Thousands in southern Sudan celebrate peace deal: United Nations

NAIROBI, Jan 10 (AFP) — Thousands of people across towns in southern Sudan celebrated the landmark peace treaty signed at the weekend between the country’s main rebel group and Khartoum, a United Nations official said.

Southern Sudanese celebrate in the streets of Khartoum yesterday’s landmark peace deal, ending more than two decades of civil war in southern Sudan, Jan 10, 2005. (AFP).

“There were celebration all over towns in southern Sudan,” a UN official told AFP by phone from the southen region of Africa’s largest nation.

In the south’s provisional capital of Rumbek, around 2,000 people gathered in the town’s Freedom Square and welcome the peace deal that ended Africa’s longest-running civil war, he said. Troops marched and local leaders gave speeches, the official told AFP from Rumbek, about 900 kilometres (540 miles) south of Khartoum.

“They were very happy,” the official added of the impoverished villagers, who have suffered the brunt of war for more than two decades.

But a bigger ceremony is expected when Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) leader John Garang travels to the region in the coming days, the official added.

On Sunday, Garang and Sudan’s Vice President Ali Osman Taha signed a peace accord in Kenya, ending 21 devastating years of war that claimed at least 1.5 million lives and displaced another four million people.

A former government garrison town of several thousand inhabitants that was captured by the southern rebels in 1997, Rumbek already hosts the headquarters of several humanitarian groups and United Nations agencies.