Khartoum, southern rebels extend truce, adjourn peace talks in Kenya
NAIROBI, Jan 26 (AFP) — The Sudanese government and the country’s main rebel group on Monday extended a ceasefire by a month and adjourned until February 17 talks aimed at ending two decades of civil war, the chief mediator said.
Sudan’s Vice President Ali Osman Taha and John Garang, leader of the southern-based rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), have been holding talks in the Kenyan town of Naivasha since December 7 to try to bring down the remaining barriers in the way of a comprehensive peace agreement.
“The talks have adjourned until February 17 so as our Muslim brothers can have an opportunity to attend the Haj (pilgrimage to Mecca),” the mediator, retired Kenyan general Lazaro Sumbeiywo, told AFP by telephone from Naivasha, 80 kilometres (50 miles) northwest of Nairobi.
“They have also extended the cessation of hostilities agreement for one month, starting on February 1,” Sumbeiywo said. The truce has been extended several times since it came into effect in October 2002.
The SPLA’s spokesman Yasser Arman said the rebel movement would have preferred to continue with the talks “without a break”.
“We are not part of the adjournment, it is the Sudanese government that asked for it. SPLA would have preffered to continue with the negotiations without a break and with the same momentum,” said Arman.
Another SPLA delegate, who asked not to be named, said “Khartoum has resorted to delaying tactics when a final deal is within grasp.”
Last week, Sudan’s official media said Khartoum and the SPLA had renewed a separate truce in Sudan’s central Nuba Mountains until July 19.
The truce, signed in Switzerland in 2001, has eased humanitarian access to the region, mainly populated by indigenous non-Arab minorities who fought alongside the SPLA in Sudan’s civil war, which, with the end of Angola’s civil war last year, became the longest-lasting on the African continent.
Garang and Taha said they had made “substantial progress” in the just-ended round of talks, said Sumbeiywo, who chairs a mediation committee of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an east African body that groups Ethiopia, Kenya, Eritrea, Uganda, and, nominally, Somalia, itself riven by clan warfare and without a viable central government.
On Friday, Sumbeiywo said the two sides had reached agreement on the status of two of three disputed regions — Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile — and were still discussing Abyei.
Khartoum and the rebels have already signed an agreement on a 50-50 split of the country’s wealth, particularly oil revenues.
The sharing of power is the other bone of contention still to be resolved.
In 2002, Khartoum and the SPLA struck a breakthrough accord granting the south the right to self-determination after a six-year transition period, and last September both sides reached a deal on transitional security, under which the government would withdraw its troops from the south.
The war in Sudan, Africa’s largest nation, erupted in 1983 and pitted the south, where most observe traditional African religions and Christianity, against the Muslim, Arabized north.
The conflict and war-related famine and disease have claimed at least 1.5 million lives and displaced an estimated four million people mostly in the south.