Sudan, S. Sudan talks: Will the ice break?

Sudan and South Sudan delegations are expected to resume their talks yet again in Ethiopia. Unlike previous negotiations that have been on and off for more than a year, things may be different this time. A combination of domestic, external and personal factors is contributing to this possibility.
For starters, it is better to remember the fact that it is now one year since South Sudan hoisted its independence flag. Despite high expectations, South Sudan’s best hope is to get good news from its mother country in terms of the opening of borders and resuming oil exports via Bashayer port on the Red Sea.
Sudan, on the other hand, reeling under a huge economic shock following the separation of South Sudan, awaits anxiously some sort of relief and is pinning its hope on starting economic and border trade with its southern neighbor, where it shares its longest frontiers, and may be even a deal that gets Juba to consider its decision to shut down oil production and transporting it via Sudan’s downstream facilities, which will allow Khartoum to reap some of the much needed hard currency.
In addition to the fact that both countries were operating in a hot water environment created by their decisions to work toward inflicting maximum damage on each other, the international community through the UN Security Council (UNSC) has issued a decision last May giving them a deadline to sort out their differences in a three-month period that is about to expire early August.
Both factors of domestic economic pressure and the UNSC are having their impact, moving the two countries from their strategy of continuing intransigence to see who is going to blink first and crack open the way for more conducive terms. In fact, both were using various tactics from proxy wars through military to intervention in each other’s domestic affairs with the hope of a regime change on the other side. Add to that the new factor of image change as far as South Sudan is concerned; from a promising country gaining independence to the newest state on earth compensating its people for decades of suffering. One year after independence, the country’s image based on the assumption that it occupies the high moral ground started to tremble. Almost all international organizations, from Doctors Without Borders to Oxfam to International Rescue Committee (IRC) to Human Rights Watch, and so on, were simply painting a gloomy picture. The IRC summed it up by saying: “The first two months of independence can be written off as a lost year.”
Sudan, on the other hand, ended up losing the country’s unity without gaining peace and is seeing for the past three weeks anti-austerity measures that delved into the political arena of calling for a regime change. It has managed so far to escape the fate of regimes taken over by the Arab Spring, but the continuation of demonstrations and moves by the opposition to unite and work out an alternative, signals toward tough days ahead.
Following their previous round in Addis Ababa last week, the two sides said that they have now started a new strategic approach, adding that they are now committed to non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs of each other and to adopt transparency and good faith in their joint cooperation to resolve outstanding issues. That looks like stating and repeating the obvious in any relations between two neighboring countries. But given the inability to get out of bitter experiences of almost half a century of civil strife, the new look for a future of non-aggression and good faith in pursuing bilateral relations deserves good attention that can be translated into hope.
Such hope is based on two concrete factors: One, worsening economic conditions have started to threaten the two regimes politically and are expected to push them to cooperate out of sheer survival instinct and second, the two delegations are led by those who can be described as hawkish personalities in both Khartoum and Juba. So any agreement now inked by both Gen. Abdel Rahim Hussein, Sudan’s minister of defense, and Pagan Amum, South Sudan's chief negotiator, stands a good chance of going through.

- This article is exclusive to Arab News