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.
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