Arab envoy to Sudan peace talks resigns

CAIRO, Nov 4 (AFP) — The Arab League’s special envoy to the Sudanese peace process has handed in her resignation, complaining that Arabs were being left out of the negotiations, a League official told AFP Tuesday.

Nadia Makram-Ebeid submitted her resignation to League chief Amr Mussa saying she felt “marginalized” from the talks between Khartoum and southern rebels taking place in Kenya, said the official who requested he not be named.

She expressed concern that the eastern African grouping Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mediating the talks “seemed reluctant that the Arab League play an effective role in these talks,” he said.

There had been signs the League would have trouble staking a claim at the negotiations to solve Africa’s longest-running conflict.

When it requested observer status at the talks in August, Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army agreed, but IGAD never responded.

Two Arab countries — Egypt and Libya — had also in recent years offered up their own plan to solve the bitter conflict but they never took off. The Arab League also recently set up a fund to help develop the war-torn south.

Under pressure from the United States the peace talks have produced crucial agreements on a six-year transitional period of self-rule for the south, followed by an internationally supervised referendum and security arrangements.

Sudan’s war erupted in 1983 when the SPLA took up arms against Khartoum to end domination of the mainly Christian and animist south by the Arabised, Muslim north.

More than 1.5 million people have been killed and more than four million people displaced in the conflict.

IGAD groups Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda and Somalia.