US envoy, lawmakers diverge in north south peace assessment

November 8, 2007 (WASHINGTON) — US President Special Envoy to Sudan sees a deal reached last Saturday as a promising beginning toward ending decades of enmity between Sudan’s predominantly Muslim north and the non-Muslim south. A prominent lawmaker says that is not what the southern Sudan leader told him.

The southern leader, Salva Kiir, president of the transitional southern government, met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday. Neither said anything at a photo session afterward.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Rice and Kiir had discussed “the current political situation in Sudan, specifically about implementation of CPA and where that stands.” The CPA is the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed in 2005 to end a massively brutal 21-year-old civil war.

Bush appointed Andrew Natsios as his special envoy at a time when the agreement appeared to be in extreme jeopardy. Natsios suggested a five-part program that he felt might bridge the crevasse between the two sides.

On Nov. 3, as Kiir prepared for his trip to the United States, the two sides announced a deal that Natsios said includes all five compromises and confidence-building actions he had suggested. But, he said Thursday in an interview, “It’s their agreement. They negotiated it. I think the utility of the proposal that the United States made to both sides was to show them there was way out.”

Rice had invited Kiir to Washington as the negotiations over implementing the CPA teetered toward failure. After their meeting, McCormack said “I heard this upstairs when the secretary met with Salva Kiir” that Natsios’ proposals were made irrelevant because “Khartoum and the south have actually already moved beyond those proposals.”

Asked whether Natsios’ suggestions were included, McCormack said, «I believe so. I think some of Andrew’s ideas were reflected in the proposal.

Democratic Rep. Donald M. Payne, chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, disagreed vigorously that significant progress had been made based on a discussion he and colleagues had with Kiir on Wednesday.

Kiir told the lawmakers “the National Congress Party has shown deliberate intent of dishonoring the CPA, that they have not behaved in good faith,” Payne said. “He mentioned that things need to be concluded that have not been concluded.” Al-Bashir controls the National Congress Party.

Al-Bashir is notorious for agreeing to act, then reneging. His unfulfilled promises took many extra months to get peacekeepers sponsored by the United Nations into Darfur, the western Sudan region where government affiliated Arab militias have killed or displaced millions of African Sudanese Muslims.

Payne said he suspected that “Bashir said they had agreed after he heard that Salva Kiir was on his way to see us.”
Kiir was unavailable for comment Thursday.

Both al-Bashir and Kiir, who also is first vice president in the national unity government, have made hopeful comments about finally having peace. During a visit to South Africa this week, al-Bashir ruled out any “return to war whatever the differences are between the parties.”

The fighting began in 1983 as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, under U.S.-educated John Garang, rose to protest the Muslim-dominated central government’s policies that included enforcing Islamic law on the largely non-Muslim southerners. Garang also held that the conditions in the south were made more wretched because it received an unfairly small share of the nation’s wealth. Garang died in an apparently accidental helicopter crash six months after he became vice president under the CPA, and Kiir succeeded him a month later, in August 2005.

In the telephone interview, Natsios said the key to bringing peace now is “they have to implement what they have agreed.” One good thing about this is that the final deadline for resolution of all this is Jan. 9, two months away. No one has that short an attention span in world affairs that they are going to forget about what they agreed to.

The southern Sudan question is important too, Natsios said, because of Darfur. Peace talks have just opened in Libya, but they were suspended after many Darfurian rebel leaders did not attend the opening session.
“If the north-south (CPA) agreement is falling apart or seems to be,” Natsios said, “there will be no peace in Darfur.” He said rebel leaders have told him as much.

One major problem that remains unresolved involves the Abeyei area. British surveyors had it in the south when colonization ended in the 1950s, and a commission established by the CPA, whose judgment was supposed to have been binding, agreed that it belonged with the south. Although he had agreed that the panel’s finding would be binding, Al-Bashir disagreed and kept Abeyei in the north.

“Abeyei is the Jerusalem of the southerners, the ancestral home of the Dinka king,” Natsios said. The Dinka are the predominant tribe of the African southerners. Complicating that, he said, is that Abeyei is “floating on oil” and Arab herdsmen want the land for their flocks.

(AP)