Sudan’s chance

SUDAN TOOK another step toward fully ending decades of civil war with last weekend’s swearing in of former rebel leader John Garang as the nation’s vice president. Garang and his recent enemy, President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, also jointly signed a new interim constitution.

The country’s woes are enormous -- the genocide conducted by pro-government Arab militias in the still-violent western province of Darfur, nationwide poverty and disease, lack of infrastructure in the war-weary south. Lasting peace and the cooperation of opposing forces in this sprawling East African nation that links the Arab world with the sub-Sahara are important to the stability of the continent.

Garang’s return to the capital, Khartoum, is his first since 1983, when he was an army officer sent south to the region of his birth to put down an insurrection. Instead, he and many of his troops joined the rebels in a civil war that killed at least 2 million people and turned 4 million into refugees.

The conflict formally ended in January, but there remained a risk that the agreement would collapse. Civil wars have plagued the country since independence from shared rule by Egypt and Britain in 1956, with an interim of relative peace in the 1970s. The discovery of oil in the south and quarrels over sharing it led to a renewal of violence between the Arab, Islamic north and mostly African, Christian and animist south. Sudan is nearly 40% Arab.

The Congressional Black Caucus and U.S. Christian groups were instrumental in pushing the Bush administration to exert pressure on Khartoum to make peace with Garang and his Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Sudan backed Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and was home to Osama bin Laden before expelling him to Afghanistan. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S., Khartoum has cooperated in fighting terrorism.

Bashir and Garang agreed to give the south substantial autonomy and the right to vote on whether to secede in six years’ time. The south’s oil revenue is to be shared 50-50 with the north, a pact that has angered insurgents elsewhere in the country, including Darfur. The constitution drops the requirement that the president be Muslim and excludes the south from required observance of Muslim laws.

Garang faces a tough transition from military to political leader; Bashir, his official power diminished, also faces the International Criminal Court’s investigation of the Darfur genocide. Still, if the two men are able to start building civil institutions and take good advantage of foreign aid, they could build a unified nation. They won’t soon make Sudanese forget decades of murder and starvation, but they might be able to consign the civil war to a tragic chapter of history.