Peace will be achieved throughout Sudan – Salva Kiir
July 20, 2006 (WASHINGTON) — After meeting with President George W. Bush, Sudanese Vice President Salva Kiir said Thursday that peace is taking hold in southern Sudan and predicted a day when “peace is also achieved all over the Sudan.”
For his part, Bush promised that his government would honor commitments to ensure implementation of the January 2005 peace agreement that ended 21 years of North-South civil war.
“We’re also committed to helping the people in Darfur,” Bush said. That vast, arid western Sudan region is where raids by marauding militias, allegedly sponsored by the central government, have resulted over the last 3 1/2 years in almost 200,000 deaths and 2 million displaced people or refugees.
Bush repeated his wish that the 7,000-soldier African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur be brought under the flag of the U.N. and reinforced to stop the bloodletting. Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir is a large obstacle to the proposed takeover by U.N. troops, whom he has described as neocolonialists.
During brief comments at a photo session, Kiir, who also is president of South Sudan under the U.S.-sponsored Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the civil war, did not mention putting the Darfur peacekeepers under the United Nations. He emphasized, however, that Darfur is only one of the problems facing Sudan, Africa’s largest country.
“It is true we have been working together during the negotiations with the people of the United States and the government of the United States of America to bring peace to Sudan,” Kiir said. “This dream has been achieved, and we are now together in the implementation.
However, he said, “There are so many other crises in Sudan.” First is Darfur, he said, but “we are sure that we are going to solve the problem so that we don’t hear about rapes and killings in Darfur. And all other parts of our country, like the eastern Sudan; we are now also negotiating in that province so that peace is also achieved all over the Sudan.”
In eastern Sudan, renegade groups called the Beja Congress party and the Free Lions are opposing the government in a move for a larger share of wealth and power.
Kiir met later with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who repeated Bush’s sentiment that “we are committed to a free and prosperous and democratic Sudan.”
In response, Kiir said Sudan’s government is determined not only to implement the comprehensive agreement but to “bringing peace to Darfur, to eastern Sudan, and making and transforming the country into a democratic, multiparty nation.”
That, he said, “of course has been our goal for a very, very long time.”
(AP/ST)