Starving Sudan : U.S.-Educated Rebel Leader Has No Regrets

He calls himself Dr. John.

He is a burly man with a bald head and a Mennonite-style beard flecked with gray. He earned his doctorate in Iowa and punctuates his conversation with such words as “ a priori “ and “irrespective.” He has an American-bred taste for fresh strawberries and peanut ice cream. But the rebel war that he directs, which has all but sealed off southern Sudan to relief food, threatens 2 million people with starvation.

In the shade of a giant acacia tree, at a rebel encampment beside an unnamed tributary of the Nile, Col. John Garang sat down for a rare interview recently. He wore a freshly pressed camouflage uniform bedizened at the shoulders with brass stars and eagles. He carried an AK-47 assault rifle. Stuffed in his belt were a revolver and a long knife.

‘We Should Be Praised’

“We are not repentant,” he said, speaking of the war-triggered famine and the civilian airliner with 60 people aboard that his soldiers shot down last month. “We warned (Sudanese Prime Minister) Sadiq Mahdi that the airspace over War Zone I is closed. We should be praised for the way we are conducting the war by alerting the people so that innocent people are not caught up in cross fire.”

The 43-year-old leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) defended the rectitude of Sudan’s civil war, a north-south conflict that has wrested control of most of southern Sudan away from the Muslim-dominated government in Khartoum.

Garang vowed that his guerrilla movement can never be beaten militarily and insisted that the fighting--born of decades of resentment by the Christian and animist south against the political dominance of the Islamic north--will not end until the government in Khartoum is dissolved.

“We are not fighting to be invited to dinner. We are fighting to effectively participate in the decision-making of our country, in the restructuring of political power in Khartoum,” Garang said. “Our aims are to create a new Sudan. This new Sudan may not be during our lifetimes.”

Rejects Blame

While proudly shouldering responsibility for a war that he says may grind on for decades, Garang refused to accept blame for southern Sudan’s worsening famine--a crisis that in recent weeks has lifted his war out of the obscurity that shrouds many civil conflicts across Africa and has put pictures of starving Sudanese on the nightly news.

The rebel leader complained that international relief agencies have deceived the world into thinking that his movement is responsible for preventing food aid from reaching the neediest victims of famine. Too much has been made, Garang said, of the food shortage in the government-controlled southern towns such as Wau, where about 170,000 people are besieged by SPLA forces and where aid officials say scores of residents have died of starvation.

“The gentlemen in Wau with neckties, they appear in the international headlines and they are a very small minority,” Garang said. “We are not against them. We will discuss relief as far as the people in the cities are concerned. But the basic issue is that nobody is taking the people in the countryside into consideration.”

Southern Sudan is a vast, undeveloped, almost roadless region where, as Garang said, the vast majority do not live in towns. Three years of civil war, combined with two years of bad rains and plagues of locusts, have displaced and destroyed the crops and cattle of hundreds of thousands of the south’s farmers and nomadic herders.

Garang said that if international aid agencies, which have relief food ready for air and truck transport from northern Sudan and several bordering countries, want to help the largest numbers of these people, “there must be a basic agreement on proportions. . . . When they talk about relief they talk about relief to the towns, not to the countryside. We did not cut off relief supplies. It is the relief supplies that have never come.”

Relief officials, who are now negotiating with the SPLA and who are alarmed by what they say is an escalating disaster in southern Sudan, maintain that 2 million people cannot be reached solely by trucking food over the rutted dirt roads controlled by Garang’s rebels. They say that large cargo planes must be allowed to land at the south’s airports, which remain under government control, for distribution of food in towns as well as in surrounding rebel-held areas.

Garang said that although he was willing to “talk about” food relief going into these airports, SPLA policy remains clear. Unless relief agencies get specific permission from his movement, Garang said his troops will shoot down any plane flying over the south.

Over the years that he has fought against the Sudanese government, Garang said leaders in Khartoum have not taken his movement “seriously.”

War Not ‘Small Wound’

“They think that the war is a small wound in the body politic of Sudan that needs a little medicine and it would be healed. That is not the truth. The people in Khartoum deceive themselves,” he said.

In three years of fighting, Garang and his army, which is estimated to have about 12,000 soldiers, have sought with considerable success to turn the “small wound” into a major hemorrhage in Sudan’s economy. The air blockade of the south and the shooting down of the Sudan Airways plane on Aug. 16 are just two examples of how Garang has fought to be taken seriously.

In past years, the SPLA attacked and chased out of the region Chevron Oil’s major drilling operation in the southern town of Bentiu, a project that could have been a major financial boon to the bankrupt government.

The rebels also forced French workers away from the Jonglei Canal project, a gigantic irrigation plan that southerners feared would divert water away from their crops and cattle to the benefit of the north.

The destructiveness of the SPLA is not random. Indeed, Garang knows well the economic potential of the Jonglei Canal, having written his doctoral dissertation at Iowa State University on the subject.

In an interview with a small group of journalists that he allowed into southeastern Sudan, Garang said the rebel war is not intended to split the country along north-south, Muslim-Christian lines. Rather, he said, he is trying to convince leaders in Khartoum that Sudan can no longer afford to be dominated by the north.

Garang’s army is the second rebel force in Sudan’s 30-year history to challenge the government in Khartoum. In the first war, which lasted 17 years and ended in 1972 when Khartoum granted the south a measure of autonomy, the rebels had fought for a separate nation. Garang said this makes no sense now.

‘Real Nation’ Sought

“For the last three years, we have been saying this is not a conflict between Arabs and Africans, this is not a conflict between Muslims and Christians, it is not a religious or racial conflict. We are in the process of national formation. We are trying to fuse this into a real nation,” Garang said.

A major obstacle to Sudan’s becoming a united country, Garang said, is northern insistence on imposing Islamic law on non-Muslims in the south. A system of Islamic law called sharia was introduced in 1983 by former President Jaafar Numeiri, who was ousted in a coup in early 1985. Mahdi’s government, elected a year later, has promised to soften the laws while still maintaining their Islamic character. Garang said any Islamic laws as part of the national government are unacceptable.

Underlying an abiding southern Sudanese suspicion toward Arabs, Garang also repeated SPLA demands that Khartoum renounce its defense pacts with Egypt and Libya. If these conditions are met, Garang said, his movement would be willing to join in a constitutional conference with other Sudanese parties and then participate in elections.

No Negotiations

The Khartoum government is unlikely to meet any of Garang’s conditions for a cease-fire. Since the downing of the Sudan Airways plane, Khartoum has broken off all negotiations with the SPLA. Mahdi, who met with Garang in July and had been sympathetic to many of the south’s concerns, now calls the SPLA leader a “terrorist.”

In a two-hour interview, Garang expressed no regret over the increasingly remote chance of a negotiated settlement with Khartoum. “I told Sadiq Mahdi (during their July meeting) in Addis Ababa that if he wanted military victory over the SPLA he needed a minimum of 600,000 new recruits,” Garang said. “And in this 600,000 new recruits . . . at least one-third will come (desert) to us.”

The SPLA, Garang acknowledged, is supported by bordering Ethiopia. But he maintained that other than “territorial access, there is nothing we get from Ethiopia. . . . There are no small Ethiopians sitting on the edge of my ear, telling me what to do.”

Ethiopia Support

American diplomats in the Horn of Africa disagree, saying Garang’s rebels depend on Marxist Ethiopia for arms, ammunition, uniforms and food. They say Garang, who spends considerable time in Addis Ababa, does not make major policy decisions without the counsel and consent of the Ethiopian government. SPLA soldiers are frequently seen in Ethiopian border areas, where international aid officials say the government gives them food diverted from famine-relief programs. Traveling in rebel-held Sudan, this reporter saw SPLA recruits eating field rations bearing Ethiopian labels.

Until recently, another major supporter of the SPLA had been Moammar Kadafi’s Libya. Garang said support ended abruptly on April 6, 1985, after the ouster of their mutual enemy, Numeiri, in Khartoum. Kadafi since has given the SPLA nothing and has supplied the new Sudanese government with Soviet-made planes that have bombed rebel-held areas.

“Nobody assists you because your face is beautiful. There must be commonalities,” Garang said. He said his and Kadafi’s “common objectives” ended with Numeiri’s overthrow. But Garang was careful not to criticize Kadafi for changing sides, or for supplying planes that have bombed his soldiers. Other SPLA officials have said that Libyan air support for the Khartoum government is the most serious threat the rebels face in the war.

Educated in U.S.

Before Garang, the son of Dinka farmers in the south, deserted the Sudanese army in 1983 to found the SPLA, he had spent nine years in the United States. He has a BA from Grinnell College in Iowa, a doctorate in agricultural economics from Iowa State and a year’s military training at Ft. Benning, Ga.

“Of course you cannot spend nine of your formative years, education-wise, without getting influences,” Garang said. But he said that although he misses his American friends in the Midwest and some of the pleasures of American culture, he objects to U.S. policies in Sudan. The United States was the major financial backer of Numeiri and maintains close ties with Mahdi’s government.

“Before Numeiri fell, the U.S. had its money on the wrong horse. It still has its money on the wrong horse. They should shift that money to the winning horse,” Garang said.