Sudan’s peace talks to resume in Kenya despite draft accord acrimony

NAIROBI, Aug 10 (AFP) — Peace talks between the Sudanese government and southern rebels are due to resume in Kenya despite acrimonious exchanges between the two parties this week over a draft final accord.

The rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA) on Friday rejected a government demand that a draft peace accord be modified before talks resume in the central Kenyan town of Nanyuki.

Sudan’s Foreign Minister Mustafa Ismail had on Thursday said that negotiations will not resume unless the mediating east African body, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), modifies the draft accord.

But in an interview with the Arab daily Al-Hayat Saturday, Ismail appeared to drop the condition and said the government delegation will attend the talks.

The SPLM/A spokesman Samson Kwaje also said the rebel group’s team will travel to Nanyuki.

In the last round of talks with the SPLM/A in Nakuru, Kenya last month, the government rejected a draft accord prepared by the mediators on outstanding issues such as power- and wealth-sharing and security arrangements during a six-year transition period agreed last year.

Khartoum said the draft was a prelude to a secession of southern Sudan with a separate army and independent central bank during the interim phase.

On Saturday, Kenya’s President Mwai Kibaki, whose country chairs the IGAD committee on Sudan, gave his approval to the draft accord, a statement from State House said.

In the Kenyan town of Machakos in July last year, Khartoum and the SPLM/A struck a breakthrough accord granting the south the right to self-determination after a six-year transition period and exempting the south from Islamic laws.

But Khartoum and the SPLM/A are wrangling on how power will be shared during the interim period between the country’s president and a vice president expected to come from the rebel-controlled south, according to a source close to the negotiations.

The SPLA has been fighting since 1983 to end domination of Sudan’s mainly Christian and animist south by the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum.

The government is also reluctant to suspend Islamic law in the capital Khartoum during the transition period, when mediators had proposed that the city serve as the joint capital.

On wealth-sharing, the bone of contention is mainly on how to apportion oil revenues and the ownership of land and other natural resources, according to the source, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity.

Khartoum has also rejected a proposal that both the government and the SPLM/A maintain separate armies during the transition period.

The government has also refused to discuss the issue of the three disputed areas of southern Blue Nile State, Abyei, and the Nuba Mountains in the centre of the country, where rebels are active although the areas are not geographically part of the south, according to the source.

The SPLM/A claims that it has the mandate from the three territories to represent them at the talks, but Khartoum, for its part, says that it controls 90 percent of those areas.

The European Union said Friday that time was “ripe” for the Sudanese government and rebels to seize on peace talks to end the war and the US government on Thursday called on both parties “to take the courageous decisions needed to reach a final agreement”.

The Sudanese civil war, the oldest in Africa, has claimed at least 1.5 million lives and displaced four million people.