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| SUDAN PEOPLE'S LIBERATION ARMY The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) has fought in one of Africa's longest-running wars, between the Khartoum government and Sudan's Christian and Animist south. That war has also been one of the bloodiest, taking the lives of some 2 million people and displacing millions more. The rebel group's leader, John Garang, was born into the Dinka tribe, the largest ethnic group in Sudan, and raised by a Christian family. An insurgent during an earlier civil war, Garang was absorbed into Sudan's army in 1972. He served as a government army officer until 1983, when he was sent on a mission to quell a mutiny of 500 soldiers in the south. Instead, Garang encouraged mutinies in other garrisons and declared himself head of the rebellion. Garang said he was fighting to take over the Khartoum government, which had imposed traditional sharia law and increased oil drilling in the south without the consent of locals. Today, the SPLA controls much of the southern third of Sudan, plus pockets in the country's central and eastern regions. Garang has led his rebellion from southern Sudan and Nairobi, where he now lives. Through the years, Garang has been accused of serious human rights abuses, against dissenters within his own movement as well as army dissenters during his years with the Sudan army. His professed ideologies have varied from Marxism to Christianity. Since the early 1990s, Christian groups in the United States have rallied in support of Garang's constituency in southern Sudan. Samaritan Purse, a Christian relief and development organization headed by Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham, has provided the area with significant humanitarian assistance since 1993. Graham and other evangelical Christian leaders also have become an influential lobby for U.S. action in southern Sudan. In his first term, President George W. Bush, who has a strong base of evangelical supporters, rejuvenated a multilateral peace process between Khartoum and the rebels in the south. Since a partial ceasefire agreement in 2002, the SPLA and the Khartoum government have been negotiating on several key issues, including the sharing of wealth and power. In a historic peace accord signed January 9, 2005, Sudan's president, Omar al Bashir, agreed to share oil revenues and governance with the south, to permit Christians in the north to escape punishments dictated by sharia law, and to grant the right of the south to secede from Sudan in the future. Garang agreed to serve as first vice president in a transitional Khartoum government and will be the first president of a new regional government in southern Sudan. |