'Garang deserves Nobel Prize'
2005-08-03 21:48
Nairobi - A Kenyan cabinet minister on Wednesday launched a campaign to nominate the late Sudanese vice-president and ex-southern rebel leader John Garang for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Environment minister Kalonzo Musyoka said Garang, along with two other men who negotiated January's landmark peace deal ending Sudan's 21-year north-south civil war, deserved the prestigious award for halting Africa's longest-running conflict.
"I hope the prize can be awarded to our departed brother posthumously in recognition of the momentous achievement," said Musyoka, whose deputy, Wangari Maathai, won the prestigious Nobel award last year.
"I proposed the three for achieving Sudan peace," he said.
In addition to Garang, who was killed in a weekend helicopter crash while returning to his base in southern Sudan from meetings in Uganda, Musyoka said he had proposed Khartoum's chief negotiator in peace talks, Ali Osman Taha, and the lead Kenyan mediator, retired General Lazaro Sumbweiywo, for the prize.
Heaping praise on Garang
Musyoka, who as Kenyan foreign minister until 2004 was among the mediators in Sudan's peace process, heaped praise on the late Garang, describing him as "a man so full of life, rare vibrancy and commanding presence".
"I watched him struggle and overcome fear, suspicion and mistrust of the people he was negotiating with," Musyoka wrote in Nairobi's Standard newspaper, calling him a "consummate politician and realist".
"Throughout the negotiations, Garang displayed tact, maturity, dynamism and astuteness," he wrote. "He was willing, often to the chagrin of his allies in the south, to give peace a chance."
Garang, a former Sudanese army colonel, had led the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army since 1983 when it rose up against Khartoum, complaining of alleged marginalisation of the poorer, mainly Christian and animist south by the wealthier Islamic and Arabised north.