Sudan CPA peace deal faces pressures

November 1, 2007 (KHARTOUM, Sudan) — The Comprehensive Peace Agreement between Sudan’s government and southern rebels ended Africa’s longest, bloodiest civil war, which left some 2 million people dead and 4 million as refugees. But the pact is in danger of falling prey to bitterness between the two sides as deadlines near for its full implementation.

“The main problem of Sudan is the nonstop fighting for decades,” says Lt. Gen. Jasbir Singh Lidder, the Indian commander of the 10,000-strong U.N. peacekeeping force monitoring the peace deal in southern Sudan.

The ethnic African south rebelled against the Arab-dominated northern government from Sudan’s 1956 independence from Britain until 1972, then again from 1982 until the peace pact was signed in January 2005.

The agreement was viewed as a major success for its backers, the United States and United Nations. On paper, it created a government of national unity and pledged to share wealth more equally between North and South.

But the complex deal also postponed the most contentious issues, like disarmament and drawing the boundary between North and South, which runs through Sudan’s richest oil fields.

“There is a danger of military tension building up along the (proposed) border,” Lidder said in a recent interview in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital.

The government has refused boundaries drawn by an international commission around the town of Abyei. As for disarmament, both the government and the rebels still keep many troops in the contested zone, and Lidder says his force is “blind” in judging government military strength because Khartoum refuses U.N. inspections.

The peace deal was supposed to create “joint integrated units” — the merger of southern and northern fighters into a common force. But these units barely exist in the border area, where heavily armed troops from the two sides face each other. A flare-up in the border town of Malakal last year killed 140 fighters and an unknown number of civilians before the U.N. intervened.

The tensions — which come as the government battles a separate rebellion in western Sudan’s Darfur region — are all the more worrying as important deadlines for the peace deal are looming.

General elections are due throughout Sudan in early 2009, and the south is to hold a referendum on independence in 2011. But the census necessary for the voting has already been postponed, and southern Sudan has withdrawn its ministers from the unity government to protest what it views as violations to the peace deal.

(AP)