Sudan hopes for peace deal soon with eastern rebels
June 14, 2006 (NAIROBI) — Sudan’s government has begun peace talks with northeastern rebels in an effort to end a 16-year, low-intensity conflict in the impoverished region, a senior official said Wednesday.
The talks began Tuesday in neighboring Eritrea, where the Eastern Front – a coalition of the Beja Congress and Free Lions rebel groups – is based, said Elsamani Elwasila, the Sudanese minister of state for foreign affairs.
The unrest in the east is unrelated to a three-year-old war in the western Sudanese region of Darfur or a southern civil war that ended after two decades with a peace treaty last year. While the concerns were local in each area, the three wars illustrate the difficulties the Arabicized elite in Khartoum has had maintaining ties with the provinces in a vast and ethnically and religiously diverse country.
Talks with the northeastern rebels “will concentrate on the power-sharing and on the security arrangements for the fighting groups, that is to say the integration of the groups into the national army and the other police, security and that sort of thing,” Elwasila told journalists in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
Power-sharing arrangements were spelled out in the comprehensive peace deal that ended the conflict in southern Sudan. That treaty also informed a Darfur peace agreement the government and the main Darfur rebel group signed in May. Two Darfur groups rejected the May treaty.
Sudan’s government expects to use the experience it gained from negotiating the Darfur and southern peace deals to quickly reach an agreement with the northeastern insurgents, Elwasila said.
The Beja Congress and Free Lions are jostling for a larger share of wealth and power. The Beja Congress is also a member of the umbrella Sudanese opposition group, the Eritrean-headquartered National Democratic Alliance.
The Beja Congress rejected a Jan. 17 accord between the government and opposition groups to end the northeastern conflict. The group said the accord failed to meet its demands for a share of wealth and power in the northeastern region.
(ST/AP)