It is very difficult indeed as to where and 
how to pay a tribute to a man who dedicated all his life to 
the oppressed people of Sudan. In a recent press interview 
just before his death, Dr John Garang de Mabior remembered 
that ‘when he was a child, he used to see himself in every 
naked, hungry child in the district.’ This humanitarian 
outlook turned out to have a profound effect on his life as 
a soldier, a lecturer, a rebel leader, an ideologue and a 
short-lived statesman. Dr Garang was, and is, regarded as 
one of the finest Sudanese leader in the modern history of 
Sudan: he was extraordinarily charismatic, highly 
intelligent and unusually popular. He shot to fame 
following the rebellion of Bor and Pibor Battalions in 
1983; since then his name has been inexorably intertwined 
with the struggle of the masses in the Sudan. Although the 
Sudan has experienced an array of political leaders in its 
political evolution, yet few politicians have distinct 
personalities. Some of them go into politics to give 
themselves a personality: they have so little sense of self 
that they are comfortable only when they have some official 
status.

Others start with a personality if only to end up 
with no personality at all. But Garang’s abilities, 
professionalism, commitment and dedication to the cause of 
the marginalised population of the country are something 
all Sudanese politicians should aspire to. Garang rose to 
this challenge with self-confidence, and his studious study 
of the under-represented populace in the Sudan was a 
primary motive in his struggle to redress this imbalance of 
power and wealth in the Sudanese society. This why around 
six million people thronged the streets of the Sudanese 
capital, Khartoum, to greet him on Friday, July 8, 2005. 
Better still, Garang was rare among the Southerners in 
calling for national unity and had, therefore, also raised 
the hopes of many Northern Sudanese, not only of keeping 
Sudan’s one million square miles united, but also of 
eventually freeing them from the hated fundamentalist 
Government, restoring democracy and human rights and ending 
the crisis in Dar Fur and Eastern Sudan. 
 
John Garang was born on June 23, 1945 into a poor family in 
Buk - a small Dinka village in Bor County on the eastern 
bank of the Nile where no one, he once said, was able even 
to read. By the age of 10, Garang was an orphan. He might 
have stayed in Buk, becoming a cattle herder like his 
father and grandfather before him, had a relative not paid 
his fees and sent him to school - first in nearby Wau, then 
across the Nile in Rumbek. In 1962, at the age of 17, 
Garang joined the first Sudanese civil war - that is, the 
Anya-Nya, but because he was so young, the then rebel 
leaders encouraged him and others of his age to seek an 
education, sending him to continue his secondary education 
in Tanzania. After wining a scholarship to Grinnell College 
in Iowa, he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics in 
1969. He was offered a graduate fellowship at the 
University of California, Berkeley, but chose instead to 
return to Tanzania as a research fellow at Dar al-Salaam 
University. There he met a future ally - Yoweri Museveni, 
now the President of Uganda - and soon decided to return to 
the Sudan to join the rebel Anya-Nya movement. 
 
During the Addis Ababa peace talks, a junior officer within 
the Anya-Nya rank and file called John Garang de Mabior 
informed Joseph Lagu that he categorically had no 
confidence that these negotiations would lead to a 
permanent solution. When he was asked by Lagu as to what 
had prompted him to think so, Garang, who was then an 
officer in the Anya-Nya military intelligence, replied that 
any resulting agreement from this peace process would not 
last long if it were not to go deep into changing the 
Sudanese body politics. Garang went on to name these issues 
as: separation of religion from politics, the question of 
ethnicities, security administration in Southern Sudan 
during the Interim Period, the endorsement of the agreement 
through a popular referendum. He added that there should 
be, at least, a five-year transitional period before the 
referendum. Furthermore, Garang warned the Anya-Nya leaders 
about the unduly hasty approach in absorbing the former 
rebel fighters into the Sudanese army. No sooner had Garang 
put these remarks in writing to Lagu than his name was 
removed from the negotiating team, and sent back to the 
Anya-Nya headquarters in Upper Nile. Later, history had to 
prove that Garang was right, and he was thinking ten years 
ahead of his superiors. 
 
Despite all his reservations, Garang joined the Sudanese 
army as an absorbed officer; and, when he was asked by Lagu 
yet again as to why he did accept the absorption into the 
Sudanese Armed Forces in spite of his scepticism? Garang 
replied: ‘I am still sticking to my opinion that this 
agreement will not last, but I want to give it a chance, 
and let us wait and see.’ Nonetheless, Garang made use of 
opportunities provided by the Sudan army to pursue further 
studies both academically and militarily. When the 
aforementioned first civil war ended with the Addis Ababa 
Agreement of 1972, many rebels - Garang among them, as 
stated earlier, were incorporated into the Sudanese Armed 
Forces. In 11 years as a career soldier, he rose quickly 
from captain to colonel, completing the Infantry Officers 
Advanced Course at the US Army Infantry School in Fort 
Benning, Georgia; but taking a four-year study break to get 
a master’s degree in agricultural economics and a doctorate 
in economics at Iowa State University. Through working in 
the Sudanese army in the North, Garang acquired skills and 
experience in dealing with Northern fellow countrymen, 
understanding their mentality, witnessing the deprivation 
of other socially and economically marginalised population 
in Northern Sudan, including the Nuba, the Funj, the Beja 
and the people of Dar Fur. The Sudanese society is infested 
with countless episodes of social diseases, including 
racism, tribalism, religious bigotry, sectarianism, 
exploitation, cultural assimilation, gender discrimination 
and so forth. In the Northern communities, Garang witnessed 
a great deal of this manifestly practised misdemeanour in 
Arab jokes, folklore, neighbourhood relations, mass media, 
employment opportunities and Government policies.

 As a Dinka tribesman, Garang might have come across an 
acrimonious, personal experience when he was not in his 
army uniform. These were the sorts of issues that motivated 
Garang and his colleagues to launch an underground movement 
to agitate for socio-political change in the Sudan. They 
were emboldened by President Nimeiri’s meddling with, and 
rescinding of, the Addis Ababa Accord that put an end to 
fratricidal hostilities in 1972. 
 
However, no settlement which contravenes the principles of 
eternal justice will ever be a permanent one. Let us be 
warned by the example of the Addis Ababa Accord of 1972. 
The results of undue haste in some respects and the 
overlooking of or putting aside important matters were to 
have catastrophic consequences later on. As to why the 
second civil war started in the Sudan, it had been a 
controversially polemic issue. Few wars, if any, have a 
single origin. The outbreak of conflicts comes from a clash 
of various causes. This was certainly true of the First 
World War, yet it was overlooked by the peacemakers of 
1919. Exhausted, physically and mentally, by four years of 
slaughter, four years of hysterically ‘hating the Hun’, 
they picked up one reason for it all: Germany. And this was 
written into the peace treaty, and, therefore, into the 
peace implementation. The result was the Second World War. 
Much to the point, all the Israeli-Arab wars are the result 
of previously unsettled conflicts, with the 1948 conflict 
as a seminal factor in the current disputes. The US war in 
Afghanistan in October 2001 was a consequence of the 
unresolved dispute that was egged out by a struggle to 
expel the Soviet troops from the Afghani territory. The 
recent Iraqi war is connected, in one way or another, to 
the unfinished business of Iraq-Kuwait war in the early 
1990s. And so the second Sudanese civil war was a direct 
result of the failure of the first one to deliver a 
sustainable settlement of the dispute; and, if a new war 
were to start in future, it would be because either a 
number of groups came out of the Comprehensive Peace 
Agreement bitterly unsatisfied or the agreement itself were 
tampered with. 
 
Sudan’s domestic history during the last fifty years that 
followed its independence in 1956 consists largely of the 
struggle of orders, whereby a large section of its 
population sought protection from, and then political and 
social equality with, the minority ruling class who 
monopolise the state and control power, wealth, education, 
business and so forth. Poverty has increased the economic 
difficulties of small farmers, many of whom, because of the 
harsh laws of loans, are falling into a state of virtual 
serfdom. Constitutions are drafted, passed and amended, but 
with little effects on the people they are supposed to 
benefit from them. Legislations are enacted, but with 
cobweb’s inefficiency that could allow the influential 
people to go through, but hold back the weak. Worse still, 
the gap between the centre and the peripheries in economic 
development, literacy, social services, the standard of 
living, income generation, medicare, child malnutrition, 
the rate of infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy 
and so forth continues to get wider and wider. Against this 
backdrop, civil wars have been fought in the Sudan. In 
1983, Dr Garang was sent to crush a mutiny in Bor by 500 
Southern Government soldiers, who were resisting being 
rotated to posts in the North. Instead, he started a rebel 
movement, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army 
(SPLM/A), which was opposed to military rule and Islamic 
dominance of the country, and encouraged other army 
garrisons to mutiny against the Islamic laws imposed on the 
country by the Nimeiri Government. This mutiny marked the 
beginning of the second phase of Sudanese civil war, which 
resulted in more than one and half million deaths and over 
four million internally displaced persons and refugees in 
over twenty years of bloody conflict. The excesses of human 
rights violations in war-stricken parts of the country by 
the Khartoum regimes soared incessantly to the point that 
the citizens of these war-affected areas began to rethink 
their position on the slogans of national unity. The basis 
of statehood, and of unity, can only be general acceptance 
by the participants if justice, equality, egalitarianism, 
freedom and social development are the practices of 
governments, and not only being beamed out as mere texts 
enshrined in constitutions. Surely, when more than twelve 
million people have become convinced that they are rejected 
in a country in which they live, and that there is no 
longer any basis for unity between them and other groups of 
people, then unity has already ceased to exist. You cannot 
kill thousands of people, and keep killing more, in the 
name of unity. There is no unity between the dead and those 
who killed them; and, worse still, there is no unity in 
slavery and domination. 
 
On this occasion, the Sudanese authorities should find a 
way out of the bloody dispute in DarFur region, Eastern 
Sudan and the simmering resentments in far Northern Sudan. 
Let us not wait until injustice, suffering and human rights 
abuses reach their zenith to the degree that the population 
of these regions start to call for the ‘right to 
self-determination’, because extremism begets extremism at 
the other end. The situation in Dar Fur dictates a second 
thought. States are made to serve people; governments are 
established to protect the citizens of a state against 
external enemies and internal wrongdoers. It is on these 
grounds that people surrender their right and power to 
self-defence to the government of the sate in which they 
live. But when the whole machinery of the State, and the 
powers of the Government, are turned against a whole group 
of the society on the grounds of racial, tribal or 
religious prejudices, then the victims have the right to 
take back the powers they have surrendered, and to defend 
themselves. With the exception of the religion factor, the 
crisis in Dar Fur is similar in effect and intensity to the 
one once existed in the South, the Nuba Mountains and 
Southern Blue Nile before the conclusion of peace deal. But 
why peace between the Sudan regimes and the SPLM/A was an 
elusive matter for so long a time? The post-Nimeieri 
regimes were either influenced by the sectarian and 
dogmatic parties - and, therefore, not negotiating in good 
faith - or dithering was the means utilised to evade peace 
overtures. When the generals of the Transitional Military 
Council (TMC), who took over power from Nimeiri in a 
popular uprising in April 1985, invited Dr Garang to 
Khartoum, he replied to their request that ‘they were not 
bishops to go to Khartoum to give a blessing to what the 
archbishops had done there!’ ‘We should have been 
consulted,’ he added. He called the TMC May II - that is, 
the May regime without Nimeiri, but with his lately 
promoted defence minister at the helm - that is, Lt-Gen 
‘Abd al-Rahman Swar al-Dahab: this fact, then 
controversially, was later proved by the political 
development in the Sudan to be correct and that the SPLM/A 
was right. In actuality, governments are institutions not 
individuals. Truly speaking, Nimeiri was overthrown, but 
his repressive institutions remained intact. These were 
what the National Alliance for National Salvation called 
the vestiges of May regime; they include the notorious 
package of September laws, the sacked civil servants and 
cashiered army officers, the abrogation of Addis Ababa 
Accord and the wide spread of corruption which crippled the 
Sudanese economy. Had Garang accepted this tantalising 
offer from the TMC, he would have been promoted to 
major-general or lieutenant-general only to retire in a 
year’s time and together with him retire the aspirations 
and hopes of the socially marginalised people for whom he 
was fighting. Pensively, Garang pondered the Sudanese 
ailments for which the deprived Sudanese population are 
suffering, including injustice, economic marginalisation, 
illiteracy, rampant diseases and so forth. He came up with 
a socially engineered solution - that is, the New Sudan, 
which was widely publicised in his public speeches, media 
interviews and published theses (John Garang Speaks, 
London, 1987; The Call for Democracy in Sudan, London, 
1992; and The Vision of New Sudan: Questions of Unity and 
Identity, Cairo, 1998). He called for the Sudan in which 
democracy prevails, free from sectarianism, secessionism, 
and religious, social and/or racial discriminations and 
prejudices. Garang caused a political furore in the 
conceptual thinking of Southern Sudanese politicians which 
had been centred, for a very long time, on the separation 
of Southern Sudan; this call has been oscillating from a 
demand for federalism in the early days of Sudan’s 
independence from the Condominium Rule in 1956 to a total 
secession from the central Government that was, and is so 
much so, dominated by the Northerners ever since the 
creation of the modern Sudan. 
 
The Southerners have, therefore, come to believe that 
liberation from this yoke of domination lies in 
dismembering the country. Garang, on the other hand, 
refused to surrender to this existing reality, and, 
instead, embarked on a new venture which advocated the 
destruction of the old Sudan and reconstructing, in its 
place, a new one according to a new empirical formula in 
which the Southerners and other marginalised people of 
Sudan should not become the guests of the central 
authority, but original partners in power- and 
wealth-sharing. Rejecting the political process in its old 
clothes, Garang called for egalitarianism as the norms of 
the day, and advocated a country in which justice and the 
rule of law were practised. Like John F Kennedy who once 
said: ‘Let us not be Democrats nor Republicans, but let us 
be Americans,’ John Garang also reiterated more than once 
that ‘let us not be Northerners or Southerners, but let us 
be, first and foremost, Sudanese.’ 
 
Garang the great theorist knew instinctively how simple 
ideas, when repeated over and over again, could work best 
like fire on dry grass on a mass audience; he also knew how 
to appeal to the emotions of his listeners, and how to 
reassure them that they were not to blame for Sudan’s ills, 
but it was all the fault of clique-dominated Government in 
Khartoum; thus came the idea of the SPLM/A as a movement in 
lieu of a political party at the inception of armed 
struggle. The call for a New Sudan is a serious response by 
the SPLM/A against ‘the attempt by various Khartoum-based 
regimes to build a monolithic Arab-Islamic state to the 
exclusion of other parameters of the Sudanese diversity; 
this constitutes the Fundamental Problem of Sudan and 
defines the Sudanese conflict. The Sudanese state has 
excluded the vast majority of the Sudanese people from 
governance, and, therefore, their marginalisation in the 
political, economic and social fields. This provoked 
resistance by the excluded. There have been wars and there 
continues to be wars in the Sudan simply because the 
majority of the Sudanese are not stakeholders in 
governance. The Arab-Islamic state in the Sudan ended up 
being imposed by force, rather than by consent of the 
governed through a consensual social contract; and force 
has been responded with force.’ The solution to this 
Fundamental Problem of Sudan is to evolve an ‘all inclusive 
Sudanese state’, which is called the New Sudan, because the 
previously tested minoritarian-based rule is the antithesis 
of majority aspirations. As Sudanese citizens, the 
population should enjoy civic rights in a country which 
there should be a progress towards human rights and social 
welfare, the eradication of poverty and putting an end to 
the cycles of hunger, the achievement of primary education 
to all and the promotion of gender equality, and an 
endeavour to attain development based on stronger emphasis 
on basic human needs - such as, reasonable health, access 
to clean water and the equality of opportunities. 
 
The vision of New Sudan Garang was championing was to be 
achieved through a two-tier process: a military struggle 
and a political dialogue that could lead to a peaceful 
settlement. This is why the SPLM/A continued to talk to the 
Government of the day in Khartoum, regardless of its 
nature. The Sudanese people, as well as political observers 
and pundits, may wonder what is different now between the 
Addis Ababa Accord of March 1972 and the Comprehensive 
Peace Agreement of January 2005 as signed in the Kenyan 
capital, Nairobi. The difference is that the ultimate 
concession of self-rule and the opportunity for 
self-determination have been grasped by the Southerners 
from the Northern Government. Previously, the 1972 
agreement focused on integrating the Southern rebels into 
the national army, unlike the present agreement that will 
see the evacuation of the garrison towns in the South, 
which the Sudan Government had previously concentrated its 
might, and the redeployment of SPLA troops to those areas. 
It is hard to underestimate the importance of this element 
of the agreement. After 22 years of struggling to control 
and defeat the rebel SPLA, costing the lives of countless 
young soldiers, civilians and students, the Sudan 
Government is now walking away from the South. In this 
current agreement, we must not allow any sense of 
exploitation, any spirit of greed nor any grasping desire 
to over-ride the fundamental principle of righteousness. 
Vigorous attempts will be made by our empowered 
partner-in-power to bully the new comers to make them 
depart from the strict principles of right, and to satisfy 
some base, sordid and squalid ideas of avarice, but let us 
resist them all. 
 
On Saturday, July 30, 2005, alas, Garang died after the 
Ugandan presidential MI-72 helicopter he was riding 
crashed. He died with five of his personal bodyguard - 
namely, Lt-Col Amak Malwal, Lt-Col ‘Ali Mian Majuk, First 
Lieut Deng Majok Kwang, Lieut Juma Mian Deng and First 
Lieut David Oboko Obur, and seven Uganan crew members. He 
had been returning from a meeting in Rwakitura with his 
long-time ally, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Great 
leaders and prophets never reach the promised land; take, 
for instance, Prophet Moses who died in the wilderness 
before taking the Israelites to the promised land only to 
bequeath the onus of the mission to his lieutenant, Joshua; 
take also Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, President Samora 
Machel of Mozambique and Yousif Kuwa Makki, to name but a 
few. The post-Garang SPLM/A leaders should strenuously 
strive to ensure the Sudanese people that Garang did not 
die in vain, and that his legacy, vision, teachings and 
aspirations are attained as his widow asserted immediately 
after receiving the bitter news that her husband was dead. 
The Sudanese masses have been deceived far too long that 
they lost confidence in the Northern-based political 
process, party system and factional squabbles. Based on a 
false hope that the entire people could be fooled all the 
time, the policies of the National Islamic Front regime 
became a bitter source of controversy, and the catastrophic 
situation in the Sudan had made people flock to the SPLM/A 
vision, as laid down in the programme of New Sudan, which 
has attracted, and continues to attract, more and more 
people. It is easy to get depressed about the quality of 
modern political leaders in the Sudan, about how readily we 
are taken in by plausible promises delivered in a plausible 
manner, but Garang was not given a chance to live up to his 
pledges to the Sudanese people. His life was cut short by 
death that we are praying today for his soul and that may 
Almighty God give him peace in his eternal life and give 
the disconsolate Sudanese people courage and wisdom to 
follow in his footsteps. 
 
*Dr Omer M Shurkian is a Sudanese from the Nuba Mountains 
in central Sudan. He is the chairman of the London based 
Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad (NMSA) As a human rights 
activist, he was involved in a campaign against the Sudan 
Government’s human rights violations meted out on the Nuba 
people in the Sudan. He also published a number of articles 
on the plight of the Nuba people.

BY OMER M. SHURKIAN