Steady but slow progress reported in Sudan’s peace talks

NAIVASHA, Kenya, Oct 20 (AFP) — Sudan’s Vice President Ali Osman Taha and rebel leader John Garang are making steady but slow progress in negotiations on disputed territories in the country’s central region, mediators said Monday.

“The talks are slow, but still progressing well,” said an official of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the east African body mediating in the Sudanese peace talks, who asked not to be named.

Both Khartoum and the southern-based Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) claim central Sudan’s territories of Southern Blue Nile, Abyei and the Nuba Mountains.

While Khartoum says it controls most of these territories, the SPLA maintains that the areas’ residents want the group to represent them in peace talks aimed at ending the 20-year-old civil war in the vast country.

Taha and Garang, who began the current round of negotiations on Friday, are also due to discuss the sharing of power and wealth between Sudan’s Islamic, Arab north and the country’s African south, where animism and Christianity are the dominant religions.

“We are still discussing the conflict regions. We have not yet started discussing power- and wealth-sharing,” SPLA spokesman Samson Kwaje told AFP.

The last round of talks ended in 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.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell will travel to Nairobi this week to “encourage progress” in the peace talks and meet top Kenyan officials, the State Department said Monday.

A statement from Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s press office said Powell will meet the Kenyan leader in Nairobi on Tuesday.

Powell will arrive in the Kenyan capital from Bangkok where he is attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit with US President George W. Bush, department spokesman Richard Boucher said.