Sudanese Deal to Bolster Peace Agreement

Source:VOA News

Representatives of North and South Sudan signed an agreement Wednesday resolving most of the outstanding disputes on implementing their landmark peace deal. The parties failed to reach consensus on two key issues and will continue with additional talks next month.

The points of agreement document, which addresses 10 specific areas of contention, is meant to bolster the 2005 North-South peace agreement, which ended decades of civil war.

The deal sets specific processes and timetables toward implementing the details of the peace agreement, including border demarcation, wealth-sharing, democratic transformation and security issues. The Juba agreement is the product of talks facilitated by the United States since June this year.

The negotiator for the southern ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, Maliki Agar, said that the pact would strengthen the fragile peace relations between North and South.

“We hope by so initialing that we have cleared the dust around [these issues], and that the implementation of all of these are going to be worked out and fixed, so that we can start the implementation of these issues, which were lagging behind the schedule of the implementation of the peace agreement,” Agar said.

Ghazi Salahuddin, the representative at the talks for the North’s ruling National Congress Party, likewise hailed the deal as a significant step forward.

“We’ve been through difficult times, we’ve differed as usual, but I think we’ve achieved a lot by agreeing on 10 issues out of 12 issues,” Salahuddin said.

The deal was mediated by U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration, who will be returning next month to work out the unresolved points.

“There are still two issues that remain to be fully worked out, and we will continue to negotiate these issues – they include the referendum and the census,” Gration said. “These will be worked out both bilaterally and trilaterally in the next month.”

Under the 2005 peace agreement, the South has the option to choose independence from the North in a January 2011 referendum.

But continuing disagreements over who is eligible to vote and what percentage of the vote the referendum needs in order to pass has prompted the head of the southern SPLM to threaten the North with unilateral secession should their disagreements remain unresolved.

The SPLM also continues to reject the country’s official national census results, which are crucial for determining regional power in elections now scheduled for April 2010, saying that the population figures drastically undercount southern Sudanese.

The Juba document will now be sent to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for formal ratification.

Darfur rebels sign deal with Sudan opposition party

(Reuters) – Darfur rebels signed an accord with one of Sudan’s main opposition parties in Cairo on Wednesday, agreeing to push for a new transitional government, both sides said on Friday, a move that will infuriate Khartoum.

The rebel Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), which attacked Khartoum last year, and the opposition Umma party told Reuters the deal was a “declaration of principles” and shared ideas and did not amount to a political or military alliance.

But the sight of Umma, led by Sudan’s last democratically elected Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, sitting with insurgents will be deeply unsettling to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, currently beset by a string of political crises.

JEM commander Suleiman Sandal told Reuters the group would continue its struggle against Khartoum, but was also interested in finding ways to unseat the government through politics. “We agreed that our country is in danger with many problems, and that those problems should have a national solution,” he said.

“We are still separate organizations. We are working to achieve one strategic target, but there are differences in means. The one target is to work against the government.”

The agreement comes almost 20 years to the day after Bashir overthrew Mahdi’s government in a bloodless coup in 1989.

A new government would be include all political groups in Sudan, including Bashir’s National Congress Party and Darfur’s main armed groups, to pave the way for delayed elections, JEM and Umma said.

Sudan is led by a north-south coalition government set up in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended more than two decades of civil war between the country’s Muslim north and its mainly Christian south.

Under the deal, Sudan’s national parliament is dominated by Bashir’s National Congress Party, and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), led by south Sudan’s president.

“ILLEGITIMATE”

Umma and JEM leaders said Sudan’s government would become “illegitimate” on July 9, the date that national elections were originally due to start under the CPA.

That will leave a “constitutional vacuum that can only be addressed through a national government,” Umma vice-president Fadlalla Burma Nasir told Reuters.

Sudan’s promised elections have been delayed until April 2010. Both the NCP and the SPLM have accepted the delay and said their government should continue until the new poll date.

Nasir said Sudan’s president had no reason to be unsettled by the accord. “All we have done is sit down together. This is not an agreement for war. This is an agreement for peace.

“Sudan’s problems are too big for any individual, any party to solve. We have to open the door to all the people who carry arms. We have to sit down with them… We can not neglect JEM.”

JEM was among rebels who took up arms against Sudan’s government in 2003, accusing it of neglecting the region. Khartoum mobilized mostly Arab militias to crush the uprising.

Discussions between JEM and Khartoum in Qatar, designed to pave the way to peace talks, were suspended last month.

Under the JEM and Umma accord, both sides said they supported the U.N. decision to refer the Darfur conflict to the International Criminal Court — although Nasir said Umma still opposed the court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant against Bashir. They also rejected the findings of a recent census.

No one was available to comment from the government.