up trucks.

Ex-rebel fighters from Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), who had entered this government garrison town for the first time on Wednesday, withdrew to camps on the perimeter, an AFP correspondent said.

At Juba airport — where Garang’s coffin was to arrive from Rumbek, the last stop on a two-day funeral procession through southern Sudan — the wives of senior SPLM officials gathered to greet the casket.

Many of the women cried and wailed as they awaited the plane and the arrival of dignitaries, including Beshir and presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Mwai Kibaki of Kenya and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

As many as 500,000 people were expected to turn out for the funeral.

Garang died when an official helicopter on which he was returning from Uganda crashed in what SPLM, Sudanese government and Ugandan officials have repeatedly said was an accident due to poor weather.

But on Friday, Museveni, who provided Garang with the helicopter, said it might not have been an accident.

Such speculation was a major contributing factor to the riots that erupted in Khartoum, Juba and other southern towns on Monday when angry southerners attacked Muslim northerners, sparking reprisals.

At least 130 people died in the clashes and both the Sudanese government and the former rebels have expressed dismay at Museveni’s comments, with Sudan’s information minister calling them “extremely worrying.”

UN special envoy Jan Pronk told reporters at Juba airport on Saturday that all the evidence collected from the crash site so far suggested the helicopter had gone down accidentally.

“There is no reason to assume anything else other than an accident happened,” he said. “It was a tragic accumulation of facts — bad weather, darkness and the pilot possibly did not know the terrain.”

Pronk urged Muslim northerners and mainly Christian or animist southerners to look beyond “the events of the last couple of days.”

“What happened in the last couple of days is individual, not structural,” he said. “We have to do everything we can to reverse the situation. African and Arab populations have to live together and the leaders know that.”

The service is to be held at Juba’s All Saint’s Cathedral with burial to follow in a hastily constructed brick and mortar mausoleum on a nearby former military training ground.

Reverend Helen Killa of the All Saint’s Church said thousands of volunteers had finally finished the crypt in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, just ahead of the expected arrival of Garang’s coffin.

“Everything is okay now,” she said. “We finished the mausoleum around 5:00 am (0200 GMT).”

In accordance with the traditions of Garang’s Dinka people, one of his sons, Chol, a 25-year-old fine arts student in Britain, dug up the first chunk of earth where his father will be laid to rest.

“It is a shock,” he told reporters Friday. “It seems like a dream. Sometimes I wake up and find people weeping. I never thought I would ever be digging my father’s grave.”