NAIVASHA, Kenya, 23 October 2003 — A senior Sudanese government official said yesterday it was “impossible to dictate” a deadline for reaching a peace deal to end two decades of civil war in the vast country.
“It is impossible for anyone to dictate a date on the two parties that are negotiating,” presidential peace adviser Ghazi Salaheddine said in Kenya hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced here that Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) had agreed to sign a comprehensive peace deal by the end of December.
After meeting Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and SPLA leader John Garang in the Kenyan town of Naivasha, Powell declared: “Both sides have agreed to continue the talks and reach a comprehensive agreement no later than by the end of December.”
“Both gentlemen have committed themselves to that goal,” said Powell.
Asked whether this time frame was realistic, Salaheddine said: “It is not putting a deadline on the end of the negotiations, it is an expression of the desire to redouble efforts to reach an agreement.
“It is a sign of commitment and sincerity that genuine endeavors are in place to end suffering in Sudan,” added government spokesman Sayed El-Khatibu.
Another Sudanese government official was less diplomatic. “The US is here to solve its own problems simply because elections are around the corner and they have never had success in the Middle East and Gulf region,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
Garang and Taha are engaged in what many expect to be a final round of negotiations to end a war that has killed some 1.5 million people and displaced more than four million since it began in 1983.
However, the Sudanese opposition fears that the government and the southern rebel movement will forge a repressive alliance once they sign the agreement ending the civil war.
Reported plans by both to postpone elections until the end of a six-year interim period “implies the beginning of a fourth totalitarianism,” Umma Party Deputy President Omar Nour Ed-Daem told a rally ending overnight Tuesday.
The government of President Omar Al-Bashir and the rebel SPLA have excluded other opposition groups from the negotiations, which have already agreed on a six-year interim period of self-rule for the south, which is dominated by the SPLA, followed by a referendum on independence.
In the current round of talks, the government and the SPLA are focusing on the status of three central regions claimed by both sides and on how to share power and wealth, notably that of Sudan’s oil reserves.
During the rally at Khartoum University, Daem also read a statement on behalf of Umma leader Sadeq Al-Mahdi calling upon the negotiators to propose national, rather than bilateral solutions to the country’s problems.
Mahdi complained the negotiations were proceeding without a mechanism to transform a peace agreement from a bilateral to a national one and without a role by North African neighbors Egypt and Libya.
He also criticized the negotiators as considering their negotiations as “a dual alliance,” according to his statement. He urged the negotiators to “correct those mistakes.”
“The people of the Sudan are not waiting for a continued sharing of power on a rotating presidential basis but are demanding direct presidential, legislative and state elections,” the Mahdi statement said.
Opposition Democratic Unionist Party official Osman Omar Al-Sherif reiterated his party’s support for peace, but said the Sudanese people will take over through multiparty elections” once peace is achieved.
Sherif slammed the National Islamic Front (NIF), which renamed itself the National Congress after taking power in Bashir’s June 1989 coup detat.
