Rebels warn of chaos as South Sudan talks resume
By C. Bryson Hull
NAIROBI, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Southern Sudanese peace talks resume today amid fears that the huge country could begin a slide into chaos if they fail, crumbling under the twin pressure of turmoil in the south and the newer crisis of Darfur.
The government and the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA) are due to resume peace efforts in neighbouring Kenya in late afternoon on Thursday to finalise accords aimed at ending a 21-year-old war in the south.
Both Sudan First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha and leader John Garang are expected to kick off the talks in Nairobi and then leave delegates behind to thrash out the details.
But observers say the progress made so far could unravel if hardline elements on both sides use the worsening, separate crisis in western Darfur as an excuse to pull out. Two earlier attempts to finish the talks this year have faltered.
“Unless current dynamics change and the U.N. Security Council puts more pressure on Khartoum to conclude the (peace) agreement, war could soon resume across the country,” the International Crisis Group said in a statement.
“I would say that Sudan is standing at a crossroads of signing a peace agreement to become a stable state, or failing and collapsing into chaos,” said Pa’gan Amum, one of the principal SPLA negotiators. “There would be full war in the south and the east and Darfur.”
PRESSURE OVER DARFUR
Khartoum, under strong international pressure over Darfur, has maintained that it wants to wrap up the talks and sign the accord by December, which will take the discussions through the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The main outstanding issues are the thorny matter of a final ceasefire — including whether to add as signatories government-backed militias that have fought the SPLA — and how to make the words of the peace agreement into reality.
“We acknowledge that those are issues of certain difficulty that we will address, but they are not things that keep us apart,” Ahmed Dirdeiry, the resident delegate for the Sudanese government in Kenya, told Reuters.
Sudan and the rebels began fighting in 1983, when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic sharia law on the mainly animist south. Oil, religion and ideology have since complicated the picture.
The civil war in Africa’s largest country has killed an estimated two million people, mainly through famine and disease.
It is a separate conflict from Darfur, which has killed 50,000 people and displaced more than 1.5 million.
On May 26, the government and the southern rebels signed landmark accords dealing with power sharing and managing three disputed areas.
Earlier deals cover the formation of a post-war national army, the division of oil revenues and a six-year transitional plan culminating with a vote by the south on whether to secede.