Africa has lost a great man


Publication Date: 8/2/2005

The new-found peace in Sudan could be blown away, but then it might be propelled forward, following the death of Dr John Garang.

The former rebel leader who died in a helicopter crash on Saturday evening was only sworn-in as Sudan's First Vice-President three weeks ago.

Dr Garang led his Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army in a bitter 21-year war to end the oppression of the non-Arab populations in the south.

By the time the peace talks to end the war began in Kenya in 2002, more than two million people had died.

It takes a lot of will and commitment to be a guerrilla fighter for as long as Dr Garang was. And it required even greater courage for him to lead his people to a power-sharing deal after so much suffering, instead of pressing for immediate independence.

There had been many rebellions by the south against northern Arabist domination, but all of them had either been crushed, or their leaders signed quick deals that landed them plum jobs in Khartoum. In the end, they failed to address the political grievances of the region.

Dr Garang's success was in uniting the southern opposition and human rights movements, and establishing himself as a respected international symbol of southern aspirations.

But his death should not blind us to the uncomfortable realities of his work. The SPLA was a coalition of disparate militia and rebel armies. The feat Dr Garang pulled off was to hold them together, albeit with an iron fist. Dr Garang didn't brook dissent within his ranks, and many critics were either jailed, killed, or simply expelled from southern Sudan.

The SPLA, too, had a particularly bad human rights record. The world looked at all these problems as secondary, and the SPLA, portrayed as Christian soldiers against "jihadists", were regarded as fighting a just war to prevent the march of conquering Arab armies southward.

Dr Garang also wasted a great deal of time in what was a wrong-headed strategy. For years he preferred the headline-grabbing attacks on towns, and was reluctant to take the more arduous approach of fighting and winning the countryside first before closing in on the big towns.

Thus, for years, the SPLA fought a see-saw energy-sapping war for towns like Juba with the Khartoum forces, costing men in battles whose strategic value was not overwhelming.

It is a mark of Dr Garang's astuteness that he was able to change strategy, gradually establishing and consolidating a safe rear-base from which he constantly renewed his forces and safeguarded his supply lines, thus enabling him to fight Khartoum to a stalemate.

There are many who held firmly that while Garang won the war, he didn't have it in him to be the peace leader, where a more consultative style was required. He learnt new military tactics, but not fresh political ones.

Yes, all that and more might be true. But when all is said and done, Dr Garang will still be judged kindly by history. That is because Sudan had, and still has, so many explosive elements in its political battles. The miracle is that the war ended with a power-sharing agreement at all.

At one level, it was a war between Arabs and what might loosely be called indigenous black populations. That was a racial conflict.

Then on another plane, it was a religious war - between Islam, and Christianity and traditional religions. Both combined to form a third point of contest - a cultural war. Then it had an economic angle - between a more developed north, and a poor south. An opportunist keen on being king in his own small corner would have exploited any of these to break up Sudan.

Even the SPLM/A under Garang were torn between seeking secession - which always seemed a sensible option - and autonomy within the bigger Sudan.

It was always Dr Garang who would give up more to end the war. That he ended up as President El-Bashir's First Vice-President reveals a man who dug very deep into his organisation's heart to make peace.

Even if Dr Garang hadn't died, he probably wouldn't have surpassed that achievement.

Email: shirdons@yahoo.com

City: Washington DC