Powell to attend Sudan peace signing, discuss Darfur

JAKARTA, Jan 6 (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell will travel to Nairobi this weekend to witness the signing of a comprehensive peace agreement to end some 21 years of civil war in southern Sudan, the State Department said.

Delegates from Sudan’s government and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed the final chapters of a peace deal on Dec. 31, paving the way for the comprehensive accord to be signed on Sunday ending Africa’s longest-running civil war.

The visit to Nairobi on Saturday and Sunday will likely be among Powell’s last foreign trips before he is expected to step down around Jan. 20 and it reflects the Bush administration’s efforts to push Khartoum and the SPLM to strike a deal.

In the mainly animist and Christian south rebels have been fighting the government since 1983, when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic law on the entire country. Issues of oil, ethnicity and governance have complicated the conflict.

The southern peace accords do not cover the continuing conflict in Darfur in western Sudan, where more than a year of fighting has created what the United Nations says is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Powell will hold talks with the Kenyan government officials as well as with Sudanese leaders with whom he will discuss the Darfur conflict, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in Jakarta as he announced the trip.

Powell and other world leaders were attending the one-day tsunami crisis summit in the Indonesian capital.