World Bank seeks speedy aid to Sudan if peace

OSLO, May 13 (Reuters) – Sudan should get aid to rebuild its shattered economy quickly after any agreement to end a 21-year civil war and without waiting for a deal to restructure its vast debts, the head of the World Bank said on Thursday.

“What we don’t want to do is to hold up the reconstruction phase as soon as they sign” a peace agreement, James Wolfensohn told a news conference during a visit to Norway.

He said that Norway and Britain were leading efforts for aid to Sudan, where the government and southern rebels are working on a deal to end Africa’s longest-running civil war. An estimated two million people have died in the conflict.

Wolfensohn said the World Bank was trying to come up with “a programme that will allow us quickly to get into a position where…in a post-conflict context you can put in some money before you have the debt relief.”

Sudan has $21 billion in debt and is in default on most of it, he said. Lenders are usually highly reluctant to hand out more money before winning a deal restructuring existing debts.

He said that any debt relief package “will include I’m sure a HIPIC (highly indebted poor countries) deal which is to relieve a good part of the debt and bring Sudan back to something that is sustainable.”

The 21-year-old war pits the Islamic, Arabic-speaking government in Khartoum against mainly animist and Christian rebels fighting for greater autonomy for the south of Sudan, Africa’s biggest country.

The conflict, which has been complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology, has uprooted four million people and contributed to recurrent famine and disease.