NEWSMAKER-Sudanese rebel led his fighters to peace table
KHARTOUM, May 26 (Reuters) – After two decades of bloody guerrilla warfare, John Garang led his rebel army off the battlefield and into talks 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).
Some say Garang, in his late 50s, has 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.
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 vital revenues to the government.
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 Grinell College, Iowa, and in 1970 joined Lagu’s southern “Anya Nya” rebels, whose name means “stinking poison”.
After peace came 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 a year later.
Garang does not drink or smoke. He is married with at least three children.