Nairobi, Kenya – Sudan elevated a former rebel leader Saturday to the vice presidency of the government he had long tried to overthrow, a merging of one-time combatants into a single leadership that took Sudan another step away from 22 years of war.
In an elaborate ceremony in Khartoum, the capital, President Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir appointed John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as his top deputy.
The men waged one of Africa’s longest-running civil wars, which caused an estimated 2 million deaths before a cease-fire accompanied the signing of a peace agreement in January.
But analysts cautioned that Sudan’s challenges remain formidable. Power-sharing experiments in countries such as Congo, Somalia and Burundi are fragile, underscoring the brittle nature of such pacts and the fact that the hard work of building a nation begins when the hoopla surrounding peace agreements settles.
Still, there was plenty of celebration as the old foes came together at the presidential palace to unite a country that has experienced far more war than peace since its independence from British-Egyptian rule in 1956. On Friday night, an estimated 1 million people packed into a central square to welcome Garang, who last visited the capital 22 years ago.
Besides sharing political power, the government and the southern rebels have agreed to divide up the region’s oil wealth, merge their armies and hold a referendum in six years to let southerners, who are predominantly Christian and animist, decide whether to secede from the rest of Sudan, which is mainly Muslim.
“There’s a lot that has to go right for this to work,” said David Mozersky, a Sudan analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research institution based in Brussels, Belgium, that follows conflict zones throughout the world. “We can be happy that Sudan has reached this point, but it’s too early to celebrate and to consider this an end to the conflict.”