NAIVASHA, 27 May 2004 — Sudan’s government and southern rebels signed landmark accords yesterday paving the way to a comprehensive end to Africa’s longest-running civil war.
The deal does not cover another conflict raging in the western Darfur area, where more than a year of fighting has created what the United Nations says is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Officials of the Khartoum government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) signed three accords in yesterday ceremony northwest of Nairobi, clearing the way for an eventual deal to end a 21-year civil war that has killed an estimated two million people mainly through famine and disease.
“Thank God for this day,” chief mediator Lazarus Sumbeiywo told the ceremony, which was also attended by Sudan First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha and SPLA leader John Garang, the two top negotiators.
After a decade of on-off efforts to end the conflict, the deal should lead to a full ceasefire and implementation pact to end a war that has bisected Africa’s biggest country for two decades.
The agreements settled the status of three disputed areas — the Nuba Mountains, Southern Blue Nile and Abyei — and set up power-sharing arrangements once the conflict comes to an end.
The war began in 1983 and broadly pits the SPLA in the mainly Christian and animist south against the northern Islamic government. The conflict has been complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and religion.
Sources close to the talks said a row over how to split government jobs in two contested areas, the Nuba Mountains and Southern Blue Nile, had held up proceedings at the last minute.
The civil war broke out in 1983 between the northern government based in Khartoum and rebels from the mainly Christian and animist south.
Weeks of stagnation in the negotiations had raised diplomatic concern that the longer the process dragged out, the greater the possibility for breakdown.
During the latest push for peace, which has seen both sides meet regularly in Kenya in the past two years, they have agreed to split state and religion, form a post-war army and allow a referendum on independence in the south after an interim period.
The government and the SPLA agreed in January on an equal split of oil revenues — now exceeding $2 billion a year from 300,000 barrels per day — during a six-year transition period. They also agreed on security arrangements including both sides to keep separate armies but deploy integrated forces in strategic areas of a country nearly four times as big as Texas.
At the end of the transition period, southerners will be given the chance to vote in a referendum on whether why want to remain part of Sudan or secede.
