Cardinal says peace only first step to end Sudan woes

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor

PARIS, Dec 3 (Reuters) – The peace settlement Sudan is nearing after 20 years of civil war will only be the first step toward bringing the wounded country back to any kind of normal life, according to the leader of Sudan’s Roman Catholics.

Cardinal Gabriel Zubeir Wako, archbishop of Khartoum, said the bloody strife between the Muslim north and secessionists in the Christian and animist south had changed Sudanese society so deeply that a long period of healing was needed.

This would also have to be a period of maximum vigilance, since potential conflicts could be explosive enough to start the fighting all over again, he told Reuters in an interview.

“Peace will be only the beginning of the process,” Wako, 63, said during a short visit to Paris.

“Peace will have to be a reality that is lived. But there is so much bitterness and anger and desire for revenge around,” said Wako, leader of the country’s four million Catholics in a population of 32 million. “Forgiveness is difficult.”

Khartoum’s Muslim-majority government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) extended a truce last week amid hopes that peace talks could reach a deal by year’s end.

More than two million people have died as a direct or indirect result of the war which pits southern secessionists against Khartoum’s Islamist government and its attempts to enforce Muslim Sharia law throughout the country.

Wako said he was not sure a peace deal could be reached in a month or two because too many issues were still unresolved.

NO PREPARATIONS FOR PEACE

Wako, whom Pope John Paul II installed as a cardinal only in October, said neither the government nor the SPLM had done much to prepare people for the time when the four million internally displaced and one million refugees could return to their homes.

Many southerners who took refuge in Khartoum have few or no links left to the areas they left years ago, he said. “When they return, it won’t be the same place they left. Some might settle in other places, which could trigger more conflict.”

Wako saw the potential for more tension when post-war reconstruction aid arrives from abroad.

“People are already saying that NGOs (non-governmental organisations) will come with lots of money to reconstruct the south,” he explained. “That could cause resentment in the north, where they will say that they suffered as much as the southerners did.”

Wako, a southerner who has been archbishop of Khartoum since 1981, said Islamists might see any post-war exodus of southerners as a pretext to say Christians had left the capital and their churches could therefore be closed.

But he said his relations with the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir had improved in recent years and he did not expect difficulties from officials.