GOS, SPLA renew ceasefire in Nuba Mountains
KHARTOUM, Jan 20 (AFP) — The government and the main rebel movement have renewed a truce in Sudan’s central Nuba Mountains as they move closer to ending their 20-year civil war, official sources said Tuesday.
The fifth six-month ceasefire went into effect on Monday and will last until July 19, the official SUNA news agency said.
The truce was originally concluded in Switzerland on December 19, 2001 as part of confidence-building measures designed to help end the war.
The international group monitoring the ceasefire, the Joint Monitoring Mission and Joint Military Committee (JMC), prepared to hand duties over to a United Nations mission if negotiations in Kenya produce a peace settlement.
“The JMM/JMC is ready to hand over now our mission to the United Nations,” its Norwegian head, Brigadier General Jan Erik Wilhelmsen, said in a statement.
The Sudanese government and the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) have made dramatic progress in the past two years toward ending their civil war, with a wealth-sharing deal signed this month.
The JMC said in its statement that in the past six months it determined there had been nine cease-fire violations, five committed by the SPLA and four by the government, a sharp drop over the previous six-month period.
It added that the JMM, backed by the United Nations, had de-mined, opened and improved various roads, especially around Umm Sirdibba and between Al Reika and Tallodi.
“Further rehabilitations of roads and the airfield are planned in the fifth (ceasefire) mandate in the area of Kauda,” it said.
“These activities have enabled the delivery of vast quantities of humanitarian aid, primarily by the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, but also by other agencies in the Nuba Mountains,” it said.
The Nuba Mountains are one of three disputed regions whose future status is being discussed in the peace negotiations in Kenya.
The SPLA has pressed for the three areas to be included in the autonomous region which is to be established in the south for six years ahead of a referendum on independence.
Like the south, historically they were mainly populated by indigenous non-Arab minorities and provided fighters for the rebel cause.
However, the government insists that, as they were not administratively part of the south under the boundaries inherited at independence in 1956, they should remain directly governed by Khartoum.
The head of the government delegation to the talks on the issue, foreign ministry undersecretary Mutref Siddeiq, said Sunday that there was 95 percent agreement on the Nuba Mountains and southern Blue Nile State, but continuing deadlock on the third disputed area — the oil-rich district of Abyei.