Observations on Sudan

The death of Sudan's vice-president John Garang in a helicopter crash as he returned from visiting his friend Yoweri Museveni, the Ugandan president, caused riots in Khartoum and in southern Sudan and is certain to have serious ramifications across the region. The loss will also be felt keenly in Washington, DC and on the US religious right, where this corrupt, warlike dictator and human-rights abuser enjoyed an improbable hero status.

Garang, who came from a poor background in the Upper Nile to rise through the ranks of the Sudanese army, leapt to prominence in 1983 when, having been despatched from Khartoum to quell a mutiny in the south, he instead took command of it and launched a civil war. As many as two million people may have died in the 22 years of fighting, civil disruption and general hardship that followed. These ended only in January this year with a peace agreement that brought Garang back in honour to Khartoum, to join a power-sharing government.

Museveni has not been Garang's only African friend down the years. He was a close ally of the Stalinist military dictator of Ethiopia Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose fall in 1991 prompted Garang to order the return to southern Sudan of hundreds of thousands of refugees, a forced march that left thousands dead of starvation. A subsequent factional and tribal war within his SPLM movement claimed the lives of many more civilians and child soldiers.

But Garang spoke a language many in the US liked. Not only was he a graduate of the commander's course at Fort Benning, Georgia, but he also held a PhD in agricultural economics from Iowa State University. Better still, he was a Christian in charge of a Christian army fighting a Muslim government. As that government became steadily more Islamist in hue - in 1993, for example, it brought Osama Bin Laden to settle in the Sudan - so Garang's credit rose among those on the religious right in the US.

Even when the Sudanese government expelled Bin Laden a few years later and offered the Clinton administration its files on him, movements such as Christian Solidarity International continued to portray Khartoum as a state sponsor of Islamist terror and Garang as the Christian saviour of Sudan. Ted Dagne of the Congressional Research Service repeatedly feted Garang on his many visits to Washington. And the current Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, offered his medical services to a field hospital in an SPLM-controlled area at the invitation of Franklin Graham, the elder son of Billy Graham.

In the end, the war could not be won by either side, and the prospect of oil in the south helped bring the rivals to the negotiating table. With pragmatic pressure from Washington, a deal was signed carving up Sudan's power and resources with Omar el-Bashir's Islamist National Congress party. By a twist of fate, Garang even became the west's best hope for the resolution of the Darfur crisis.

And yet though he spoke of democracy, he could not bring himself to prepare for a succession. So, like most autocrats, what Garang leaves behind him is a void.

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