The Sudanese government and rebels in the south have resolved obstacles in their peace talks and are expected to sign an accord on Wednesday paving the way for an end to 21 years of civil war which has claimed two-million lives.
Negotiators for the government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) will sign protocols at a ceremony which should settle the dispute, mediators said on Tuesday.
Kenya hosted the talks at Naivasha, a town outside Nairobi, and hailed the agreement as a breakthrough which would allow both sides to lay down their weapons.
”The signing of the protocols represents a major step towards the achievement of a final comprehensive political settlement to the conflict,” said the Kenyan government.
In response the Arab League pledged $2-billion to rebuild southern Sudan.
But the accord does not cover a separate conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region where hundreds of thousands have been displaced in what some aid agencies call the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Nor does it guarantee an end to fighting between the government-held north and SPLA-held south.
”We are very pleased that the next stage of the peace process has been reached. We will be even more pleased when the comprehensive ceasefire has been signed,” said Susan Linnee of the thinktank the International Crisis Group.
Both sides had already agreed to share wealth and power during a six-year transition period leading to a referendum on independence for the south. But that deal snagged on administrative arrangements, the status of buffer regions, and whether Khartoum, the capital, should be governed under Islamic law.
It was not immediately clear how those issues were resolved but Kenya’s optimism that they were indeed resolved seemed to be shared by Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, who told reporters in Ethiopia that a deal would be signed on Wednesday.
The war, which flared up in 1983, pitting the mainly Muslim and Arab north against the mainly Christian and animist south, was waged across deserts and scrub and killed an estimated two-million people, mostly civilians who succumbed to hunger and disease.
The stakes rose in the 1990s with the tapping of oil which now yields $2-billion in revenue per year, but pressure from the United States and other outsiders prodded the combatants into talks in 2002.
The SPLA agreed to put its demands for secession on hold and the National Islamic Front government agreed to partly separate state and religion and withdraw most of its troops from the south.
However, talks then stalled over whether Khartoum should be a secular capital or subject to sharia law and the status of three areas in the buffer zone, Abyei, the Nuba mountains and the Southern Blue Nile, which the rebels feared would be populated with northerners.
Mediators hoped that with those sticking points removed the way was clear for a comprehensive ceasefire accord to consolidate the recent lull in fighting.
”There is an agreement,” said George Garang, an SPLA official. ”The rest of negotiations will focus on modalities of implementation, international guarantees, redeployment of troops and a few issues.”
Today’s ceremony is expected to be welcomed by the Bush administration as a foreign policy success.
Washington pushed hard for a settlement and was reportedly disappointed when it did not materialise in time for the president’s state of the union address in January.
In addition to worrying about Sudan’s potential as a haven for terrorists the White House was lobbied by the Christian right as well as oil companies to end the civil war.
However, just as the north-south conflict has eased, Darfur has ignited. Government troops and Arab militias are accused of exploiting an uprising to ethnically cleanse one-million people from the region through aerial bombardment, rape and execution.
Although Muslim, the victims are black African and aid agencies say Khartoum wants to replace them with Arabs.
The prospect of clinching a north-south peace deal has muffled criticism of atrocities in Darfur, said Robert Cohen, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, because the US did not want to alienate the Sudanese government. – Guardian Unlimited Â