Rebel chief warns of split Sudan if peace deal is dishonoured

NAIROBI, Jan 8 (AFP) — The main rebel leader in southern Sudan on Saturday warned that the oil-rich country would break-up if the final peace agreement, which is due to be signed over the weekend with the Khartoum government, fails to be implemented.

Sudan’s People Liberation Army leader John Garang (R), flanked by his deputy Commander Salva Kiir Majardit, answers a question during an SPLA press conference in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, January 8, 2005. (Reuters).

“I am confident that this agreement will be implemented,” John Garang, the leader of Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), told a press conference in Nairobi.

“If this agreement is dishonoured then, of course, the country will break up,” said Garang, who is due Sunday to sign a final peace accord with Sudan’s President Omar el-Beshir, to end Africa’s longest conflict.

“But if it is implemented the way it is negotiated, there are good chances that the country can remain united.”

“But at end of the day, it will depend on the vote of the people of southern Sudan,” said Garang, adding that the clinching of the final peace deal on New Year’s Eve had marked his greatest “emotional” moment.

The rebel chief, who started fighting in the then Anyanya guerrilla movement in 1962, said: “It is the responsibility of us all … to make unity attractive” to the people of southern Sudan.

Under the deal, which has taken 10 years to negotiate, southern Sudan will vote in a referendum whether to remain united with the rest of Sudan or secede, after six years of self rule, which will begin six months after the deal is signed.

War erupted in southern Sudan in 1983, when the rebels rose up against Khartoum, denouncing Arab and Muslim domination on the black, animist and Christian south.

The conflict has claimed at least 1.5 million lives and displaced four million people.

“This agreement will create conditions to resolve problems in other parts of the country. You cannot have peace in one part of the country and war in another,” Garang said, referring to 22 months of fighting in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

Garang vowed to plough into peace talks, mediated by African Union, and aimed at ending the Darfur conflict, which has claimed around 70,000 people and displaced some 1.6 million people.

“I will come if I am invited, if I am not invited, I will ask to be invited,” to Darfur talks, he added.

The conflict in Darfur, which broke out with an uprising in February 2003 led by two rebel movements, pits people of black African descent against Khartoum’s Arab domination mainly in the shape locally of armed militias known as the Janjaweed.

The proxy forces and Khartoum’s troops and air force have been accused by rights organisations, local people and foreign governments of atrocities against villagers, many of whom have fled across the border into Chad or to safer parts of Sudan.

The outcome is what UN agencies call the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.