Sudan says March peace deal depends on SPLA rebels
CAIRO, March 4 (Reuters) – Sudan said on Thursday it could reach a peace deal to end its two-decades-old civil war this month if rebels agreed to give up a potentially oil-rich region.
Asked if U.S Secretary of State Colin Powell’s prediction of a peace deal this month was realistic, Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said: “Yes, if the other side, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), is ready to make concessions.
He said the status of the oil-producing region Abyei was holding up peace talks.
“The SPLA insists that Abyei is part of the south. The government is saying… Abyei is not part of the south,” he told reporters at the Sudanese embassy in Cairo.
Some two million people have been killed in the conflict between the Islamist government in Khartoum and Christian and Animist groups in the south of Africa’s largest country.
Sudan earns about $2 billion a year from its growing oil output of about 250,000 barrels a day, rich picking for a poor nation of 30 million that only began oil exports in the 1990s.
Ismail said Sudan also wanted to hold peace talks this month to try to end its other civil war; the battle with rebels in the arid western Darfur region.
The United States called on Sudan on Tuesday to disarm militias it backs there to help end a year-old conflict that aid organisations say has displaced one million people.
The two main Darfur rebel groups accuse Khartoum of neglect and arming Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.
Ismail said the government hoped to persuade Darfur rebel leaders to attend a conference in March where it would seek to disarm all groups in the area, including the government-armed militia known as Janjaweed.
“Weapons should be collected from all those who are working outside the regular armed forces, whether the Janjaweed, whether the militia, whether the opposition,” Ismail said.
But Darfur rebels said last month they would not attend the government proposed conference.
“We want to persuade them (western rebels) to stop fighting and to come to the conference. We will do our best to convince, if not all of them, most of them,” said Ismail.