Sudan expects final south peace deal in 4-5 weeks
CAIRO, June 10 (Reuters) – Sudan expects to sign the final peace agreement to end more than two decades of civil war in the south of Africa’s largest country in four to five weeks, First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha said on Thursday.
He told reporters during a visit to Cairo that all the major issues were resolved and only technicalities needed to be agreed before the signing ceremony due to take place in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
“We expect that these finishing touches will take about four to five weeks after which, God willing, there will be the final signing,” he said.
The southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed a number of protocols with the government last month, paving the way for a final peace accord.
The southern conflict pits the Islamist government in Khartoum against the mainly Christian, animist south, complicated by oil, ethnicity and ideology. It has claimed two million victims.
Taha said a donor conference to help rebuild the lawless south, devastated by wars that have raged for all but 11 years since Sudan gained independence from Britain in 1956, was expected to take place in Norway in November.
He added the peace agreement would provide an opportunity for oil-rich Sudan to improve its relations with the United States, which has played a key role in the peace talks and lists Sudan as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.
“The state of war in the south was one of the main things that stopped relations between Sudan and the United States developing in the past,” he said.
But the United States has voiced increasing concern over a separate conflict in Sudan’s remote west, which the United Nations says has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with more than one million displaced.
Rebels in western Sudan took up arms against Khartoum last year accusing the government of arming Arab militias in Darfur to loot and burn African villages, a charge Khartoum denies.
Taha said a recent humanitarian ceasefire signed with the Darfur rebels was a step towards peace but added it would not be easy to achieve peace in the poor region bordering Chad.