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From the United Methodst News Service
NEW YORK, NY, August 1, 2005—The international mission agency of The United Methodist Church today called for prayers that a peace agreement in southern Sudan will hold in the wake of the death of one of its principal architects.
“Let us pray that the peace accord will be respected despite this great tragedy,” said the Rev. R. Randy Day, chief executive of the General Board of Global Ministries.
Dr. John Garang, 60, the U.S.-educated leader of the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army, who had become the first vice president of Sudan only three weeks ago, was killed in a helicopter crash late on Saturday, July 30, as he returned from a trip to Uganda. In January, 2005, the peace agreement forged between the north and the south in Sudan ended the longest running civil war in Africa. Some 1.5 million people were killed.
“We watch developments in southern Sudan carefully because of the protracted conflict there and because we have about a dozen congregations in the area,” Day said. “We are also praying for the peace and prosperity of all the people of Sudan.”
The mission board’s call for prayers came partly in responded to a plea from Angelo Maker, who was one of the thousands of “lost boys of Sudan.” In the 1990s, these children and teenagers walked hundreds of miles to escape the turmoil in southern Sudan, going first to Ethiopia, back to Sudan, and then to Kenya. The United States agreed to accept 3,000 of the “boys,” 52 of whom were resettled by the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) in 2001 and 2002.
Mr. Maker is now a student and attends a United Methodist church in Virginia. He was a guest at the Western Pennsylvania Annual Conference last June.
“The situation in southern Sudan is very critical,” he said in his e-mail, that encouraged people to pray that the peace accord will hold steady.
The conflict in southern Sudan is distinct from that in Darfur, a western region of the vast country where UMCOR provides humanitarian services to displaced people.
Appeals to respect the peace in the south were also made by the New Sudan Council of Churches, the Sudan Catholic Bishop’s Conference, and the All African Conference of Churches. Dr. Mvume Dandala, a South African Methodist who leads the latter organization, issued a statement calling upon “the people of Sudan to be calm and demonstrate that commitment to peace that Dr. Garang had wished for when he signed the peace agreement.”
John Garang was a member of the southern Dinka ethnic group and was from a Christian family. A member of the Anglican Church, he was graduated in 1969 from Grinnell College, a school with Congregationalist church roots in Iowa. He also received military training at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Christian population of Sudan is concentrated in the south.
