Top negotiators in Sudan peace process to meet-aides

By Wangui Kanina

NAIROBI, Dec 5 (Reuters) – The two top negotiators in south Sudan’s peace process are due to meet on Monday in a push to reach a comprehensive deal aimed at ending Africa’s longest civil war ahead of a Dec 31 deadline, aides said.

Sudanese First Vice President Ali Osman Taha was due to meet John Garang, leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) in the Kenyan town of Naivasha to iron out issues blocking a final deal to end Sudan’s 21-year war.

“We are here hoping that this is the last round of talks,” said deputy chief negotiator and Minister for Federal Relations Nafie Ali Nafie.

“We hope to meet the deadline, because firstly we are both committed to do that and secondly, the issues remaining are not difficult to handle, we believe we can wrap them up,” he told reporters on arrival with Taha in Nairobi.

SPLA/M officials said Garang was due to travel to Naivasha on Monday to begin face-to-face talks with Taha.

Garang said on Friday he was confident of reaching and signing a comprehensive peace deal with the Khartoum government by the end of the year, which is what both sides had pledged before the U.N. Security Council in November.

The war, which has killed 2 million people, broadly pits the Islamist, Arabic-speaking government in the north against rebels seeking greater autonomy for the animist and Christian south. Oil, ethnicity and ideology have complicated the conflict.

Both sides have made substantial progress towards a peace deal, but dates for a final agreement have repeatedly slipped since 2003, with issues over funding SPLA/M forces and payment of lucrative oil revenues to the south yet to be resolved.

Officials in Khartoum said Jan Pronk, the U.N. Special Representative for Sudan, would arrive in Kenya on Sunday for talks on funding development efforts in Sudan.

Africa’s largest country faces conflict on many fronts — mainly in the south where rebels have been fighting the government since 1983 when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic law on the entire country.

But violence has also erupted in the western Darfur region, triggering what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The U.N. Security Council has promised political and economic support once Sudan ends its southern war and the Darfur conflict.

(Additional reporting by Opheera McDoom in Khartoum)