Southern Sudan rebels, Khartoum set for final round of talks in Kenya
NAIROBI, June 24 (AFP) — Sudan’s government and the main southern rebel group are Friday due to enter a crucial final round of talks to clinch a definitive end to 21 years of devastating civil war.
Held amid high expectations, the negotiations between the Islamic regime in Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) will cover details of a comprehensive ceasefire and how to implement various deals signed since July 2002.
The two sides, who have fought a war that together with famine and disease has killed at least 1.5 million people and displaced another four million, are currently discussing the finer details of their nation’s post-war military landscape.
“We all hope that they shall finish once and for all,” Lazaro Sumbeiywo, the retired Kenyan general mediating the peace talks, told AFP Thursday.
Sumbeiywo, the lead player in the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) mediation team, added that the parley was “crucial.”
An earlier agreement signed in September 2003 broadly outlined how Khartoum would withdraw regular soldiers from south Sudan and how troops from both sides in a war that flared up in 1983 will be integrated into a new army.
Military experts from the United States and Britain are expected to take part in the final round of talks in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, northwest of the Kenyan capital Nairobi.
Khartoum and the SPLM/A have signed accords that provide for a six-year interim period of autonomy for the south, before the region holds a referendum on its political future. Deals on wealth- and power-sharing have also been signed.
The war in Sudan, Africa’s largest nation, erupted when southern-based rebels rose up against Khartoum, ostensibly to end Arab and Muslim domination and marginalisation of the black, animist and Christian south.
While religion has also fueled the war, it is just one facet of a very complex conflict, in which control of natural resources has played an increasingly dominant role.
Sudan produces around 250,000 barrels a day of oil, most of it in the south.
A final peace deal, if clinched, will allow both sides to expand exploration in a country reported to have more than three billion barrels of reserves, as well as attract foreign oil firms, which fled either in protest at civilian deaths linked to oilfield security or as a result of bad press.
Sanctions linked to Khartoum’s alleged support of international terrorism have prevented western firms from operating in Sudan, but not from putting out feelers in anticipation of the punitive measures being lifted or the country officially ending the war in the south.
Relations between Khartoum and Washington, traditionally close to Garang, have thawed considerably over recent years with the Bush administration taking an active role in the peace process.
Sudan watchers have said that a deal will shift pressure to another conflict raging in Sudan’s western Darfur region, which erupted in February 2003 when black African rebel groups rose up against the same Sudanese government.
The government and pro-Khartoum Arab militias known as Janjawids have been accused of indiscriminate killings and massive human rights abuses in Darfur, where at least 10,000 people have been killed and up to a million displaced in what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.