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Sudan violence after death of vice president may be only beginning
Those who live by the sword sometimes die while traveling in a presidential helicopter.

Though John Garang was born into a Christian family, he is unlikely to make it into any "heroes of the faith" lists. As founder and leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army, he is reported to have committed numerous human rights abuses, including forcibly recruiting child soldiers, killing thousands of civilians, and taking political prisoners.

Nevertheless, his appointment as vice-president of Sudan was a huge step forward for the country—the result of a difficult peace agreement in January between Garang and Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir. About 2 million people had died in the 21-year civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south.

Yesterday, three weeks after Garang took office, the Ugandan presidential helicopter he was traveling in crashed, killing him and 13 others. (The Ugandan government had loaned Garang the helicopter.)

Both the Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement blamed foul weather for the crash, but some southerners in Khartoum cried foul play. At least 36 people, including policemen, were killed as rioters shouted "Murderers! Murderers!"

But Garang's death could have longer lasting effects on Sudan's fragile peace than today's rioting, says The Christian Science Monitor:

Because the [peace] deal was dominated so personally by Garang and his northern counterparts - who negotiated word by word and line by line for years—its success depended largely on the considerable force of Garang's personality and power.

His demise, analysts say, will test whether the impetus for peace is larger than one man. It also removes a powerful moderating influence inside Sudan's government, which was involved in what the U.S. calls genocide in the separate conflict in the country's western Darfur region. …

[The crash] comes at a fragile time, because "the peace isn't yet institutionalized," says Richard Cornwell of the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa.

This was a hugely "personal deal" between Garang and Mr. Bashir, he adds.

It may be that the death of Bashir's longtime adversary may make him more open to the south's struggle for freedom. We shall see. Sudan, as always, is full of surprises—and rarely happy ones.

Safire: Desecration is a bad (and potentially blasphemous) word choice
Weblog has never really seen the appeal of a constitutional amendment against flag burning. (Christianity Today as a magazine hasn't taken a position on it.) But it's hard to see how any Christian who reads William Safire's New York Times Magazine column this week could be for it—at least in its present form. The amendment, as passed by the House, says, "The Congress shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States."

"Desecration is a noun steeped in the violation of religious belief. It is rooted in the Latin sacrare or secrare, source of sacred and sacrifice, dealing through the millenniums with worship of a deity," Safire writes. "To desecrate is to profane what is holy; Merriam Webster defines it as 'to violate the sanctity of,' American Heritage as 'to violate the sacredness of' and the Oxford English Dictionary as 'to take away its consecrated or sacred character.' Houses of God and gravestones can be desecrated by people bent on reviling religion or embracing evil."

The problem, Safire says, is that "national flags are not religious objects or symbols. … It's unlikely that the proposers of this amendment, or those representatives who voted for it, intended to treat the nation's flag as a religious symbol. But that is what that word desecration does."

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August (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49