Sudan president sees final peace deal within a week

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Dec 29 (Reuters) – Sudan’s president said on Monday he expected his government and southern rebels to reach a final peace deal within a week to end their 20-year-old civil war.

Mediators hope both sides are on the verge of clinching a comprehensive settlement after more than a year of negotiations in Kenya to end a conflict that has claimed an estimated two million lives, mainly through hunger and disease.

“Great progress has been achieved,” Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir told a news conference in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa after unrelated talks with the leaders of Ethiopia and Yemen on economic cooperation and other issues.

“We expect within a week’s time to reach a final agreement in the peace process,” Bashir said after the two-day meeting.

The rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) said it would not react directly to the president’s comments but, asked about the possibility of reaching a final agreement within a week, spokesman Yasser Aman told Reuters in Kenya:

“There are good prospects but there are difficulties. We are trying our best to reach a comprehensive agreement,” he said. “One of the root causes of this war is the imbalance of power and wealth sharing, this will be resolved but it will be difficult.”

The war pits the Islamist government in Khartoum against rebels in the mainly Christian and animist south in a conflict complicated by oil, ethnicity and ideology.

U.S. ROLE

The United States has played a leading role in exerting pressure on both sides in Sudan to reach an agreement, hoping to transform relations with an oil-producing country it lists as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

While hailing the progress towards ending the war with the rebels in the south, Bashir accused neighbouring Eritrea of backing a separate rebel group in the Darfur region in the west of Sudan.

“It is not a secret Eritrea is exerting huge effort to destabilise the Sudan… Eritrea has worked hard by supplying arms and providing training to enemy fighters,” Bashir said, speaking at a joint news conference with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The United Nations estimates that more than 600,000 people have been uprooted by fighting in Darfur, which analysts say could complicate efforts to strike a peace deal in the south. Sudanese security officials accuse Eritrea of flying aid to the Darfur rebels, and have in the past said the Darfur rebels were also backed by Sudan’s opposition Popular National Congress and the SPLA.

Eritrea denied the accusations, saying it would be impossible for it to provide backing to rebels in western Sudan, which lies far from its border with Sudan in the east.

“It’s a total lie,” said Teumezghi Tesfa, counsellor at the Eritrean embassy in Nairobi. “It’s very difficult to say that Eritrea are supporting rebels in Darfur, we don’t even have land access or any communication with these people,” he told Reuters.

Eritrea accuses Sudan, Ethiopia and Yemen of forming an “Axis of Belligerence” to sponsor terrorism in the region.

Eritrea and Sudan have long accused each other of supporting rebels on their territory, and Eritrea’s relations with Ethiopia remain tense following a 1998-2000 border war.

Sudan’s parliament on Monday approved the extension of a four-year-old state of emergency for one year, linking the decision to the escalating conflict in Darfur.