John Garang de Mabior

The SPLM made its first official contact in a March 2005 delegation to Beijing led by its then-deputy Chairman Salva Kiir Mayardit who became South Sudan’s leader following the death a few months later of the SPLM’s charismatic Chairman John Garang de Mabior...

Lual a respected economist who was close to the late SPLM Chairman John Garang de Mabior has come under fire for his publicly unionist views and his lack of criticism of the NCP...

Millions of Sudanese would agree with these echoes of the late Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) Chairperson Colonel John Garang de Mabior who liked to say the NIF was ‘too deformed to be reformed’...

The SPLM knows full well that it must depend on its own army to protect it a pillar of the philosophy of the late Commander in Chief Colonel John Garang de Mabior...

Its construction was halted in 1983 by attacks by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (now the Southern government army) though armed with his PhD in agriculture the late SPLA chief Colonel John Garang de Mabior greatly favoured the Egyptian-backed project...

Years of fighting ensued between Riek’s Nuer and the mostly Dinka forces of the SPLA Mainstream leader the late John Garang de Mabior...

This was fed by the ecstatic welcome for the late SPLM Chairman John Garang de Mabior in Khartoum in July 2005 and the fact that many Northerners embrace his vision of a ‘New Sudan’ politically secular and giving some of the Nile Valley elite’s power to the country’s marginalised peoples...

There is still though a group in the SPLM that believes in the New Sudan that lay at the core of the CPA for many of its foreign architects who counted on John Garang to carry this through...

As a result the majority of the army once dominated by Dinka is made up of Nuer at least according to the Chief of Defence Staff James Hoth Mai himself a Nuer albeit a loyalist of the late SPLM/A chief Colonel John Garang de Mabior...

Efforts to bring the SSDF into the SPLA had repeatedly failed because John Garang feared that such large numbers of Nuer would undermine the dominance of his own Bor Dinka clan...

Rek Dinka from northern Bahr el Ghazal Salva was in Anyanya before joining the SPLA at its birth as a major; he later became Chief of Defence Staff but was never part of John Garang de Mabior’s inner clique...

This fits with the SPLM's re-emphasis on the 'New Sudan' beloved of its late leader John Garang de Mabior (AC Vol 50 No 20)...