Sudan VP, rebel leader to resume peace talks in Kenya

NAIVASHA, Kenya, Oct 15 (AFP) — Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and rebel leader John Garang were due to start a new round of peace talks in Kenya, officials said.

The talks on issues still outstanding — in a peace process that has already seen several agreements signed — had been expected to resume in the Kenyan town of Naivasha on Wednesday.

Taha and Garang — the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) — are due to discuss the sharing of power and wealth between Sudan’s Islamic, Arab north and the country’s more African south, where animism and Christianity are the dominant religions.

The SPLA took up arms against Khartoum in 1983.

An official with the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the international body mediating the talks, told AFP in Naivasha that four committees doing preparatory work on the issues “have made substantial progress.”

“This kind of progress … will obviously lay some groundwork for the principal leaders (Taha and Garang) to resolve the contentious issues,” he said.

Another IGAD source said the committees had “shown tremendous willingness to resolve the issues, even those issues that were the cause of conflict in other rounds of talks.”

The last round of talks ended late September when Taha and Garang signed a deal on the security arrangements to be put in place during a six-year, post-war period of autonomy for the south, ahead of a secession referendum.

That period of autonomy was clinched in a breakthrough in July 2002.