NAIROBI, 9 January 2005 — Sudanese rebel leader John Garang said he planned to push for peace in Darfur once he joined a national unity government under an accord he is due to sign today to end the separate, older war in the south. Garang, saying the violence in Darfur had the “potential for genocide”, was speaking yesterday on the eve of the signing of a comprehensive peace deal to end 21 years of civil war in the vast country’s oil-producing south.
Under the agreement Garang, the leader of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, will be appointed first vice president of Sudan, Africa’s biggest country. “You cannot have peace in one part of the country and war in another part of the country,” Garang told a news conference in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, where he and government negotiator Ali Osman Mohamed Taha will sign the southern accord. “There is a potential for genocide which must be stopped and that is the responsibility of government,” he said.
“The SPLM is committed to an inclusive and comprehensive peace all over Sudan. It will work with the (ruling) national Congress Party and other political forces to realize and ensure a just peace agreement for Darfur.” Garang has long expressed sympathy with the African rebels in west Sudan’s Darfur region, whose demands for a bigger political say in Khartoum and more state resources are similar to the SPLA’s own.
Garang has said Khartoum has used the same techniques in Darfur, where tens of thousands of people have been killed as a result of the conflict, that it once used against his forces. Darfur’s deepening crisis has complicated the painstaking negotiations between Khartoum and the SPLM, whose wide-ranging peace agreement is set to produce profound political and economic changes in both north and south. Asked if he would participate in talks to end the Darfur conflict, which the United Nations says is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, Garang replied: “If I am invited I will come. If I am not invited I will ask to be invited.”
The Sudanese government on Thursday accused Darfur rebels, who launched their uprising in February 2003, of planning an offensive to coincide with the peace deal covering the south. Several rounds of talks between Khartoum and the Darfur rebels in the Nigerian capital Abuja have so far yielded little progress, and both sides continue to accuse the other of violating a truce agreed last April. Garang said the SPLA would release all prisoners of war immediately after the peace deal was signed, and would work to expel the Ugandan rebel Lords Resistance Army from bases in southern Sudan. During the past 18 years the cult-like LRA, based in northern Uganda and lawless parts of southern Sudan, has abducted more than 20,000 children, according to World Vision, in its battle against the Ugandan government.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo flew to the Darfur region yesterday to assess the crisis there following talks with Bashir, an AFP correspondent reported. “I came here to congratulate President Omar Bashir on the New Year and, in advance, on the peace agreement that will be signed tomorrow,” said the Nigerian leader, shortly before he left the Sudanese capital.
Fighting in Darfur is escalating and the Sudanese region could face a new upsurge in violence despite efforts by the UN Security Council and others, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Friday. “A buildup of arms and intensification of violence, including air attacks, suggest the security situation is deteriorating,” Annan said in a report to the Council. “I am concerned that we may move into a period of intense violence unless swift action is taken,” the report added. Jan Pronk, the special UN envoy to the Sudan who drafted the report, plans to brief the council on Tuesday. About 1.7 million people are homeless and some 70,000 are estimated to have died in the western Sudan region.
In another development, Sudan’s second largest opposition party has said it will not participate in the transitional government, the press reported yesterday. The decision by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to stay out of the power-sharing administration could deal a blow to efforts by Bashir to garner support among northerners, which he needs to balance southern influence. “We will not participate in a transitional government,” party leader Mohammed Osman Mirghani said.
His statement was released as the party reopened its offices in Khartoum for the first time in 15 years. Last month, the Umma Party for Reform and Renewal, an offshoot of the Umma Party, Sudan’s largest political group, pulled out of an alliance with Bashir, causing the resignation from government of 14 senior party members. Northern and southern political groups that are not affiliated to the ruling National Congress party of Bashir or the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement have the right to participate in the transitional government under the terms of the peace agreement.
