KHARTOUM, 15 December 2005 — Sudan’s southern peace deal is being implemented too slowly and the northern ruling party is doing too little to convince its former foes it wants a unified country, says the widow of former Vice President John Garang. Rebecca Garang told Reuters in an interview late on Tuesday she also wanted investigators into the helicopter crash which killed her husband five months ago — three weeks after he became Sudan’s first vice president - to report on progress.
John Garang, a former southern rebel, was the architect of Sudan’s southern peace deal signed on Jan. 9 to end a civil war that claimed two million lives over more than two decades. His death sparked a wave of sectarian violence in August.
“They are slow (with implementation) and I want them to explain to me why they are slow,” she said of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir’s northern party which signed the deal with Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army. “If there are circumstances which make them slow down they should explain to the people.”
The deal shares wealth and power, enshrines democratic transformation and gives the south a referendum on secession within six years. But Rebecca Garang, a minister in the southern government, said the north still needed to make unity attractive to southerners. “They should do more, they should put a lot of effort on this to make unity attractive,” she said.
