Last minute disputes delay Sudan peace deal
(Updates with Sudan foreign minister, SPLA comments)
By Katie Nguyen
NAIVASHA, Kenya, May 26 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government and southern rebels hammered out final details on Wednesday to a deal paving the way to end Africa’s longest-running civil war, delaying a planned signing ceremony in Kenya.
After a decade of off-on peace efforts, the deal should open the way to a full ceasefire and implementation pact to end a war that has bisected Africa’s biggest country for two decades.
Kenyan government officials and foreign dignitaries including Norwegian International Development Minister Hilde Frafjord Johnson gathered at a lakeside hotel near Nairobi for a ceremony that had been scheduled for 1 p.m. (1000 GMT).
Three hours after that time visiting U.S. Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Charles Snyder emerged from a meeting with the negotiators and pronounced himself optimistic.
“I’ve been doing a little shouting and yelling — everyone has been doing a little shouting and yelling. I think they will work it out,” Snyder told reporters.
Chief mediator Lazarus Sumbeiywo appealed for patience.
“The parties have one or two clauses that we need to go over before we can have a signing ceremony…The parties have promised us they will sign today so please bear with us,” he said.
The deal would be a major step to ending Sudan’s 21-year civil war, but does not cover another conflict raging in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where more than a year of fighting has created what the United Nations has branded one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
At about the same time Snyder made his remarks, Sudan Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail told reporters in Khartoum: “The issues of dispute are the percentages (of government jobs) in the two areas of the Nuba Mountains and the Southern Blue Nile and what is related to the national capital and the laws that will govern it.”
Sudan People’s Liberation Army spokesman Samson Kwaje said unresolved issues included the relative strength of SPLA and the (ruling) National Congress party representation in planned interim administrations in the Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile after a peace deal.
Kwaje added that differences also persisted over what he described as the representation of southern Sudan in the future national legislature, the cabinet and civil service.
Sudan’s civil war broke out in 1983 between the northern Islamic government based in Khartoum and rebels from the mainly Christian and animist south.
During the latest push for peace, which has seen both sides meet regularly in Kenya in the past two years, they have agreed to split state and religion, form a post-war army and allow a referendum on independence in the south after an interim period.
The government and the southern rebel SPLA agreed in January on an equal split of oil revenues — now exceeding $2 billion a year from 300,000 barrels per day — during a six-year transition period.
They also agreed on security arrangements allowing both sides to keep separate armies but deploy integrated forces in strategic areas of a country nearly four times as big as Texas.
(Additional reporting by Wangui Kanina in Naivasha and Nima Elbagir in Khartoum)