Rioting and tit-for-tat killings continued in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, on Wednesday, as southerners upset with the death of the rebel leader John Garang clashed with northern Arabs and government security forces struggling to restore order.
The death toll from three days of unrest in Khartoum and its suburbs approached 100, according to local authorities and relief agencies.
Mmarauding
There were reports of gangs of people, some carrying clubs, knives and guns, marauding through the streets, even well after a government-imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew.
The imam of a mosque outside of Khartoum was killed, the UN reported. Northern Muslims, crying "God is great!" in Arabic, were seen setting upon black African southerners.
The ugly scenes represented the worst fears after Garang's death on Saturday night in a helicopter crash, which authorities have insisted was an accident caused by foul weather, not an act of sabotage as some southerners claim.
Officials tried to soothe riled tempers in broadcasts urging Sudanese not to allow the collapse of the peace agreement between the Islamist government of the north and Garang's southern rebel movement.
Bury the strife
"I urge all the good people among you to bury the strife," President Omar al-Bashir said in an address over state television.
Garang's replacement as chairman of the rebel movement, Salva Kiir Mayardit, made a similar plea from the southern town of New Site, where he received a steady stream of international visitors making condolence calls.
"We want this situation to be stopped as soon as possible," said Kiir, calling the rioters "enemies of peace" who were tarnishing Garang's legacy.
The violence stood in marked contrast to the spirit of peace that seemed so prevalent in much of Sudan just days ago.
In January, a peace agreement that halted the two-decade civil war and made Garang vice president also brought hopes for a solution to the country's other long-running conflict, in the western Darfur region.
The upsurge in violence seemed to tear at those people involved in the long negotiations to quell the north-south war, which was the longest-running civil conflict in Africa.
`Ddr. John'
"To fail in Dr. John's vision is to fail Dr. John," Roger Winter, the US government's top envoy to Sudan said during a visit here, using Garang's nickname.
Garang was educated in the US and earned a doctorate in economics at Iowa State University in 1981.
An emotional Winter gave Garang's widow, Rebecca, a tight hug in the tent where she is mourning with relatives and friends.
Winter and Constance Newman, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, also embraced Kiir.
"He was special," Winter said of Garang, a man he first met in the late 1980s, well before the Sudanese rebel movement gained significant support in the US.
"We came to love each other in this manly way that comes when you have mutual respect and common vision," he added.
Uunraveling peace
The sudden death of such a significant American ally has raised worries in Washington, and not just because the outbreak of violence raised the possibility of the unraveling of the historic peace deal that Garang struck with Khartoum in January.
The Bush administration had long counted on Garang to play a key part in resolving another rebel insurgency, the crisis in Darfur.
With his death has come concerns that the Darfur conflict would slip down on the agenda, according to several diplomats who spoke without attribution to avoid stoking the tense situation.
In his new role, Kiir tried to address concerns about Darfur after a closed-door meeting with Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma of South Africa.
"There can be no peace in Sudan when there is fighting going on in Darfur and eastern Sudan," Kiir said, repeating one of Garang's frequent refrains.
"Our commitment is that guns must be silenced in the whole country," Kiir added.
At the same time, Kiir, who has spent most of his 54 years as a rebel, expressed clear sympathies with other Sudanese who have taken up arms against their government.
"People fight to address the grievances that are not being addressed on the table like the one we are sitting," he said.
"When you claim your rights and are not given them, you resort to violence as a way of expressing your discomfort," he added.
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