Garang: Rebel with a cause
2005-08-01 11:12
Khartoum - Sudanese vice-president John Garang fought for more than two decades for the political autonomy of southern Sudan, but got to enjoy less than a month at the helm of his native region before his life was cut short by a helicopter crash.
He become Sudan's first vice-president in a ceremony that sealed a January peace deal signed by his Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) with Khartoum in Nairobi.
Finally won people's respect
Garang, 60, who only returned to Khartoum in early July for the first time since the 1983 launch of the civil war, also took the oath as head of a new autonomous administration for south Sudan.
His swearing in followed the promulgation of a new power-sharing constitution provided for under January's peace agreement.
The tall, US-educated economist-turned-guerrilla once derided in the West as a Soviet stooge, had finally won respectability as southern leader.
The completion of the process brought full circle Garang's transformation from rebel leader to statesman.
Born in the remote Bor district in 1945, Garang was among the few in British-controlled southern Sudan to enjoy education beyond primary level.
After completing his secondary education in Tanzania, he went on to study economics at Grinnell College, Iowa.
In 1970, he walked away from a graduate fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, to take up arms against the Khartoum regime.
Involved in the military
The so-called Anyanya uprising ended with a 1972 peace agreement under which Garang joined the Sudanese military, eventually rising to the rank of colonel and receiving training at the US army infantry school in Fort Benning, Georgia.
He returned to the bush in September 1983 and ironically, had been sent by the government to suppress a mutiny by southern troops in his home district of Bor.
The 105 Battalion of the Sudanese army, which he had commanded in the 1970s, became the nucleus of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
Washington's Cold War alliance with the Khartoum government prompted Garang to throw in his lot with the pro-Soviet government of neighbouring Ethiopia.
The overthrow of the Soviet-backed regime in Addis Ababa in 1991 and the displacement of the SPLM from Ethiopia prompted a disastrous split in the movement.
The SPLA divided on ethnic lines with Garang maintaining the support of his Dinka people, while the rival Nuer sided with breakaway leader Riek Machar.
The Islamist-backed regime brought to power by a 1989 coup sent waves of volunteer militiamen to the south and Garang's troops were forced back from the large swathes of territory they had occupied to a narrow border strip.
However the coup was ultimately to prove a blessing in disguise as the new government's policies pushed northern opposition groups into alliance with the SPLA and discredited Khartoum in US eyes.
- AFP