Sudan peace talks restart in Kenya
By Wangui Kanina
NAIVASHA, Kenya, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Sudan’s civil war foes resumed peace talks on Tuesday and the main mediator said a lot of work lay ahead for negotiators trying to end two decades of war in the oil-exporting country.
Officials said rebel leader John Garang and Sudanese First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha met in this Rift Valley town northwest of Nairobi to try to resolve two topics holding up final agreement on ending a conflict that has killed an estimated two million people.
The talks, adjourned three weeks ago to permit Taha to go on the Muslim haj pilgrimage, will try to forge agreement on who rules three contested areas claimed by both sides and on how to share power once Africa’s longest-running war comes to an end.
Although the government and Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) last month hailed “substantial” progress on the topic of the three contested areas, experts say there is a long way to go before a comprehensive peace deal.
“They still have a lot of work to do on these two areas,” said chief mediator, retired Kenyan general Lazaro Sumbeiywo, referring to power-sharing and the three disputed areas.
“I would have wished they could move faster than they have. The problem is they are not making decisions,” he told Reuters. He did not elaborate.
For 20 years, rebels from the largely animist and Christian south have fought for greater autonomy from the Islamist government in the Arab-speaking north. Disputes over oil, ethnicity and ideology have complicated the conflict.
Africa’s biggest country earns about $2 billion a year from its growing oil output of about 250,000 barrels a day, riches for an impoverished nation of 30 million that only began petroleum exports in the late 1990s.
A deal signed in January provides a roughly equal division of oil revenues for Khartoum and a yet-to-be-created governing authority in the rebels’ southern bastion when the war ends.
The latest round of peace talks between the government and SPLA began in early 2002 but do not cover a separate rebellion in western Sudan which shows little sign of abating.
During a visit to the talks by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell last year, both the government and the SPLA stated their commitment to signing a peace deal by the end of the year. That promise and subsequent target dates have not been met.
“Hopefully we’ll reach a peace agreement during this round (of talks),” rebel spokesman Yasser Arman said.
The parties are expected to tackle the three disputed frontline areas of Nuba Mountains, Southern Blue Nile and Abyei.
Delegates said last month both sides had agreed to give Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile self-rule during a six-year interim period after a final peace is signed.
However, Abyei is proving more problematic. The SPLA wants a referendum there on whether it should join the south, while the government argues that it belongs to the north according to boundary lines drawn up at independence in 1956.