John Garang
John Garang De Mabior was a Sudanese politician and revolutionary leader. From 1983 to 2005, he led the Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement as a commander in chief during the Second Sudanese Civil War. He served as First Vice President of Sudan for three weeks, from the comprehensive peace agreement of 2005 until his death in a helicopter crash on July 30, 2005.
A developmental economist by profession, Garang was one of the major influences on the movement that led to the foundation of South Sudan’s independence from the rule of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir.
Early life and education
John Garang was born on 23 June 1945 into a poor family in Wangulei village, Twic East County, in the Upper Nile region of Sudan. A member of the Dinka ethnic group and an orphan by the age of ten, he had his fees for school paid by a relative, going to schools in Wau and then Rumbek. In 1962, he joined the separatist rebels of southern Sudan during the First Sudanese Civil War. However, due to his young age, the rebel leaders encouraged him and others of his age to pursue higher education and because of the ongoing fighting, Garang was forced to complete his secondary school education in Tanzania. After winning a scholarship, he went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Economics in 1969 from Grinnell College in Iowa, United States.He was offered another scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, but chose to return to Tanzania and study East African agricultural economics as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow at the University of Dar es Salaam. At UDSM, he was a member of the University Students' African Revolutionary Front. However, Garang soon returned to Sudan and joined the Anyanya rebels. There is much erroneous reporting that Garang met and befriended Yoweri Museveni, future president of Uganda, at this time; while both Garang and Museveni were students at UDSM in the 1960s, they did not attend at the same time. In 1970, Garang was in one of the batches of Gordon Muortat Mayen's soldiers, the then leader of the Anyanya rebel group, sent to Israel for military training.
The civil war ended with the Addis Ababa Agreement of 1972 and Garang, like many rebels, was absorbed into the Sudanese military. For eleven years, he was a career soldier and rose from the rank of captain to colonel after taking the Infantry Officers Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, United States. During this period, he took four years of academic leave and received a Master's degree in agricultural economics from Iowa State University. In 1981, he earned a PhD degree in Economics from Iowa State University. By 1983, Garang was serving as a senior instructor in the military academy in Wadi Sayedna 21 km from the centre of Omdurman where he instructed the cadets for more than four years. Later, he was nominated to serve in the military research department at Army HQ in Khartoum.
Political ideology
Garang coined the philosophy of "Sudanism" which would be the guiding philosophy to a secular and multiethnic New Sudan. He believed, for the people of Sudan to live in cohesion, they must not separate themselves into the many existing ethnic factions present within the nation but, rather, to collectively renounce the belief that Black African-ness, Islam, Paganism or Christianity were to be the ultimate defining characteristics of Sudan. Rather, he willed that citizens should embrace all cultures of Sudan, and to unify under the one commonality they all share, being Sudanese.Rebel leader
In 1983, Garang went to Bor and southern government soldiers in Battalion 105 who were resisting being rotated to posts in the north. Although he was not among the officers in the Southern command arranging for the defection of Battalion 105 to the anti government rebels, he was supporting the revolution. When the 105 Battalion attacked Sudanese army in Bor on 16 May 1983 under the command of Major Kerubino Kuanyin Bol, who was the leader of the budding movement which launched an impromptu attack, Garang rode by an alternative route to join them in the rebel stronghold in Ethiopia. Major Kerubino Kuanyin Bol and William Nyuon Bany Machar led Battalion 105 and 107 in Bor and Ayot, respectively. As a major, Kerubino coalesced with William to organize a revolt and opened routes to Ethiopian plains. By the end of July, Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement had brought over 3000 soldiers into the newly created Sudan People's Liberation Army/Movement, which was opposed to military rule and Islamic dominance of the country, and encouraged other army garrisons to mutiny against the Islamic law imposed on the country by the government. William Nyuon Bany and Kerubino Kwanyin Bol were both founding members of SPLA. Bany was appointed the 3rd high-ranking Commander after Bol.This action marked the commonly agreed upon beginning of the Second Sudanese Civil War, which resulted in one and a half million deaths over twenty years of conflict. Although Garang was Christian and most of southern Sudan is non-Muslim, he did not initially focus on the religious aspects of the war.
Garang was a strong advocate for national unity: minorities together formed a majority and, therefore should rule. Together, Garang believed, they could replace President Omar al-Bashir with a government made up of representatives from “all tribes and religions in Sudan." His first real effort for the cause, under his command, occurred in July 1985 with the SPLA’s incursion into Kordofan.
The SPLA gained the backing of Libya, Uganda, and Ethiopia. Garang and his army controlled a large part of the southern regions of the country, named "New Sudan". He claimed his troops' courage came from "the conviction that we are fighting a just cause. That is something North Sudan and its people don't have." Critics suggested financial motivations to his rebellion, noting that much of Sudan's oil wealth lies in the south of the country.
In early 1991, Mengistu Haile Mariam's regime was overthrown by the Khartoum-backed Ethiopian rebels. Upon the rebels’ seizure of the government, they closed all SPLA training camps in Ethiopia and cut off the SPLA's arms supply, forcing the SPLA to return hundreds of thousands of Sudanese back to South Sudan. This disrupted military operations and leadership within the SPLA. However, this caused the West to reconsider relations with the SPLA – justifying their providing the SPLA with "non-lethal help."
Shortly after, there were leadership misunderstandings between Garang and senior SPLA commanders, Riek Machar and Lam Akol in August 1991. The splinter group led by Machar and Akol was named the SPLA-Nasir. This resulted in Dinka Massacre which enraged civilians and exposed the deep ethnic divides within the SPLA. The Southern Sudanese communities became more divided than ever before in their history. These organic divides among the Southern Sudanese communities were exacerbated by the deliberate "divide and rule" policies instituted by the regimes in Khartoum, in order to maintain their power over the Southern Sudanese peoples. SPLA-Nasir accused Garang of ruling by force, in a "dictatorial reign of terror"; but ethnic rivalry seemed to have a part, with the Nasir faction mainly composed of Nuer, and Garang's supporters mainly Dinka people. Months of fighting between the two factions left thousands dead in early 1992. The SPLA-Nasir also raised the idea of an independent south.
On September 14, 1992, Bany, who was at the time Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the SPLA and Deputy Chairman of the SPLM, announced his defection from the SPLA, and escaped Garang territory. The following day, Commander Salva Kiir Mayardit was promoted from Chief of Staff to Bany's old positions of Deputy Commander-in-Chief and Deputy Chairman. Bany joined forces with Machar and Akol, and later joined forces with Bol to form SPLA-United, Sudanese People's Liberation Army-United.
Image:John Garang in crowd.jpg|thumb|left|Garang in a crowd of supporters
Garang had refused to participate in the 1985 interim government or the 1986 elections, remaining a rebel leader. However, the SPLA and government signed a peace agreement on January 9, 2005, in Nairobi, in Kenya. On July 9, 2005, he was sworn in as the First-Vice-President - the second most powerful person in the country - following a ceremony in which he and President Omar al-Bashir signed a power-sharing constitution. Simultaneously, he became the premier in southern Sudan. This administration had limited autonomy for six years, at the end of which there would be a scheduled referendum regarding secession. No Christian or southerner had ever held such a high government post. Commenting after this ceremony, Garang stated, "I congratulate the Sudanese people, this is not my peace or the peace of al-Bashir, it is the peace of the Sudanese people."
In the Hillcrest Hotel in Nairobi on New Year's Day 2003, there was a meeting between the SPLA and the Fur people. Garang asked two associates of Abdul Wahid al Nur to declare that the Fur people were with the SPLA – they refused.
Over 15 months, starting in September 2003, Ali Osman and Garang met in private in Naivasha. Their secret meetings and negotiations lasted up until the Comprehensive Peace Agreement was initialed on New Year's Eve 2004.
The CPA appeared to embody the vision of the "New Sudan" that Garang wanted. Within the CPA, power was split between the National Congress Party and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement for six years, until 2010, with Garang as the first vice-president.
As a leader, John Garang's democratic credentials were often questioned. For example, according to Gill Lusk, "John Garang did not tolerate dissent and anyone who disagreed with him was either imprisoned or killed". Under his leadership, the SPLA was accused of human rights abuses.
The ideological profile of SPLA was as shadowy as Garang himself.
He varied from Marxism to drawing support from Christian fundamentalists in the US.
The United States State Department argued that Garang's presence in the government would have helped solve the Darfur conflict in western Sudan, but others consider these claims "excessively optimistic". U.S. President George W. Bush, who supported South Sudanese independence, especially considered Garang to be a promising leader and called him a "partner in peace." Bush highlighted Garang's Christian faith, and even connected him to support at evangelical churches in his hometown of Midland, Texas.
Garang effectively used radio to advance his cause.