KHARTOUM, 24 April 2005 — Sudan’s government and former rebels will allow other opposition parties a role in writing a new constitution, but the start of work has been delayed to allow for more talks, the ruling party said yesterday. The ruling National Congress Party and the former southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed a peace deal in January to end more than two decades of civil war in Sudan’s south. Under the deal a new government of national unity will be formed and wealth and power will be shared. The first task is to form a new interim constitution.
The two parties had planned to hold at least a two-thirds majority in the constitutional commission, which is the percentage needed to make any decisions. But the NCP said they had compromised to give other parties a real say. “It will mean the two (parties) together will be less than two-thirds in the commission,” Ibrahim Ahmed Omar, secretary-general of the NCP told Reuters.
The peace deal allows for power sharing in government, giving the NCP 52 percent and the SPLM 28 percent of all posts. Northern opposition parties get 14 percent and non-SPLM southern forces six percent. But a special compromise was being negotiated for the constitution, an important national issue.
Omar said the SPLM and NCP had given up 10 seats between them to have only 38 of the 60 seats in the constitutional commission, a little over 63 percent. It will allow opposition parties some say, if small, in the shaping of the constitution. The compromise is likely to appease those opposition parties still undecided about joining the constitutional commission after weeks of talks. A joint NCP-SPLM delegation is leaving this evening for Egypt for two days of talks with Sudan’s main umbrella opposition group, which is hesitant about joining.
Omar said the work of the commission, due to begin on Saturday, had been delayed until at least Thursday, to allow the Cairo talks to finish and because Sudan had invited several foreign presidents to the commission’s first day of work.
Meanwhile, the African Union will reconvene its faltering peace talks between the Sudanese government and the Darfur region’s rebel groups in the first two weeks of May, a spokeswoman for the AU chairman said yesterday. Remi Oyo, spokeswoman for President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, told AFP by telephone from the Africa-Asia Summit in Jakarta that a decision was made after a meeting in Egypt with the Sudanese, Egyptian and Ethiopian presidents.
“The talks should resume in the first half of next month in Abuja,” she said, adding that Obasanjo had discussed the crisis on Saturday with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is also at the summit in Indonesia. Sudan’s arid and impoverished western region of Darfur has been in the grip of civil war for more than two years, after black African groups rebelled against what they see as persecution from Khartoum’s Arab-led government.
The African Union has brokered a shaky cease-fire and sent a small force of military observers, but has struggled to find a political solution and three previous rounds of talks in the Nigerian capital Abuja made little progress.
