KHARTOUM, 29 December 2003 — Sudan’s four-year-old state of emergency could end if a peace deal is signed to end two decades of civil war in the south, the official Sudan News Agency SUNA reported yesterday. President Omar Hassan Bashir imposed a state of emergency in Africa’s largest country in December 1999. SUNA quoted Chairman of the Justice and Legislation Committee Ismail Al-Haj Musa as saying the president had sent a letter to Parliament asking that the emergency law be extended for a fifth year.
“When a comprehensive cease-fire agreement is signed within the framework of a peace agreement, reasons for the state of emergency will cease to exist,” Musa quoted Bashir as saying in the letter.
The state of emergency gives Bashir and the security authorities unlimited powers to arrest people, detain them indefinitely, close newspapers and dissolve parliament.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s government and rebels were due to meet in Kenya yesterday to continue talks on how they would share their wealth once their war ended and settle disputes over three contested areas.
The two sides resumed peace talks on Friday, after a Christmas Day break, to iron out an accord on dividing the oil-exporting country’s wealth. They had hoped to reach a peace deal to end their conflict by the end of the year, although that goal is seen as increasingly unrealistic. “We’re talking about the three areas and the wealth sharing simultaneously,” an official of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army told Reuters.
