Rebels to take quarter of Sudanese intelligence jobs
KHARTOUM, Jan 7 (Reuters) – Rebels from southern Sudan will make up a quarter of the personnel in Sudan’s large intelligence agencies under a post-peace government, intelligence chief Salah Gosh told reporters on Friday.
The Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) will sign a deal in Kenya on Sunday to end more than two decades of civil war in the south of Africa’s largest country. They will then start the lengthy process of rebuilding the country and setting up a new government.
Gosh, who rarely speaks to the media, said the new post-peace national intelligence agency would be 26 percent drawn from the SPLM’s own security forces, and the process would take place over two and a half years.
“We welcome the southerners so that they will become an inseparable part of the security services,” he said.
“Our duty will be to deal with anyone who tries to violate the constitution,” Gosh said, adding the security forces would be responsible for internal and external security, although there would be coordination with the police.
The existing intelligence services are extensive in northern Sudan, where they keep tabs on anyone the authorities suspect is a threat to national security or the government.
Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said a meeting with the United Nations, the African Union and donor countries in Khartoum on Friday discussed how the implementation of the peace deal would pan out over a six-month interim period.
He said the United Nations and the government were talking about having between 8,000 and 10,000 U.N. troops in the south to monitor implementation of the deal.
The top U.N. official in Sudan, Jan Pronk, said after the meeting that the U.N. mandate for the troops and the mission was under discussion and would be released around Jan. 25.
The United Nations has said it would not be just a ceasefire monitoring mission and would likely contain elements of peacekeeping, though it would not be a full peacekeeping force.
The southern deal does not cover an almost two-year-old conflict which has driven almost 2 million people from their homes in the western region of Darfur and in which tens of thousands of people have been killed.
Gosh said that to coincide with the southern signing ceremony on Sunday the two main Darfur rebel groups were planning attacks from three areas — east of the capital of South Darfur state, southeast of the capital of North Darfur state and near the Chadian-Sudanese border town of Tine.
“They are amassing troops in specific camps,” he said, adding that the government was ready to repel any attack.
He said a new rebel group, the Sudanese National Movement for the Eradication of Marginalisation, which began attacks last month in an area bordering Darfur, was just a branch of the main Darfur rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA).
“This is just a new front of the SLA,” he said. The SLA has set up it up to avoid retribution from the African Union, which is monitoring a shaky truce in the remote area, he said.