Tens of thousands mourn Sudan ex-rebel leader

JUBA, Sudan, Aug 6 (AFP) — The funeral of the late Sudanese vice president and ex-rebel leader John Garang began here Saturday before tens of thousands of grieving mourners and a host of African dignitaries, AFP correspondents said.

Residents of Borr await the arrival of the body of the late first Vice-President of Sudan, John Garang. (AFP) .

Amid a sea of weeping, wailing black-clad southern Sudanese, a priest at Juba’s All Saint’s Cathedral intoned a solemn prayer as the ceremony got under way at 2:15 pm (1115 GMT), more than two hours behind schedule.

A crowd of at least 10,000 people, many singing and waving black flags and flags of Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), had gathered in front of the church and along the route his cortege followed from the airport to the cathedral.

Larger groups of mourners were seen in other areas of the town, including at the nearby former military field where Garang was to be interred in a hastily constructed mausoleum.

In blistering heat under a blazing equatorial sun, a UN helicopter flew overhead as dozens of distraught women on the cathedral grounds fainted and were carried to a Sudanese Red Crescent first aid tent behind the church for treatment.

After the service, Garang’s coffin, symbolically draped in a Sudanese flag, was to be brought to the crypt that volunteers completed just hours before the casket’s arrival from the town of Rumbek, the last stop on a two-day airborne funeral procession.

At the airport, the casket had been unloaded from a plane by eight unarmed soldiers, four each from the Sudanese army and the SPLM, and laid on the tarmac for inspection by Garang’s family and dignitaries, including Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir, his long-time nemesis-turned-partner.

An SPLM military band played martial music as the coffin was loaded onto a Landcruiser for the short ride to the cathedral where massive crowds waited in the intense heat.

Juba, which will serve as the capital of an autonomous southern Sudan under a landmark January peace deal Garang concluded with Khartoum, was under tight guard following deadly clashes in the wake of his death and questions about the July 30 helicopter crash in which he was killed.

Heavily armed Sudanese troops deployed throughout the city 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-fighters of the SPLM’s military wing, who had entered this government garrison town for the first time on Wednesday, withdrew to camps on the perimeter, an AFP correspondent said.