Sudan Mourns Great Thinker Mansour Khalid
26 April, 2020
KHARTOUM (Sudanow) - Sudanese intellectual, diplomat and politician Dr. Mansour Khalid passed away in hospital Thursday aged 89, after a long disease that kept him in a wheelchair in recent months.
The late Mansour Khalid was born in the City of Omdurman here in January 1931, he graduated from the University of Khartoum with a law honours degree and obtained an MA in law from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate degree from Paris University.
As a diplomat and law expert Mansour Khalid had served as an expert in the united nations headoffice in New York and in the UNESCO and as professor of international law in the American University of Colorado. As an academic he assumed the education portfolio and served as his country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in the early 1970s.
The late Mansour Khalid is seen as one of the country’s outstanding symbols in thought, politics and diplomacy and as one of the most influential politicians in the country.
One of Mansour Khalid’s outstanding achievements was his role in the negotiations that led to the Addis Ababa 1972 Peace Agreement that ended Sudan’s first civil war and gave Sudan relative peace for ten years under the rule of Sudan’s military ruler Ja’afar Nimeri (1969-1985).
In 1985 Mansour Khalid became political advisor of John Garang, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) when he assisted in a number of understandings between the SPLM and some political forces. He was also a founding member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that led a strong opposition against Bashir’s rule.
Upon hearing the news about Mansour Khalid’s death the Government of Southern Sudan declared a state of mourning for three days during which the national flag will be lowered at half mast.
In an obituary, former State Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr. Francis Deng has written that:
I will have much more to say about Mansour later in a longer tribute. What I would like to say in this brief message is that Mansour was a true giant who, through his scholarly and intellectual contributions, his political stands, and his public service, transcended the divides of identity politics in favor of justice and human dignity for all nationally, regionally and globally. He was a personification of ideals that are rare in our paradoxically globalizing and yet fragmenting world.
Mansour’s death is a grave loss to our Two Sudans, to our African Continent and to humanity. But he will remain immortal in our living memory.
Some observers consider Mandour Khalid “a qualitative value added to the Sudanese intellectual and cultural life and one of the country’s sources of knowledge. The late Khalid had written several books (in English and Arabic), considered the best to have been written on Sudan’s political history. The list includes:
-Dialogue with the elite
-There is no use in us if we don’t say it
-Sudan and the dark tunnel
-The false dawn
- South Sudan in the Arabic mindset
-The Sudanese elite, addiction to failure (two parts)
-Sudan, the horrors of war and the peace ambitions
-The story of two countries
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