The Garang Helicopter Crash

Last week I was talking to my friend (and Rebunk and now DCAT reader) Roger when he mentioned that the rumors were that John Garang’s helicopter was missing and reported down. Garang was recently sworn in as Sudan’s vice president. But before that he was the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the rebel group that had helped to make Sudan’s civil war one of the worst on the planet in the post-World War II era. Without knowing any more details than that, I told Roger that the possibility of the Sudan plunging back into the chaos of civil war by Friday had just increased exponentially.

It is unlikely that the country, already ravaged by genocide, will reach that state of internecine conflict by my arbitrary deadline, but things are as tense as they have been in some time. The death of Garang looks suspicious, especially in the south, the area of the African rebels’ greatest strength, and the Mail & Guardian reports that with over 100 deaths resulting from clashes in the past few days, the danger of resumed sectional conflict beyond the horrors that already exist is very real. Eric Reeves argues in The New Republic online that the helicopter crash and resulting upheaval at minimum is likely to exacerbate the genocide.

Certainly suspicious deaths of leaders in Africa have in the past had the effect of throwing already fragile nations into chaos. One needs think back no further than 1994 when a plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprian Ntayamira of Burundi was shot down near the airport in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. Everyone aboard perished and Habyarimana's death precipitated the 100 days of Rwandan genocide that followed, as Hutu extremists used the deaths as a pretense to slaughter the Tutsi minority and Hutus who seemed too moderate or sympathetic to the Tutsi. In recent decades there has been a disproportionate number of incidents in which politicians died in African aircraft disasters, and this latest one has the possibility of perpetuating one of the worst human rights crises in recent history.