Sudan peace talks extended amid hopes for final deal by month-end
NAIROBI, March 22 (AFP) — Peace talks between Khartoum and the main southern rebel group, which were expected to adjourn on Monday, were extended for 10 days amid hopes that outstanding issues would be resolved by the end of the month, mediators said.
“The negotiations will go on and it is very possible that the two sides will agree on all the remaining issues by the end of the month,” chief mediator Lazaro Sumbeiywo, a retired Kenyan army general, reported by phone from the talks’ venue in Naivasha, northwest of the Kenyan capital.
Another official in the regional Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mediation said that the talks had been “extended to March 31 when parties indicated that they might have some deal.”
On Friday, US President George W. Bush’s special envoy to Sudan John Danforth told the parties to wrap up the process by the end of March, warning that further delay might cause international support for the peace process to wane.
Sudan’s Vice President Ali Osman Taha and Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) leader John Garang, who resumed their fourth round of face-to-face talks on February 17, are “currently handling the sticking points as a package,” Sumbeiywo said.
The status of three disputed regions – Abyei, Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile – as well as power-sharing are the issues standing in the way of a final peace deal.
“The parties have even made progress on Abyei,” where there was a deadlock, Sumbeiywo added.
Sudan’s conflict flared up in 1983, when the mostly Christian and animist south took up arms to end the domination of the wealthier Muslim, Arabised north.
The war, now Africa’s longest, has claimed at least 1.5 million lives and sent more than four million others fleeing from their homes.
Since July 2002, when they struck an accord granting the south the right to a referendum after a six-year transition period, other deals have been reached on a 50-50 split of the country’s wealth – particularly revenues from oil, which is concentrated in the south – and how to manage the Khartoum and SPLA army during the interim period.
Last week, a top UN official, Mukesh Kapila, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, hailed progress being made in peace talks between the southern rebels and Khartoum, but said, referring to another conflict in western Sudan, that Africa’s largest country “cannot have peace … without peace in Darfur.”
The conflict in Darfur is much more recent that that between the north and south, having broken out in February last year, but it has already claimed more than 10,000 lives, according to Kapila.
He called it “the world’s greatest humanitarian and human rights catastrophe” and “possibly the world’s hottest war.”