Sudan leaders prepare to sell peace to the people
By Wangui Kanina
NAIVASHA, Kenya, May 27 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government and southern rebels woke on Thursday to the task of selling a key peace accord to their own factions to try to end Africa’s longest-running civil war.
The government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) signed agreements on Wednesday in Kenya on how to share power and manage disputed strategic areas, lifting the last hurdles to a comprehensive peace deal and ceasefire.
But after months of tough talks, government and rebel negotiators must now persuade their constituencies, polarised by 21 years of war, that it is time for peace.
“You both will need to sell your agreement to the Sudanese people and mobilise your support,” Norway’s development minister Hilde Frafjord Johnson told the government’s negotiator Ali Osman Mohamed Taha and SPLA leader John Garang.
The accord does not cover a separate conflict raging in the western Darfur area of Africa’s largest country. It excludes up to 30 other militia groups, some eyeing Sudan’s newly tapped oil wealth, who could still scupper peace hopes.
Wednesday’s accords give Khartoum 70 percent of executive and legislative seats in the north and the SPLA the same in the south during a six-year transition, an SPLA delegate said. After that the south would vote on secession.
In the disputed Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile regions, which control much of the oil wealth, the government would have 55 percent of power and the SPLA 45 percent, with the governorship switching between the two every 18 months.
STRIDES TO PEACE
After a decade of on-off efforts to end a war that broadly pits northern Arab Muslims against southern black animists and Christians, talks made massive strides after First Vice President Taha took a direct role last September.
But Garang acknowledged the tasks ahead. “Nine months is what God has prescribed as a full term,” the veteran rebel leader said. “We hope we have delivered to you a healthy baby — but then of course a child needs to be nurtured.”
Kenyan mediators said a final peace deal could be concluded within two months, and Johnson said that seemed realistic.
“We commend both sides for their commitment to peace and urge them to move quickly to work out details of a formal ceasefire and related security arrangements, as well as the means for implementing the agreements signed today,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a statement.
But optimism has been tempered by conflict in Darfur, where more than a year of fighting between black African rebels and horse-mounted Arab militias has forced an estimated one million people from their homes in what the United Nations says is the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
“Sudan will not be at peace until the problem of Darfur is resolved,” Powell cautioned.
Previous protocols covered forming a postwar national army and an equal division of oil revenues during the transition.
“There is still room for plenty of disagreement on implementation — for example, on international monitoring (of the process),” John Ashworth, analyst with Sudan Focal Point, an advocacy office for Christian churches in Sudan.
“The government is facing the reality that in six and a half years the southerners are going to vote for independence…and they won’t want to cede the oil areas,” Ashworth said.
The Arab League, which counts Sudan among its 22 members, welcomed the accord but expressed concern it could lead to the eventual secession of the south.
“Some people are worried about the partition of Sudan and will continue to be worried. The coming days will show how real these fears are,” said league spokesman Hossam Zaki.
Oil has fuelled religious and ethnic enmities with the SPLA laying claim to fields producing much of the 300,000 barrels a day that earns Sudan over $3 billion a year at current prices.
Sudan’s civil war has killed an estimated two million people mainly through famine and disease since 1983 when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic sharia law on the mainly Christian south.
(Additional reporting by Katie Nguyen and Alistair Thomson)