NAIROBI, 8 October 2004 — Sudan’s government and southern rebels resumed talks on a final peace deal yesterday amid fears that tensions in the oil-producing south and the newer Darfur crisis could plunge Africa’s biggest country into chaos.
Underscoring the external pressures on Khartoum to end its 21-year-old southern civil war, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, warned both sides not to reopen previous agreements signed in May.
“At this crucial juncture, leadership and political will is what the international community requires from both sides,” Pronk told delegates at an opening ceremony in Nairobi. “This is the time, the stakes are high and the eyes of the world are on you.”
Sudan’s First Vice President Ali Osman Mohamed Taha and Sudan People’s Liberation Army rebel leader John Garang both attended the opening and expressed their commitment to finish the process, begun in neighboring Kenya in 2002. Two earlier attempts to finalize a peace deal have failed this year.
A signed deal would be a model for solving the Darfur problem and other crises bubbling in Africa’s largest country, Garang said. “Having peace in one part of the country and having conflict in other parts is of no use to anybody,” he told the meeting.
The SPLA has warned that if these latest talks fail, Sudan could slide into war on multiple fronts - in the south, with other rebels in the east and in the west in Darfur. Khartoum has said it would like to complete the southern peace deal by December.
Meanwhile, Annan named a five-member panel yesterday led by Italian Judge Antonio Cassese to investigate whether genocide has taken place in the Darfur region. Created at the request of the UN Council in a US-drafted resolution, the commission will also look into reports of widespread violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the western Sudanese area.
More than 1.5 million people have been driven from their homes and up to 50,000 killed by fighting in Darfur since a rebellion broke out in February 2003, according to the United Nations, which calls the area the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The US government believes genocide is taking place in Darfur, and two top UN human rights watchdogs told the council this month war crimes had probably occurred on “a large and systematic scale” there. The two were Argentine Juan Mendez, the special UN adviser for the prevention of genocide, and Canadian Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights.
