Last-minute haggling delays key Sudan peace texts
NAIVASHA, Kenya, May 26 (AFP) — Haggling to the last minute, Sudan’s government and main rebel group were Wednesday evening due to sign deals crucial to a comprehensive resolution to 21 years of devastating civil war in the south of the vast country.
Scheduled for early afternoon, the accords still had not been signed by nightfall and officials said Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leader John Garang were trying to iron out the distribution of jobs in a post-war dispensation.
Hundreds of Sudanese and Kenyan officials and foreign diplomats, including US Acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles Snyder, were kept waiting in the grounds of a hotel near the lakeside town of Naivasha for the ceremony.
The delay led Snyder to cancel a news conference scheduled for Wednesday evening.
SPLM/A spokesman Samson Kwaje spelled out the problem to AFP.
“We have not agreed on the percentage of representation of southern Sudan in national institutions including the legislature, executive, judiciary and civil service,” he said.
“We’ve also not agreed on the representation of SPLM and the (ruling) National Congress party in the interim administration in Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile,” he said, referring to areas at the heart of the current round of negotiations.
“The parties have promised us that they are going to sign today but they are trying to get issues that are outstanding straight… there are two or three clauses that are not straight,” the talks’ chief mediator, Lazarus Sumbeiywo, told AFP.
Hundreds of Sudanese civilians began arriving early Wednesday morning at the hotel where the signing was to take place.
On Tuesday, the foreign ministry in Kenya, which has played a lead role in the negotiations, announced prematurely that “a major breakthrough… has been achieved.”
“The breakthrough has realised agreements on key outstanding issues of power-sharing, the two conflict areas of Nuba Mountain and Southern Blue Nile as well as Abyei,” the ministry said in a statement.
“The protocols represent a major step towards the achievement of a final comprehensive settlement to the conflict.”
The accords will cap two years of intensive negotiations, leaving only technical aspects of a permanent ceasefire to be thrashed out before a comprehensive peace accord is sealed.
The deals do not cover a separate 15-month conflict which is raging in Sudan’s western Darfur region creating what the UN has termed the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.
Taha and Garang have been meeting in Kenya since September 2003, after lower-level delegates failed to move forward.
On Tuesday, the US welcomed the imminent deal in Kenya.
“We’re pleased with the progress that is being made at Lake Naivasha in Kenya between the Sudanese parties,” Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters.
“These documents represent major milestones on the road to a peaceful settlement of Sudan’s civil war,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in Washington.
Snyder met Taha and Garang in April and early this month to express international displeasure that the peace process had been dragging on for too long.
Sudan’s war erupted in 1983 when the south, where most observe Christianity and numerous traditional religions, took up arms to end domination by the wealthier, Islamic and Arabised north.
Together with recurrent famine and disease, Africa’s longest conflict has claimed at least 1.5 million lives and displaced more than four million people, mostly in the impoverished south, according to aid agencies.
Since July 2002, when the two sides 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 — and on how to manage government and SPLA armies during the interim period.