Onetime Rebel Chief Takes Office in Sudan

Former rebel chief John Garang took his place in the Sudanese leadership Saturday, swearing the oath of office as first vice president in a new government after more than 20 years of fighting from the swamps of the south.

At a ceremony in the presidential palace, Garang became deputy to his old enemy President Omar Hassan Bashir, who signed a new interim constitution and took his own oath.

The long and bitter war between the Khartoum government and Garang’s rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement ended in January when they signed an agreement that includes a new coalition government and arrangements to share wealth and power.

Garang and Bashir took their oaths in the presence of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and six African heads of state.

Bashir spoke in Arabic, the language of the north, and Garang in English, the language preferred by many educated southerners, reflecting the diversity of Sudan, which has dozens of languages and ethnicities. Muslim and Christian clerics introduced the ceremony.

“My presence here today in Khartoum is a true signal that the war is over,” Garang said.

Southern Sudan has been at war for all but 11 years since independence from Britain in 1956. Garang’s rebellion began in 1983 and broadly pitted the Islamist government in Khartoum against the Christian and animist south. The fighting, complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology, claimed 2 million lives, mostly from famine and disease, and left the south with little infrastructure.

The peace deal gives Bashir’s party 52% of government and parliament and Garang’s group 28%, with northern and southern opposition groups taking the remaining 20%. The south can vote on secession in a referendum within six years.

It also divides oil wealth roughly equally between the north and the south, where the main oil fields lie.

But the peace deal does not cover the conflict in the western region of Darfur, which has raged for more than two years.