South Sudanese peace hopes dashed by delays
Sept 13, 2006 (JUBA) — Sitting at a plastic table beside the vast waters of the Nile, Charles Mambo Simba says he isn’t confident about the future of his home in southern Sudan.
“We signed a peace deal last year but the government is cheating,” said the 24-year-old, sipping soda through a straw as the mighty river snaked through the green valley below him.
“There’s no proper sharing of resources. Khartoum keeps the oil for themselves. They don’t want the south to develop.”
In a report released late on Tuesday U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested that a peace pact ending 21 years of civil war in southern Sudan could be crumbling, as key pledges by donors and signatories are being ignored or circumvented.
The January 2005 agreement was supposed to usher in big changes in southern Sudan, racked by decades of fighting between the Arabic-speaking Islamic government in Khartoum and southern rebels, following Christianity and traditional religions.
The deal signed by the government and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) provides for power and wealth sharing, but Annan said some of its basic tenets, such as election planning and dividing oil revenues, have not been met.
Many southern Sudanese agree.
“When (President) Omar Bashir came to Juba, he promised money for development, good buildings, electricity, yet there’s nothing,” said 23-year-old builder Daniel Bojo, working on a makeshift bamboo fence.
“We don’t even have clean drinking water,” he added, as metres away a group of women washed clothes in metal basins along the banks of Nile.
The United Nations has some 10,000 peacekeepers in the south to monitor the agreement and help train police, human rights workers and provide other services.
It has set up a radio station where there was none, but Khartoum has refused to allow broadcasts in the north.
Moreover, the U.N. Mission in Sudan, known as UNMIS, has not been permitted to monitor the oil-rich Abyei region.
In the impoverished south where paved roads are rare, some 370 km (230 miles) of roads were fixed, allowing the return of over 10,000 refugees, food aid to 3 million people and polio immunization of 4.8 million children, the report said.
It added that donors have not lived up to their pledges, committing $430 million of the $2.6 billion needed for reconstruction.
In Juba, the capital of semi-autonomous southern Sudan, only one road is paved and even then it is pitted with potholes.
Heaps of discarded rubbish rot in the sweltering heat on the roadside, occasionally disturbed by dust kicked up from passing U.N. four wheel drives.
There are few brick buildings, many straw-and-thatch huts.
“The south is lacking a lot – there are no roads, no medical facilities, no education, nothing. Yet they are pumping out all this oil,” said kiosk-owner, Sadir Kiden.
The peace deal grants southerners the right to vote in 2011 on whether to secede or remain part of Africa’s biggest country. Many say they have already made up their minds.
“They have no option to stop us. We are going to vote for an independent south,” said Kenny Abdu, 21, a waiter. “If we have unity, it will be the same story all over again.”
(Reuters)
To read the latest UN report on CPA implementation, go at : http://www.unmis.org/english/cpaMonitor.htm.