Who’s who of the SPLM-Juba faction: Telar Deng
SPLM, the ruling party of South Sudan, has fractured since the start of a civil war in December 2013. The faction of the party based in Juba remains under the leadership of President Salva Kiir.
The SPLM-Juba faction controls the cabinet, a remnant of the SPLA, and several governorships. In a series of articles, Radio Tamazuj profiles some key party members who have remained loyal to Salva Kiir since the start of the crisis.
Factbox: Telar Ring Takpiny Deng
Telar Deng is a South Sudanese politician who has served the SPLM mainstream under John Garang, the breakaway SPLM-Nasir faction under Riek Machar, the Sudan government under Omar al Bashir, and most recently the SPLM-Juba faction under Salva Kiir.
A native of Yirol, Lakes state, Telar earned an undergraduate degree in 1981 from the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
He joined the SPLA sometime after graduation in the 1980s, serving as a judicial officer in Western Upper Nile, in what is today Unity State, where the current opposition leader Riek Machar was then zonal commander.
Telar joined the SPLA-Nasir faction of the SPLA when the rebel movement split in 1991, but he resigned from the breakaway faction in 1992, and was later reconciled with the SPLA-mainstream ahead of its 2005 move into power-sharing government in Khartoum.
He returned to university in the mid-1990s, and was eventually awarded a second bachelor’s degree in law, second class, lower division, from the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, where he also attained an LLM law degree.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Telar held an advocacy position at the New Sudan Council of Churches in Nairobi.
In 2006 following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, he was appointed by Omar al Bashir as Minister of State for the Presidency in Khartoum, one of several SPLM appointees to the power-sharing government.
The same year he was also elevated by decree of the new SPLM Chairman Salva Kiir into the interim SPLM Political Bureau, though he had not been a member of the Political Bureau under the late SPLM Chairman John Garang.
Telar was still State Minister when a political crisis broke within Sudan's Government of National Unity in October 2007, resulting in SPLM's temporary withdrawal from the joint NCP-SPLM government.
He was summoned by an SPLM investigation committee from Khartoum to Juba the following month, in November 2007, along with the then deputy interior minister Aleu Ayieny Aleu.
After declining to answer the summons, Telar and Aleu were expelled from the SPLM Political Bureau and stripped of their party membership in December 2007, on orders of SPLM Chairman Salva Kiir.
In the same month, Deng Alor and Pagan Amum were advanced into ministerial positions vacated by Telar and Aleu in a cabinet reshuffle of the Government of National Unity in Khartoum.
Eventually Deng was reinstated as a party member by the Political Bureau in a meeting in April 2009, but he was not restored to his position in the Political Bureau.
Thereafter, he has served in a number of roles including as legal advisor to South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir and caretaker governor of Lakes State for four months during the 2010 general elections. He had himself unsuccessfully sought the SPLM nomination for the gubernatorial candidacy.
His opponent in the SPLM primary election, Chol Tong Mayay, went on to become Lakes governor but was removed by President Kiir in 2013 and later became part of the founding group of the opposition SPLM-Leaders faction.
Following the dismissal of the cabinet in July 2013, Kiir appointed Telar as justice minister. However, South Sudan's parliament rejected his appointment – the first time in the new country’s history that the legislature rejected a presidential appointment.
The rejection was due in part to concerns over a land transaction involving the Bank of South Sudan, in which Telar Deng had been involved. Soon after the rejection, Kiir reappointed Telar Deng as his legal affairs adviser, the position he still holds today.
More in this series:
Who’s who of the SPLM-Juba faction: Aleu Ayieny Aleu