Riek Machar

Riek Machar Teny Dhurgon has been the principal rival of Salva Kiir for three decades, and has served as South Sudan's vice-president several times, most recently as first vice-president from 2020. A Nuer born in 1952, he took degrees in engineering at the University of Khartoum and then a doctorate at the University of Bradford before joining the Sudan People's Liberation Army in 1984, during the Second Sudanese Civil War. In 1991 he broke with John Garang in the Nasir declaration, arguing for outright southern independence rather than Garang's vision of a reformed Sudan, and for Garang's removal. The split turned into fighting between southern factions along Nuer and Dinka lines, including the Bor massacre, in which forces under his command killed at least two thousand Dinka civilians; he apologised publicly for it in 2011. Over the following decade he led a succession of splinter movements: the SPLA-Nasir, SPLA-United, the South Sudan Independence Movement and the South Sudan Defence Forces. He accepted a separate peace with Khartoum in 1997, which cost him credibility among southern nationalists, and returned to the SPLA fold in 2002. After the war ended he became vice-president of Southern Sudan, and then of the independent state. His dismissal in July 2013 was the immediate prelude to the civil war that began that December and killed some four hundred thousand people. He spent much of the following years in exile or under house arrest in South Africa, returned to office under the 2018 peace agreement, and was detained again in 2025 amid renewed fighting. His career traces the central problem of South Sudanese politics: a liberation movement that never resolved how power would be shared once the common enemy was gone.

• Lived: 1952 CE – ?
• Nationality: South Sudanese
• Roles: politician, military