Share & more
A local initiative to reconcile Dinka and Nuer communities has been launched by the New Sudan Council of Churches. A delegation of Nuer chiefs from Western Upper Nile and Dinka chiefs from Rumbeck are to meet tomorrow (Thursday) in Thiet, Bahr al-Ghazal, with the support of the local authorities. “After more than seven years of fighting and untold levels of suffering, a people’s peace movement is underway,” the New Sudan Council of Churches said in a statement sent to IRIN. The meeting of the chiefs is to prepare the ground - and provide the security guarantees - for a much more ambitious peace conference in which “hundreds of Nuer” are to be invited, unarmed, to the land of their “traditional enemies”.
A meeting house to seat 1,000 people, toukels (huts) and stores have been built by Dinka youths for the visitors from the east of the Nile, in what will be a process of lengthy discussion and debate, the statement said. A similar follow-on meeting is planned later in the year in Nuerland.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
