Sudan foes fine-tune oil cash deal, comprehensive peace accord delayed
By Bogonko Bosire
NAIVASHA, Kenya, Dec 21 (AFP) — Sudan’s government and main southern rebel group were still fine-tuning a deal on a 50-50 split of oil revenue Sunday, when officials admitted that a deadline to sign a comprehensive accord ending 20 years of civil war by the end of the year would be missed.
Only minor delays were expected on both counts and Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir waxed optimistic about the whole peace process in Khartoum’s press.
The Islamic government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement are scheduled to sign a wealth-sharing protocol on Tuesday — instead of Sunday as earlier announced — while the final peace deal repeatedly promised before December 31 is now on the cards for sometime in January.
The two delegations led by Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and SPLA/M leader John Garang negotiating in a hotel on the shores of Kenya’s lake Naivasha reached a rough deal on Friday on how to share cash from the country’s 300,000 daily barrels of oil, but said Sunday they needed more time to finalise the details.
Details of the deal only emerged on Sunday, when Al-Sahafa, an independent newspaper, quoted Beshir saying an equal split had been agreed between Khartoum and the government to be set up in the south during a six-year interim period.
An SPLA/M official in Naivasha confirmed the arrangement to AFP.
Oil accounts for some 43 percent of government revenue and is the main issue of wealth-sharing negotiations, the main point of the current — and supposedly final — round of talks.
“This accord will facilitate reaching agreements on the future of the three regions and on power-sharing,” Beshir told the daily, referring to the other two key issues still on the negotiating table.
The three disputed regions are Abyei, Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile state, which lie north of the administrative boundaries left over by Britain on independence in 1956, lines that separate north and south as far as the talks are concerned.
Most of Sudan’s oil comes from fields in the south.
The president expected the two sides to reach “positive results very soon if the negotiations continue in the same spirit.”
But not, according to sources in Naivasha, as soon as the end of this year — despite pledges made in October to visiting US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
“The comprehensive agreement will be signed next month,” Kenyan Foreign Minister Kalonzo Musyoka told AFP.
The minister, who had planned to witness the signing of the wealth-sharing deal in Naivasha on Sunday, declined to say exactly when in January this might happen.
When asked if it was possible for the final deal to be reached this year, Nick Hayson, a South African advisor to the mediating Inter-Governmental Authority on Development, gave AFP an unequivocal “no.”
“They were hoping to finish by December but now it’s not possible,” he said.
Representatives of the two warring sides — whose conflict has claimed some 1.5 million lives since 1983 — were a shade less pessimistic.
“We still have time, but another committee is now discussing the three areas,” SPLA/M spokesman Yassir Arman told AFP.
Asked if this issue could be resolved at the same time as wealth-sharing, the spokesman simply said: “maybe.”
Government delegate Ahmed Diedry, who is also the number two in Sudan’s embassy in Nairobi, declined to be drawn at all, saying: “That one is yet to be determined.”
Previous rounds, also in Kenya, have yielded success, first in 2002 when the foes agreed that, after six years of self-rule the south will hold a referendum on whether to join the north — and under what arrangement — or secede.
In September, Garang and Taha cliched a deal on transitional security arrangements.