Sudanese expand peace talks, review wealth pact
By Wangui Kanina
NAIVASHA, Kenya, Dec 24 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government and rebel foes fine-tuned a draft pact on Wednesday on how to share wealth after their civil war ends and expanded their painstaking peace talks to cover three contested regions, delegates said.
Rebel leader John Garang and the government’s first vice president Osman Ali Taha reviewed a draft accord on sharing wealth while a technical committee of negotiators discussed the areas of Abyei, Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile.
A final accord on either topic at the talks in Kenya would dismantle a big hurdle to ending Africa’s longest conflict in the continent’s biggest country — a 20-year-old civil war that has cost two million lives and uprooted four million people.
Washington pledged in October to boost aid to Sudan to rebuild the sparsely populated country of 30 million but warned that assistance hinged on the implementation of a peace deal.
Kenya’s Foreign Minister Kalonzo Musyoka said on Tuesday the two men had reached agreement in principle on sharing riches such as the oil-exporting country’s petroleum revenues but added he expected the two sides to postpone signing a pact on that topic until other issues were also settled.
“The two leaders have met today,” one of the delegates said. “They are still discussing the wealth sharing agreement — there are still some outstanding issues on things like (regulatory) petroleum commission and the banking system.”
War broke out in Sudan in 1983, pitting the Islamic government in the Arab-speaking north against rebels seeking more autonomy for the largely animist or Christian south. Oil, ideology, ethnicity and religion have complicated it.
The government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) agreed last year to a waiver on Islamic law in non-Muslim areas and a six-year transitional period from January 2004 after which the south would vote on whether to secede.
A comprehensive wealth sharing agreement would cover how to distribute oil revenues and share taxes and would settle the central bank’s role and resolve questions about the currency.
Two other outstanding topics are power sharing in the interim period and the contentious issue of three areas.
The three regions are part of northern Sudan, but the SPLA says they are marginalised, like the rest of the south, and have demanded self-rule for them and a waiver on Islamic law.
The oil deal was a concession by the government, which had wanted only five percent of oil revenues to go the SPLA. Sudan’s main oil fields are in the south, where the SPLA is based.
Despite the progress in the talks, the Sudanese government is still fighting two other rebel groups that launched an uprising in the western Darfur area in February.
The rebels, which accuse the authorities of marginalising the arid region, said on Tuesday that government-armed militias and warplanes killed at least 24 people over the past four days.