Sudan govt, rebels try to hammer out wealth deal

NAIROBI, Dec 28 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government and rebels were due to meet on Sunday to continue talks on how they would share their wealth once their war ended and settle disputes over three contested areas, officials said.

The two sides resumed peace talks on Friday, after a Christmas day break, to iron out an accord on dividing the oil-exporting country’s wealth. They had hoped to reach a peace deal to end their 20-year conflict by the end of the year, although that goal is seen as increasingly unrealistic.

“We’re talking about the three areas and the wealth sharing simultaneously,” an official of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) told Reuters by phone.

Delegates said rebel leader John Garang and the government’s first vice president Osman Ali Taha were yet to meet to discuss the two issues since the talks resumed on Friday in the resort town of Naivasha several miles north east of the capital.

Kenya has said the two have agreed in principle on the wealth sharing but have yet to seal a final deal awaiting the outcome of talks on the three areas and power sharing.

A final accord on wealth sharing or the three areas would remove a major hurdle to ending Africa’s longest conflict in the continent’s biggest country — a war that has cost two million lives and uprooted four million people.

A comprehensive wealth-sharing agreement would cover how to distribute oil revenues and share taxes and would settle the central bank’s role and resolve questions about the currency.

The SPLA says the three contested areas of Abyei, Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile — all of which are in northern Sudan, are marginalised and should have self-rule and a waiver on Islamic law.

Washington has urged the two sides to strike a peace deal by year-end and pledged in October to boost aid to Sudan, but warned assistance hinged on the implementation of a peace deal.

War broke out in Sudan in 1983, pitting the Islamic government in the Arab-speaking north against rebels seeking more autonomy for the largely animist or Christian south. Oil, ideology, ethnicity and religion have complicated it.

The government and the SPLA agreed last year to a waiver on Islamic law in non-Muslim areas and a six-year transitional period after which the south would vote on whether to secede.