Sudan says emergency law to end after peace deal
KHARTOUM, Dec 28 (Reuters) – Sudan’s four-year-old state of emergency could end if a peace deal is signed to end two decades of civil war in the south, the official Sudan News Agency SUNA reported on Sunday.
The war has killed two million people, mainly through famine and disease, but both sides have said they hope peace talks in Kenya will come up with a comprehensive deal by early 2004.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir imposed a state of emergency in Africa’s largest country in December 1999. SUNA quoted Chairman of the Justice and Legislation Committee Ismail al-Haj Musa as saying the president had sent a letter to parliament asking that the emergency law be extended for a fifth year.
“When a comprehensive ceasefire agreement is signed within the framework of a peace agreement, reasons for the state of emergency will cease to exist,” Musa quoted Bashir as saying in the letter.
The state of emergency gives Bashir and the security authorities unlimited powers to arrest people, detain them indefinitely, close newspapers and dissolve parliament.
An extension could be passed without difficulty, delegates say, because most members of parliament belong to the ruling National Congress Party and small parties allied to it.
Musa reported Bashir as saying the security situation in Sudan had not changed, despite the ceasefire in the south.
“The security threats still prevail, the war is still going on in the south, there is only a temporary halt to hostilities,” Musa quoted Bashir’s letter as saying.
The civil war broadly pits the Islamist government in Khartoum against the mainly Christian and animist south, but has been complicated by ethnicity, oil and ideology.
The current round of Kenya talks has reached agreement in principle on sharing oil wealth, but other contentious issues remain unresolved, including power sharing and the status of three areas claimed by both sides.
But analysts have said a separate and escalating conflict with different rebel groups in the Darfur region in western Sudan could develop into a full-blown civil war and threaten any peace agreement in the south.