Sudan’s NCP is violating peace deal
By The Khartoum Monitor
Jan 30, 2006 — The message First Vice President Salva Kiir delivered at the Republican Palace on Saturday about the ruling National Congress Party (NCP) not complying with the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was very clear and the NPC should take note of it too.
The National Congress is not only dragging its feet on the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, it is violating the deal. It has been clear to many Sudanese for a long time that the NCP never really believed in the CPA and it signed the deal because it was under pressure in the battlefields in southern Sudan and Darfur.
It also came under intense political pressure inside Sudan and from international players such as the United States. Now that the pressure is easing in the form of the cease-fire in the south and fewer angry voices in the US, Europe and Sudan, the NCP feels it can now do what it wanted to do all along, ignore the CPA. That is why We are calling on the international community to take note.
The CPA calls for free and fair elections and the NCP is aware that if the peace agreement is implemented in full it would lose all power. While the SPLM will most likely win elections in the south, the National Congress will be heavily defeated in the north, leave alone in the south.
Its human rights record, its undemocratic formation, its inability to contain corruption, its policies that have impoverished the majority of Sudanese while greatly enriching a few and its unpopular Islamic fundamentalist ideology would ensure that free and fair elections are likely to be held in three or four years, as called for by the CPA.
The NCP is implementing those provisions of the CPA that do not touch its power base and even so it is doing it without conviction. This is the partner the SPLA has. There are no provisions in the CPA for punishing the side that violates the deal.
This is where the international community comes in. It must come up with a formula to force compliance. The CPA is what brought peace to southern Sudan, if it is not being observed, then we are sliding back to war. This is what must not allowed and the only way of doing that is to punish severely the side that is dishonouring the agreement.