Updated August 2, 4:53 p.m. CDT Tuesday saw continued violence between northern and southern Sudanese over the death of former southern rebel leader and vice president John Garang, who died in a helicopter crash. A friend of Garang’s said the recently forged peace will not slip away easily.

“We are very careful not to let this opportunity slip out of our hands because Garang died,” said long-time friend John Lueth, enrollment services advisor for the ISU office of student financial aid. “When southern Sudan is a theater of war, it means women, children and elderly suffer.”

Lueth said Garang first came to Iowa after gaining the attention of visiting professors while a refugee and high school student in Tanzania. After getting a bachelors degree in economics from Grinnell College, he returned to Sudan to fight in a southern rebel movement. When peace was reached in 1972 and the rebels were integrated into the national army, he returned to the United States, studying at the Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Ga., and getting a doctorate in economics from Iowa State. He returned to Sudan in the early 1980s as a captain in the Sudanese army.

Salva Kiir Mayardit, Garang’s second in the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, was named to succeed Garang as vice president and president of Southern Sudan. According to the January peace agreement between the Khartoum government representing the Muslim north and the Christian and Animist south that Garang fought for, the leader of the SPLM also must be the country’s vice president.

Lueth said negotiation on the United States-led peace agreement, reached last January, began in July 2002. The agreement gave southern Sudanese a share of government power and the chance at democratic elections.

“He has brought the people of southern Sudan far enough, what remains is for the people of southern Sudan to make it real, and that will be the best memory of John Garang in this war,” Lueth said.

However, even without the threat continuing riots, Lueth said peace was not assured.

“Even now, we are worried they might violate it like the previous ones,” he said of the northern Sudanese government.

Lueth said a previous peace deal fell apart in the early 1980s, when the government attempted to deploy southern Sudanese military forces to the north.

“The soldiers in the south refused, they said we don’t want to go to the north,” he said.

Lueth said the northern government sent Garang, then an officer in the Sudanese army with an economics degree from Grinnell College, to convince the southerners to accept their orders.

“When he went there he decided to side with them, he left for the bush with them and formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army,” he said. “From then, everything became history.”

Lueth said that although Garang hoped for unity between the north and south, many Sudanese in the south would prefer independence after years of oppression by the north. He said the north supports the idea of an Islamic government, while those in the south would prefer a secular government.

“I don’t want to force on the northern Sudanese a secular government,” Lueth said. “However, unlike me John Garang thought there’s still a chance for us to be united.”

He said many in the south fear a united government would lead to Islamic governance, as Muslims outnumber Christians and Animists and could enact their agenda in a democratic government.

Lueth said he plans to attend Garang’s funeral, scheduled for this weekend in Juba, the capitol of southern Sudan.