Garang, John

▪ 2006

 Sudanese rebel leader and politician (b. June 23, 1945, Wangkulei, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan [now in The Sudan]—d. July 30/31, 2005, southern Sudan), was appointed to the post of first vice president of The Sudan after having founded and led the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 22 years of war against the Sudanese government and then negotiating an end to that war. Garang graduated from Grinnell (Iowa) College in 1969 and returned to The Sudan, where he was involved with the Anya Nya rebel group in the Christian and animist southern part of the country. After the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, Garang was among those rebels absorbed into the Sudanese armed forces. He became a colonel, trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, and earned advanced degrees in the U.S. The Sudanese government grew increasingly Islamist in the early 1980s, however, and when Garang was sent to put down an uprising in the south in May 1983, he instead joined the rebel forces, out of which he built the Sudan People's Liberation Army, which by 1991 was 60,000 strong. Garang engaged in peace talks with Pres. Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir beginning in July 2002, and the talks culminated in the signing of a peace agreement in January 2005, under the terms of which Garang joined the government on July 9 as first vice president. He died in a helicopter crash as he was returning from a meeting with the president of Uganda.

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