Former foes from Sudan’s north-south civil war have agreed on measures to prevent clashes over a contested oil area, but remain divided on other disputes after two days of talks, one of the parties said on Friday.
Political tensions are rising in Sudan in the build-up to a decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague next week on the boundaries of Abyei, a central Sudanese region close to oil fields claimed by both the north and the south.
Abyei’s borders were among a number of divisive issues left unresolved in a 2005 peace deal that ended more than two decades of civil war between Sudan’s government and the south’s dominant Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
Forces from both sides have clashed in Abyei since the agreement and analysts have warned remaining disputes between the two sides could still drag the region back to conflict if left unresolved.
Any return to civil war would have a devastating impact on the surrounding region, Sudan itself and the country’s oil industry.
Leaders from the two sides met in Khartoum on Wednesday and Thursday to try to hammer out their remaining differences in a summit brokered by United States Sudan envoy Scott Gration.
SPLM delegation leader Malik Agar told Reuters the sides had agreed to a package of measures to try to maintain calm in Abyei after The Hague ruling, expected on July 22.
”Once the decision is made in The Hague, one side is going to feel disappointed. We need to avoid any violence,” he added. ”The measures are really an elaboration of what we have already agreed. There was no big progress in the meetings.”
He said the parties had agreed to an increase in the number of UN peacekeepers in Abyei and would send their own high-ranking delegations to the town on the day to try to ease tensions.
Both sides also repeated a promise to accept The Hague court’s ruling, whichever way it fell. No one was immediately available to comment on the meeting from the northern delegation, led by presidential adviser Ghazi Salaheddin.
Agar said the parties had so far made little progress in resolving a string of other disputes, including preparations for national elections, a disputed census and a raft of laws seen as central to the peace deal.
The north-south talks are due to continue on Sunday and Monday after Gration returns from a two-day visit to Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region.
Two million people died and four million fled their homes between 1983 and 2005 as north and south Sudan battled out differences in ideology, ethnicity and religion.
The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement shared oil revenues between the north and south, set up a coalition government and promised elections, now scheduled for April 2010, and a referendum on southern independence in January 2011.– Reuters