Sudan talks reopen to fine-tune peace accord
By Mike Pflanz
NAIROBI, June 27 (Reuters) – Sudan’s government and southern rebels met in a buoyant mood on Sunday to fine-tune last month’s peace accords ending Africa’s longest running civil war, mediators said.
Delegates will hammer out details for a permanent ceasefire agreed in a landmark peace deal, signed on May 26, ending a 21-year war which killed two million people and cut Africa’s largest nation in two.
The agreement between the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) does not cover a separate conflict in the western Darfur region. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan will both visit strife-torn Darfur next week.
“There is only one thing on the agenda and that is the detailed security arrangements proposed with this agreement,” chief mediator Lazarus Sumbeiywo told Reuters by telephone from the lakeside hotel outside the Kenyan town of Naivasha where the peace talks were being held.
“The atmosphere is very positive and we would expect by the 17th, latest the 19th, of next month to get a resolution to accept the details of how security is going to be arranged.”
Neither the SPLA leader Dr John Garang nor Khartoum’s chief negotiator First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha is involved in this phase of the reopened talks, Sumbeiywo said.
Discussions so far have been between eight delegates from each side and mediators from the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development secretariat.
“These talks are at a committee level, talking about the technical details for a permanent ceasefire and the arrangements for this,” SPLA spokesman Yasir Arman said.
A further and final phase of discussions on how the full peace deal will be implemented will be held once these security talks end, officials added.
“The feeling is very positive, we will definitely have a resolution within the time given,” he said.
The May 26 agreements lifted the last hurdles to a full peace deal by resolving key concerns on how both sides would share power and manage the disputed Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile regions.
Earlier stages in the process saw the former opponents agree to split state and religion, form a postwar army and allow a referendum on independence in the south after a six-year interim period.
The government and the SPLA agreed in January on an equal split of oil revenues, now more than $2 billion a year from 300,000 barrels a day, during this transition phase.
Disputes over oil complicated the war, which started in 1983 when rebels from the Christian south began fighting Islamic government forces in a bid for greater autonomy.