Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
still a thousand miles further north. By the afternoon, we had passed by the falls, and come
upon a crumbling set of brick and timber buildings. For the first time, Severino muttered
words: this place, he told us, was called 'Commando'. It was a place with which he was
very familiar - the park's rangers used it as an outpost. But then, he lifted his hand and
pointed to one crumbling shack, in the heart of the others. 'That's the place,' he said. 'That
was Garang's hideaway.'
Slowly, we approached. Now, it was only a collection of shattered bricks, gradually be-
ing reclaimed by the wild. But Severino was lifting the lid on the story of South Sudan's
origin, and one of the longest civil wars that Africa - and, indeed, the world - has ever
known.
Dr John Garang de Mabior was a Sudanese politician and leader of the rebels who ini-
tiated the Second Sudanese Civil War in 1983. A member of Sudan's native Dinka tribe,
Garang had been born in 1945 in the upper Nile region of Sudan. Orphaned at the age of
ten, he tried to join the army when the first civil war erupted in Sudan in 1955, but, because
of his age, the army sent him abroad to continue his education - first in Tanzania and later
in the United States. Garang was a bookish young man and quickly excelled at his stud-
ies, but, though he was offered a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University
of California, he made the decision to return to his Sudanese home. It was a decision that
would ultimately change the face of Central Africa for ever.
Civil war still raged in his home country and Garang was soon numbered among the
rebel soldiers of Southern Sudan, fighting the government in the north for greater repres-
entation and regional autonomy. In 1970, the rebel army sent him to Israel for military
training, and, although the first civil war ended in 1972, Garang had already taken his first
steps towards becoming a career soldier. Subsumed into the Sudanese standing army, for
eleven years he rose through the ranks, becoming first a captain and later a colonel. Then,
in 1983, his sympathies still with the rebels of the South, Garang masterminded a defec-
tion of a battalion stationed in the southern city of Bor. It was the opening gambit in what
would become the Second Sudanese Civil War. By the winter of that year, Garang had
brought various rebel commands into his control, effectively founding the Sudan People's
Liberation Army, a professional rebel outfit that would resist at all costs the north's milit-
ary rule and brutal imposition of Islamic law.
The Second Sudanese Civil War was to last twenty-two years and cost one-and-a-half
million lives, drawing in the armies of Uganda, Libya and Ethiopia along the way. In 2005,
after two years of peace talks, a resolution was finally reached - with the southern regions
of Sudan being given the status of an autonomous region for six years, before a referen-
dum would decide their ultimate fate.
What we were looking at here, Severino explained, was the final hideout Garang had
used during the most desperate phase of the Second Civil War. In 1993, things were at
