THE Khartoum government has decided not to extend a year-long ceasefire with rebels limited to southwest Sudan’s Bahr al-Ghazal province, Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail said on Friday. At a press conference following talks in Kenya between Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, Ismail said the government instead wanted a “comprehensive and general” ceasefire. On Monday, Colonel John Garang’s SPLA announced that it was unilaterally renewing a ceasefire in Bahr al-Ghazal for three months, and extending the measure to afflicted parts of the eastern Upper Nile State. Since the summer of 1998, the humanitarian truce has been renewed every three months by both sides to enable relief workers to help civilians, but the last such pact expired on July 15.