Sudan’s vice president returns home as peace talks stall

NAIROBI, April 17 (AFP) — Sudan’s Vice President Ali Osman Taha on Saturday returned to Khartoum amid deadlock in peace talks with the country’s main southern rebel group aimed at ending Africa’s longest and most catastrophic combat, officials said.

“Taha has just returned home for about 72 hours,” an official in the mediation who asked not to be named told AFP by telephone from the talks venue in Naivasha, 80 kilometres (50 miles) northwest of Nairobi.

Sudan’s charge de affairs in Nairobi, Ahmed Dirdeiry, also told AFP that “Taha left for Khartoum to brief President Omar al-Beshir on the state of the negotiations.”

Taha, who has been locked in tough negotiations with Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) leader John Garang, left amid a deadlock on whether or not to impose Islamic laws in the capital, Khartoum.

In July 2002, the Khartoum government and the SPLA agreed that areas in the north should be under Islamic law while the south would be free of religious laws during an interim period of six years of self rule, after which the south would vote in a referendum.

The government insists on the 2002 deal, but the SPLA argues that despite being in the north, Khartoum is a capital for all.

To resolve this, “both sides have presented briefings to the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mediators with a view to come up with a compromise draft on the areas of contention,” Dirdeiry said.

But the SPLA complained that Taha’s trip was tailored to prolong the much-delayed negotiations aimed at halting the war that erupted in 1983 and has claimed the lives of at least 1.5 million people and displaced more than four million others.

“The sudden trip by Taha confirms the widely circulated opinion that the strategy of the government is to prolong the talks and buy time at the expense of a quick finalisation of the peace agreement which we are almost reaching,” SPLA spokesman Yasser Arman told AFP by telephone from Naivasha.