Washington, DC — American officials are cautiously optimistic that Sudan's comprehensive peace agreement will be implemented as scheduled, according to the U.S. special envoy Roger Winter, even though Sudanese living in the south and north have been hit with a "punch in the stomach" by the sudden death of First Vice President John Garang in a helicopter crash three weeks ago.
The death shocked everyone in Sudan, Winter said in a briefing last week. Describing a meeting a few days after Garang's death with Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, the number two government official in Sudan's capital Khartoum, Winter said the Sudanese vice president "was absolutely ashen."
Speaking prior to his return to Sudan for a week-long mission, Winter said: "I don't think we fully understand yet what the implications of Dr. John's death are."
"Sudanese, especially in southern Sudan, are shocked by Garang's death and only now beginning to figure out what this means," he said.
Winter, a former executive director of the U.S. Committee on Refugees, served as assistant administrator for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development before being tapped as the special representative on Sudan for Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick in July. Earlier this month after Garang's death, Winter and Assistant Secretary of State Constance Newman held talks in Khartoum with top officials and led a presidential delegation to Juba for the funeral of Garang, Winter's long-time friend.
This week in Khartoum, Winter is meeting with Garang's replacement as first vice president and leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army in the south, Salva Kiir, as well as officials in the Khartoum government that signed a peace accord with the SPLM/A in January and ratified a new constitution in early July.
"The constitution being signed was an extraordinary event, and I thought it didn't get any better than that," Winter said in the briefing. "With the death of Dr. John things changed rather radically." Winter said he would have a better assessment of the future of the peace agreement after meeting with Sudanese leaders. With Garang's death and Kiir's installation to replace him, "some fundamental change in leadership style has occurred," Winter said. "But we don't know yet that there is in fact any substantive change to what that leadership is seeking to accomplish."
Although Kiir in past statements has appeared to support the partition of Sudan into two countries with independence for the south, while Garang championed a "New Sudan" through change in Khartoum, Winter said he is hopeful that the two men's long association - and the signed peace agreement - will hold with the leadership change. So far, he said, there is no reason to suspect otherwise. Kiir "has said all the right things, but he is a different individual," Winter said.
Regarding Sudan's Darfur region, where the UN estimates 180,000 people have died and more than 2 million have been displaced, Winter said it is unclear what impact, if any, Garang's death will have on the conflict, which he called "genocide."
Even though the conflicts in Darfur and southern Sudan are separate, Winter said, "the comprehensive peace agreement did have promise for Darfur. For many, many years, Dr. John and others who were talking about a new Sudan were looking to change the center, the sort of political power construct in Khartoum. They wanted it to become more responsive to every other area of Sudan because every area outside the center has been a very marginalized population."
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Winter said Garang had been personally engaged in figuring out how the comprehensive peace agreement in the south might help to resolve the conflict in Darfur. "We all thought that Dr. John would be part of the solution for Darfur," Winter said. "We all thought that the CPA (comprehensive peace agreement) and the liberalization that we expected to happen in Khartoum would change the dynamic within which the war was existing."
"The war began in Darfur for Dafurian reasons but, clearly, the fact that there was this emerging peace agreement in the south was of great interest to the people in Darfur and a spur to them, perhaps."
The installation of a government of national unity in Khartoum in July, with Garang as first vice president, altered the political landscape in the country, Winter said. People in Darfur "saw that something was changing and they wanted to be a part of that."
