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FALL 2002
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TWO VOICES
IN THE LONGEST CIVIL WAR IN THE WORLD
The crowd of 1000 Sudanese and a few Americans packed the Memorial Union's Great Hall and broke into spontaneous song and thunderous applause when their hero -- John Garang -- told them about his vision for southern Sudan.
On March 23, John de Mabior Garang, the founder, chairman, and commander-in-chief of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement and its army, and a 1981 graduate of ISU, returned to his alma mater. “The movement is on track,” he told his audience, who had come from throughout the midwest to hear him speak. “We are united at home; you must unite here.”
But one member of his audience – also an ISU graduate, and also a passionate southern Sudanese – disagrees. The movement to liberate southern Sudan from its oppressor is not on track, says John Lueth (M.S. 1983, political science), and his countrymen are far from united. “The movement is in shambles,” he says. “We are not united. We do not have a diplomatic core that can topple the northern regime.”
The two men – once best friends – are separated by their experiences, philosophies, and thousands of miles. Garang leads a guerilla army and an oppressed people. Lueth is a financial advisor for Iowa State. In his spare time, he crisscrosses the United States and Canada, lecturing and lobbying about his homeland – where he has been afraid to return for the past 20 years.
The two men share a love for a country that has become one of the most tragic and terrorized places in the world. The country has been at war for 33 of the past 44 years, and in the last 18 years, the war and accompanying famine have taken 2 million lives. The region has displaced more people than in any other conflict in history: 4.5 million Sudanese have been uprooted from their homes. Starvation and forced inscription of children to the military are rampant. Slavery is the suspected reason for the disappearance of thousands of women and children.
'What kind of independence is this?'
John Lueth traces the country’s long, sad history back to 1947, the year he was born. That year, the British – who had ruled the country for the previous 50 years – gave the country its independence and attempted to unite the northern and southern parts. But the two regions are as different as it is possible for two countries to be. The northern Sudanese are light-skinned, Arabic-speaking, and predominately Muslim.
The southerners practice a variety of indigenous faiths and Christianity; they are dark-skinned Africans who speak English and a variety of tribal languages.
The geography is also different, and helped determine the country’s fate. The flat desert of the north had made it possible for the British to subdue – and subsequently educate and westernize – the northern Sudanese to a greater degree than the south. The mountains and dense, fertile bush of the Nile-rich south had provided safe haven for militant villagers who have historically resisted British rule. The British gladly handed over all education functions of the south to Christian missionaries. Southern economic development was almost non-existent.
It was not surprising then, that when it came time to hand over the reins of power, that the British would hand them to the northerners, who represented less threat and who were more educationally and economically sophisticated. And it was not surprising that the fierce southerners would immediately resist their new rulers – this time northern Sudanese. “The southern people said, ‘What kind of independence is this?’” says Lueth, “and they became mad.” When Lueth was 7 years old, a serious southern mutiny closed all the schools, and initiation to school was postponed for a year. By the time he was in middle school, using or teaching English in the schools was forbidden. “The intensity of the hatred became very bad,” remembers Lueth. The long war had begun in earnest.
The son of an educated Christian missionary, Lueth grew up speaking a number of tribal languages in addition to English. Because his father traveled throughout the country, Lueth and his family did not share the fierce loyal tribalism that defined many of his countrymen. By the time he was 13, Lueth wanted only one thing: to fight northern domination. “I wanted to join the rebels in the bush, but they said, ‘You are too young; go get some education and come back later,’” Lueth remembers.
Lueth did come back later, and by the time he was 17 he was a lieutenant in the movement. He understood guerrilla warfare: how to blow up bridges, how to defend the countryside, how to buy ammunitions, how to attack convoys and take weapons. He became a highly educated and valued leader of the movement, receiving military training in Israel and a master’s degree in military science. He was consistently at the top of his class, and spoke English, French, Lingala, Kiswahili, and Arabic.
Garang had also been pursuing higher education, but in a different way. He had joined the masses of students who fled Sudan in the early ’60s at the height of the religious persecution and had graduated from high school in Tanzania. From there, he went to Iowa’s Grinnell College to work on a B.A. in economics.
The first time John Lueth met John Garang, it was with a great deal of suspicion. Garang was a student from Grinnell College, visiting Lueth’s military camp with a group of journalists, and toting a video camera. Camp officials began their relationship with the young college student by arresting him. “We soon released him and his colleagues,” remembers Lueth. “We said, ‘You are innocent people; why don’t you come and help us?’”
The movement was interrupted by a 1972 peace agreement with the north that would last for 10 tense years. The military forces of the north and south were combined into one military. From the beginning, the provisions of the agreement caused discord. As the southern armed forces were absorbed, its highest-ranking military officers were demoted. One of the few exceptions was John Lueth, whose language and military skills were noted by the northern regime. His rank was raised from 1st lieutenant to a three-star captain, and he became responsible for training and administering examinations to the country’s young soldiers, including John Garang. The two men became friends and colleagues. When Garang returned to Iowa to attend ISU, Lueth helped care for his family.
Lueth was highly valued by the northern regime. When Garang and the late John Timmons, ISU professor of agricultural economics, recruited him to come to ISU in 1981, his U.S. visa was facilitated by no less than the president of Sudan. “Overnight, I found myself at Iowa State,” remembers Lueth.
By then, John Garang had received his Ph.D. in economics from Iowa State and had returned to Sudan, where violence and anger were boiling – threatening to shatter the uneasy peace accord. The southerners had learned that, without their knowledge, the northern administration had secretly signed an agreement with Egypt to dig the Jonglei Canal, which would siphon water from the southern Sudan swamps and send it to the northern desert and to Egypt.
In addition to the canal betrayal, the northerners had begun to forcibly relocate the absorbed southern troops to live and work in the north. “They discovered that if all the southerners stayed in the south, it didn’t look like one country,” said Lueth. “So they tried to mix people up. But the southerners didn’t want to go to the north. They became very angry.
“By the time I left for the United States, I knew that in a short time, people were going to fight again,” says Lueth.
When violence erupted in 1983, the military called upon its most educated officers to help quell the conflict. Because he was a southerner, the administration believed Dr. John Garang would be the most successful officer to quell a mutiny of 500 southern troops in Bor, who were resisting orders to be sent to the north. When Garang arrived in Bor, the troops restrained him, demanding that he stay with them instead of returning to the north. He did not resist. Instead of quelling the rebellion, Garang joined it and encouraged mutinies in other areas. The 10 years of peace were officially at an end; another long, bloody war resumed. Today, Garang is recognized as the founder and chairman of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement. He is the commander-in-chief of its army, which has grown to a force of more than 70,000.
The years that followed have been catastrophic, with southerners fighting not only against the northerners, but among themselves as well. “A power struggle began almost immediately after John Garang took over,” says Lueth. Many educated southern officers were executed by the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). “John found himself the only literate person, and it was hard to organize the movement. They became preoccupied with security. Before others could join, it had become a one-man organization. Educated people were not welcome; they were seen as a threat.”
Lueth, studying political science at ISU, learned that his country was coming unraveled under the command of his friend. “All of my colleagues got killed in a very short time. Not by Arabs, but by the SPLA. So when I wanted to go back to the movement, people who loved me and cared for me said, ‘Don’t come. You will not make a difference.’”
‘A guerilla fighter is like a fish in water, and the water is the people.’
The suddenness of the revolution, and what Lueth sees as Garang’s lack of experience and readiness to be its leader, are only partial reasons for southern Sudan’s lack of unity. “We – southern Sudan – have never been a nation,” says Lueth. “Our nationalities are our tribes.” While the northerners are united by their language and religion – Arabic and Islam – and by the shared experience of their education, the southerners’ loyalties and experiences are fragmented. Tribes speak different languages. Christianity, which is not the majority religion, is not the unifying force that Islam is in the north.
“We must love ourselves as one people with things we cherish among ourselves, and which make us a nation,” says Lueth.
In the 19 years since the SPLA was born, it has gained a reputation for disregarding human rights with dozens of human rights organizations, as well as with the U.S. State Department. While subjugation by the northern army is the root cause of the war, there are many charges that Garang’s SPLA has been responsible for killing southern Sudanese villagers, taking slaves (of a differing, insubordinate tribe), diverting food meant to alleviate the suffering and starvation of southerners for military purposes, and kidnapping children to use as soldiers. In its 279-page study titled “Civilian Devastation: Abuses by all Parties in the War in Southern Sudan,” Human Rights Watch/Africa devotes 169 pages to “SPLA violations of the rules of war.”
“The leadership of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement has committed itself repeatedly to eliminating these problems,” reports a 2001 U.S. State Department report on human rights practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. “However, in practice it appears unable to impose consistently those commitments in the field.”
“Garang’s military is irresponsible and undisciplined,” says Lueth. “When I was in the early guerilla movement, we followed the teachings of Mao, who said, ‘A guerilla fighter is like a fish in water, and the water is the people.’ If you don’t have the trust of the people, you are lost. The SPLA has robbed and killed the very people it must depend on.”
Garang bristles at the suggestion that there is any problem in Sudan other than northern oppression. “If someone sits on my shoulders and holds me down, who is the problem?” he asked in a VISIONS interview. “The person sitting on me, or I – who am being sat on?
“The north has used the issue of tribalism to divide and rule. It’s not a new strategy,” says Garang. “When people concentrate only on what they call the south/south conflict, they miss the point. They don’t see the big picture.”
Responding to questions about human rights abuses by the SPLA, Garang answers, “We are a human rights movement. We went to the bush in 1983 to fight for human rights and human dignity. We cannot violate the rights of fellow citizens while it is their rights that are violated by Khartoum (the capital of northern Sudan).
“There have been incidents of human rights abuses in the movement – we are commanding an army of 70,000, and have been in this war for 19 years. It would not be strange for such abuses to occur. Do we have mechanisms to correct such abuses? Yes we do.”
Changing the equations of power: Sept. 11 and oil
If Garang and Lueth are divided in their analysis of the health of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement and its army, they also disagree about strategies that will free their country. Both men are well aware of two developments that have dramatically altered equations of power between Sudan and the rest of the world: the potentially positive effects of Sept. 11 and the horrific effects of stepped-up oil production.
Sept. 11: A window of opportunity
Garang’s stop at ISU in March was sandwiched between meetings with high-ranking U.S. officials – including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Defense Secretary Colin Powell – and dignitaries in London, Brussels, and Oslo. The purpose of the world tour was to take advantage of what he calls “a window of opportunity” created by Sept. 11.
Suddenly, there are new, compelling reasons for northern Sudan to enter the good graces of the United States. After Sept. 11, being identified as an extremist Muslim nation meant also potentially becoming a target of the United States’ war on terrorism. “Khartoum was afraid that they might be treated like the Taliban,” says Garang. “They started to cooperate with the United States and provide information about Bin Ladin and the al-Qaida.”
The United States can use northern Sudan’s conciliatory, post-Sept. 11 attitude to broker peace between the south and the north, says Garang. Also, if the north backs away from its identity as an extremist Islamic regime, this may also translate into relief from religious persecution for Christians in the south.
Oil production results in genocide
The fairly recent development and production of southern oil reserves in the Upper Nile by the north has also changed the equation of power. In the last few years, the north has developed a “scorched earth” policy, wiping out whole villages that stand in the way of oil development. In the past year, approximately 400,000 Nuer (a southern tribe) have been displaced and thousands more have been killed. The “blood oil” is being purchased by the west, including the United States, because one of the developers is on the U.S. Stock Exchange. Millions of dollars of oil revenues have allowed the north to acquire sophisticated weapons, which have been used to exterminate whole villages.
The atrocities resulting from the blood oil have helped prompt warring southern tribes to unite against an enemy that is growing stronger. “People who have been adversaries are realizing they are one people,” says Lueth.
‘We will never be one people’
In spite of Garang’s dislike and distrust of the northern regime, he believes negotiation is possible. “The government in Khartoum has not changed and will not change. But that not withstanding, we are willing to negotiate,” he says. Garang believes that international pressures and the strength of the popular uprising will prompt the north to negotiate, in much the same way that the former white government of South Africa negotiated with Mandela.
But the nature of the peace Garang is negotiating worries Lueth. One of Garang’s plans, for example, involves forming a national democratic alliance between the north and south, with a certain amount of “self determination” for the south (including religious freedom) rather like the relationship between the state governments of the United States and the U.S. federal government. Eventually, the country would vote on complete separation of the two regions.
But Lueth does not believe that a democratic vote would ever result in southern succession – the only solution he believes is viable. “It is in the interest of the north [for Sudan] to continue to be one country, because the south is rich with water and oil; they will never vote for two countries,” says Lueth. “No constitution will ever secure our rights, because the legislature is controlled by the northerners. We will never be one people; there is no fit. Our values are too different. The north will enforce the language of Arabic and the religion of Islam on us, because they are the majority, and the majority rules.
“The integrity and nationality of the southern people can be preserved only by having an independent southern Sudan.”
But specialists on the subject of Sudan say that the likelihood of Lueth’s dream of two Sudans becoming reality is slim. “It’s unlikely that the U.S. would support two [Sudanese] states,” says Jemera Rone, counsel with Human Rights Watch/Africa. Egypt is an influential force in the world and in the United States, says Rone. Egypt will always resist splitting the two countries, because the country needs the water from the Nile of the southern region, and the African southerners are more difficult to negotiate with than the Arabic northerners.
And so the two men – who love the same country – go their separate ways. Garang has returned home to Sudan after his world tour, where he says he is beginning to build schools. “Our children cannot wait for peace. They must go to school now.”
But Garang’s nation-building process has come too late, says Lueth. “The power of the movement is concentrated in just one man, who is afraid to relinquish his power. He is preoccupied with his position, and that’s not how a leader should be.”
Over the years, John Lueth has asked his friend John Garang if there were a place for him in the movement. His questions have been met with silence.
“I don’t give up,” says Lueth. “All of these years, I’m believing that maybe next year I’ll go home. I dream that maybe one day things will change. But dreams are not the things of a leader.”
Lueth has made his own place in the movement, from his unlikely vantage point in Ames, Iowa, lobbying against Sudanese blood oil in which U.S. citizens unknowingly invest. He has been called upon to testify before congressional hearings, and is a popular speaker with college students and church groups.
He still considers John Garang his friend. The two men care about each other’s families, and their history binds them together. But Lueth has serious doubts that the course Garang has taken will free their people.
“Somebody has to wither away in order for the rest to succeed. If this movement continues this way for another two or three years, the whole movement will wither away.
“If I got a call from my people, saying, ‘We need you, John,’ then I would go home.”
About the Writer | Karol Crosbie is the former associate editor of VISIONS magazine.