Sudan "War Is Better Than a Bad Peace"

By Pico Iyer

John Garang is seated in a dry riverbed, under the sweeping branches of an acacia tree. Around his belt, the tall (6 ft. 4 in.), American-educated leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) wears a knife and a 9-mm automatic pistol; his thick hands are clasped around the stock and barrel of a Hungarian-made AKM assault rifle, private serial number 000. Suddenly, the stillness is broken by the shouts of 1,000 of Garang's guerrillas passing on their way to battle at nearby Kapoeta, a southern Sudanese town 140 miles east of the city of Juba. First they chant, "Garang, Garang, Garang." Then they break into song:

A brave man will always die

But he dies for freedom.

The bullet from an AKM will never miss,

The bullet is a beautiful color.

Their song complete, the soldiers march off to the front, dressed in beige uniforms and Italian bush hats, with ostrich plumes sticking from the muzzles of their rifles to keep out the swirling dust.

Over the past three years, Garang and his 20,000 fighters have been steadily gaining ground in their struggle against the Muslim-dominated government in Khartoum. By now they have virtually taken over the southern third of Sudan, laying siege to its four largest towns and in the process, cutting off food shipments to at least 2 million famine-struck people on the brink of starvation.

Garang, a Christian member of the Dinka tribe, vows that in spite of the human cost, they will continue fighting until the government of recently elected Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi stops trying to impose Islamic customs upon the Christians and pagans of the south. "Religion must no longer be used for political aims," Garang, 41, told TIME last week in his first interview with a major U.S. publication inside southern Sudan. "Anyone can see that Sudan is disintegrating. There is no government by the people, for the people. A new Sudan must be born."

Encompassing 160 different ethnic tribes scattered across Africa's largest country, the 22 million people of Sudan, two-thirds of them Muslim, have never had much unity. Indeed, the nation has been torn by civil war in one form or another ever since it began preparing for independence from Britain and Egypt in 1955. That year a band of southerners took up arms to fight for secession from Khartoum. In the 17 years that the Anya Nya I (Snake Venom) movement was active, more than 500,000 died. In 1975 the rebel cause turned into Anya Nya II, and in 1983 it splintered further into the SPLA. As their leader, the SPLA members chose Garang, a former lieutenant colonel in the Sudanese army whose academic skills had taken him from a peasant hut in the Dinka tribal village of Wangkulei to a doctorate in agricultural economics at Iowa State University in 1981.

Although he took part in the earlier separatist struggle, Garang is eager now to renounce any hint of a secessionist program. "We are not a Christian movement," he stresses. "We are not an African movement. We are a Sudanese movement. We cannot for a moment entertain sectarianism based on religion, on race or on tribe, because it is precisely such sectarianism that has blackened Sudan for 30 years. We are a unionist movement dedicated to the creation of a united new Sudan that uses its resources for the people and does not fight within itself."

In that cause, SPLA fighters receive most of their arms from the Marxist government of neighboring Ethiopia, but also use everything from mint condition U.S.-made 60-mm mortars to 14.5-mm Soviet antiaircraft guns. According to Garang, the guerrillas have used their weapons to shoot down 24 planes and destroy hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers. These days, he boasts, "all transport in and out of south Sudan is under virtual SPLA control." The rebels' military dominance, however, has come to seem increasingly ruthless. Just last month, when a Sudan Airways passenger plane took off in an area that the guerrillas had declared closed, the SPLA shot it down with a Soviet-made SA-7 missile, killing all 63 people on board. That show of force moved international relief agencies to suspend all shipments to the millions starving in the south, an estimated 95% of them in rebel territory.

Garang claims that the SPLA command is concerned about those who are stranded without food by the fighting. Relief shipments can reach them, he says, providing they are channeled through the rebels' own Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association. He maintains that he would consider holding talks with the international relief agencies and the government to discuss sending food to those besieged in the cities. But at present, complains the bearded leader, with a touch of hyperbole, "international organizations distribute food to our people with a teaspoon, and to government-held areas with a shovel."

Garang professes to be eager for a peaceful solution to the civil strife. "Our objectives," he declares, "are political, not military, and if we can achieve our aims by other means than military, that would be best." With a blend of bravado and abstraction, the former university lecturer even says his vision of a new Sudan "does not exclude Sadiq. We will just transform his thinking from that of a sectarian theocrat to that of a Sudanese nationalist." But when the Prime Minister actually sat down with Garang in Ethiopia two months ago, the peace talks quickly collapsed, as each side blamed the other for the breakdown. Garang, indeed, remains determined to extend the fight until his objectives are met. "As someone once said," he quotes, " 'War is better than a bad peace.' "

With reporting by James Wilde/ Kapoeta