Fragile Sudanese peace tested

NAIROBI, Kenya — For two decades, John Garang personified Sudan's bloody civil war. For the past seven months, he personified peace. His death last weekend will sharply test which legacy will prevail.

Distraught rioters burned cars and threw stones yesterday in Khartoum, Sudan's capital. But Sudanese officials were quick to say that Garang's death — in a helicopter crash blamed on bad weather — would not halt this year's historic progress toward peace.

"We lost Garang at a time when we needed him most, but we think that we have made great strides toward peace and we believe that the peace process should continue," said Garang aide Nihal Deng.

The Sudanese government, meanwhile, said the former rebel commander's passing "gives us more strength" to continue the peace process.

Still, observers say the loss of Garang is a major blow to Africa's largest country, clinging to a fragile peace and still reeling from the humanitarian disaster in Darfur.

After leading the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) since 1983, the charismatic — and sometimes ruthless — colonel signed a deal with the Arab-dominated northern government in January, ending a 21-year conflict that killed 2 million people. Just three weeks ago, Garang was sworn in as the country's vice president, working with his former enemy, Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir.

The January agreement was midwifed by the Bush administration and was a high-profile contribution to the overall decline in the number of African wars.

But because the deal was dominated so personally by Garang and his northern counterparts — who negotiated word by word and line by line for years — its success depended largely on the considerable force of Garang's personality and power.

Under the January peace agreement, southerners are to receive about one-third of the seats in the new joint government. Oil revenue is to be split evenly between the north and south, and southerners are to have a significant degree of autonomy until they have the chance to vote on secession in 2011.

Garang's demise, analysts say, will test whether the impetus for peace is larger than one man. It also removes a powerful moderating influence inside Sudan's government, which was involved in what the United States calls genocide in the separate conflict in the country's western Darfur region.

Initially, there were no signs of foul play in the crash, which happened along the Sudan-Uganda border. Yet it comes at a fragile time, because "the peace isn't yet institutionalized," says Richard Cornwell of the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa.

This was a hugely "personal deal" between Garang and Bashir, he adds. The Sudan conflict began in 1983 when the north tried to impose Islamic sharia law on the Christian and animist south.

As the leadership of Garang's SPLM gathers for an emergency meeting, a major question looms: Who will replace Garang — and will that person be able to persuade the many disparate southern militia groups to stick with the peace deal?

There is deep skepticism among other southern leaders about the wisdom of the deal. It set up a six-year interim period, with confidence-building measures, including the withdrawal of northern troops from the south.

At the end of the six years, southerners will vote on whether to secede from the north. Garang — who earned his Ph.D. at Grinnell College in Iowa — was one of the few southerners who preached the value of north-south unity.

"He was well aware that the south could disintegrate into warring factions" if it seceded from the north, Cornwell explains. North-south unity, Garang calculated, would also help keep the south unified — because it would keep southern groups focused on dealing with the north, not on their own infighting.

It was this kind of political astuteness that gave Garang such clout. "Garang was the one man who could hold the south together," adds Cornwell.

Experts on Sudan said hard-liners in the ruling party or discontents within the SPLM could use Garang's death as a chance to disrupt the peace process, create divisions or revive fighting.

"The people who signed the agreement will want to go forward with it, but it's not impossible that some in the military will see it as an opportunity to win a military victory," said David Shinn, director of East African affairs at the State Department from 1993 to 1996. "That's not at all a certainty, but it can't be ruled out."

Salva Kiir Mayardit, Garang's deputy, emerged as the movement's new leader and appeared likely to take over as first vice president. "We call upon all members of the SPLM and the entire Sudanese nation to remain calm and vigilant," Kiir said.

Garang "didn't run a very democratic organization. There was Garang and nobody and nobody," Shinn said. "There was never any talk about succession, because he was so important to the organization. Salva Kiir is the No. 2, but it's not clear how solid his support is and he could be challenged."

Others noted that Kiir's history with the SPLM dates to the mid-1980s and that he was a key player in the peace negotiations. "He is not a complete unknown," said a senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He has the confidence of the men in the field."

Whoever succeeds Garang must now work with Bashir to confront a major issue behind Sudan's conflicts: Whether the country's outlying regions — the south, Darfur and the east — will get more power and economic support than they traditionally have had from the central government in Khartoum.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.