Annan pledges UN support for comprehensive Sudanese peace agreement
NAIROBI, June 07, 2004 (IRIN) — United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has pledged the UN’s continuing support for the talks aimed at ending conflict in southern Sudan. He said the peace process had reached a critical phase with the signing on 26 May of three key protocols on power-sharing and the contested areas.
In a message read during the formal launch of the final phase of talks
between the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation
Movement (SPLM/A) in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 5 June, Annan said
the UN would send an advance team to support negotiations between the two
parties.
The Sudanese government and the SPLM/A have signed six protocols, which,
together with two annexes, are to make up a comprehensive peace agreement.
Technical committees are expected – within two months – to prepare
annexes governing the implementation of the protocols and comprehensive
ceasefire arrangements and guarantees.
Muhammad Ahmad Dirdeiry, the Sudanese deputy ambassador in Nairobi, told
IRIN on Monday that work of the final phase would start on 22 June.
Dirdeiry said the two protocols – on a comprehensive ceasefire and on
modalities of implementation – together with the other protocols already
signed “will together form a comprehensive peace agreement, the signing of
which would signal the pre-interim period” lasting six months, and lead to
an interim period of six years. At the end of the period, “a referendum on
whether to remain in a united Sudan” or separate will be held in the
south, Dirdeiry told IRIN.
Efforts by IRIN to obtain comment from the SPLM/A were unsuccessful.
Annan also called for a “concerted international response” to the crisis
in the western Sudanese state of Darfur, where fighting between government
forces and allied militias on the one hand and two armed rebel groups on
the other hand has displaced up to two million people.
“The crisis in Darfur continues to cause appalling suffering that demands
a concerted international response,” said Annan in his message.