US engages Sudan’s National Congress Party, former rebels in tripartite talks
By Daniel Van Oudenaren
June 25, 2009 (WASHINGTON) – Tripartite talks were held in Washington among delegations of the United States, the National Congress Party, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, concluding with officials from both Sudanese parties highlighting major outstanding issues and pointing to follow-up sessions to take place in the coming months.
The talks were meant to bolster implementation of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended a civil war begun in 1983; the event Tuesday aimed to underline the scope of international support for the agreement.
US Special Envoy Scott Gration, a former Air Force General, was the proponent and facilitator of the meeting.
“We embarked on outstanding issues. We crossed great miles in different issues: political, security and economic,” said Idris Mohamed Abdelgadir, State Minister to the Presidency and Deputy Head of the NCP delegation, in an interview Wednesday evening.
Yaser Arman, spokesman of the SPLM delegation, said in an interview Wednesday that the presence of the international figures “raised the profile of the CPA and injected new momentum, new spirit in the CPA.”
Mr. Arman, who is the Deputy Secretary General of SPLM for North Sudan, acknowledged that the conference “will help the parties to seek a solution” for their problems but added that “we did not resolve the issues at the conference itself.”
According to Jon Temin, a Program Officer at US Institute of Peace specializing in Sudan, the conference shows the US commitment to the north-south peace deal. “The fact that the United States is hosting this and bringing the parties here is what’s new, it seems to show a real re-commitment to the CPA not just on the part of the United States but on the part of the 33 or so other countries or entities that were represented.”
Mr. Temin had helped organize a public panel featuring some of the conference participants held at USIP on Wednesday.
ADDRESSING THE TENSION OVER ABYEI
It appears that one major topic of the closed consultations was addressing the tension over the disputed oil-rich region of Abyei, which is situated between north and south Sudan. Both SPLM and NCP have submitted arguments to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which will rule by July on which boundary demarcation to accept. The area is inhabited by two main ethnic groups, the Ngok Dinka and Misseriya Arabs, but the region in the past has also been heavily militarized.
At issue is not only whether the parties formally accept the decision of the Hague court, but how they actually exercise their political and military influence in the Abyei region in the wake of the decision. The town of Abyei was destroyed in May 2008, displacing approximately 50,000 people.
Mr. Arman for the SPLM said, “The most outstanding issue is Abyei. We both agreed that the ruling from the Hague will be final and binding. We both agreed that we should work hard for it to be accepted by everybody, we should contain any group that is going to work against this ruling.”
Likewise, Mr. Abdelgadir for the NCP said, “Both parties, NCP and SPLM, accept their unequivocal acceptance of the arbitration outcome and their will to implement the outcome of that decision.”
“We discussed here and agreed to develop a plan between the two parties with the assistance of the international community and particularly the US to seek ways and means to guarantee the implementation of the PCA outcome,” he said. He indicated that this would involve jointly working with the Ngok Dinka and Misseriya communities to prevent spoilers from obstructing the implementation of the PCA’s decision.
Mr. Gration himself has volunteered to go to Abyei at the time of the ruling.
According to Mr. Arman, the two peace partners have agreed that the UN Mission in Sudan should increase its forces in the area ahead of the ruling, if necessary. But another SPLM official said that the NCP disagreed with this idea.
ADDRESSING THE CENSUS DISPUTE
The outcome of the census potentially affects the entire power-sharing formula contained in the 2005 peace agreement. After the release of the census results this month, southern figures objected to what they said were low numbers for the populations of the ten states of South Sudan, as well as the population of southerners living in the Khartoum. Senior figures in the SPLM, including Foreign Minister Deng Alor and Mr. Arman, held a press conference in Khartoum rejecting the results of the census and alleging that it was rigged.
But Mr. Abdelgader contended, “The census is a technical process,” pointing out that the results were passed by a technical working group whose rapporteur was the UN Population Fund. He noted too that the results passed without objection at a meeting of the Presidency, in which the SPLM leader participates as First Vice President of the Republic.
He told Sudan Tribune that the results “should be used to re-adjust the power formula in the CPA – this is something we are now delaying, but we are definitely going to use the results of the census in the elections to come.”
Despite this determination, he said that a political rather than technical approach to resolving the dispute — as requested by SPLM – might be possible. “A political understanding, if there is a real partnership of the two parties, could happen after the elections.”
“It might be possible, but as something related to the executive organs, because the parliamentary organs will be determined by the constituencies which are determined by the census results,” he said.
BILATERAL DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS
The Obama administration has not released any information about the outcome of a policy review for its relations with Sudan, but indications of its approach appear in its diplomatic activities and in the pubic statements of Special Envoy Gration.
This past week’s events were largely unprecedented in that the US invited such a large delegation from the NCP. Previously, the US Central Intelligence Agency has welcomed the NCP’s Salah Abdullah Gosh, Director of National Intelligence and Security Services, for a visit in April 2005, but that visit was not made in a diplomatic capacity.
Though the US State Department initially anticipated that Mr. Gosh would attend this week, he was not present at the events.
American officials aim to continue facilitating the implementation of the CPA through follow-up meetings. The tripartite talks will continue with a meeting in Khartoum in July and another in Juba in August.
Mr. Abdelgader said that “the backing which we are seeing now from the Department of State and from important elements in the Congress like the Foreign Affairs Committee headed by Senator Kerry, all this is something that is sending a signal in the right direction.”
He also signalled Khartoum’s desire to improve relations as the talks with SPLM progress, ending the US sanctions regime against the Government of Sudan: “Any positive development on our trilateral process now of course depends on the improvement of the bilateral relation between Sudan and the US, because these things are inter-related.”
“The fruition of the trilateral process depends basically on the improvement in the bilateral relation between Sudan and the US,” he said.
The US Administration’s open engagement with the Government of Sudan has met with hesitancy in some quarters. A former US diplomat, Roger Winter, said Sunday during a keynote speech for a gathering of Sudanese in San Diego that the current ruling party is “directly responsible for the deaths of literally millions of Sudanese and the destruction of the livelihoods of millions more.”
Mr. Winter, the former US Special Representative on Sudan, added that the National Congress Party “has been at war with its people every single day of its rule.”
Similarly, Mr. Arman remarked that there had been good reasons for Sudan’s isolation from the outside world, pointing to “Sudanese issues of human rights and respect of law, war in Sudan and the humanitarian situation, implementation of agreements,” and the atrocities in Darfur. He said that for re-engagement between the US and Sudan to benefit all Sudanese, these issues must first be resolved between Sudan’s government and its people.
“I don’t see that the engagement will be fruitful” unless these issues are first resolved, he said.
But another observer was more positive. Mr. Temin of USIP said, “My sense is that General Gration’s approach to Sudan is a holistic one and that the US is probably learning from some past, perhaps, missteps in segmenting Sudan’s problems and not trying to address things comprehensively.”
On Wednesday, members of the National Congress Party delegation met with US business leaders at the Cosmos Club located near the Embassy of Sudan.
(ST)